The Amazing Tom McQuaide

Gavin Jenkins

On September 26, 1903, Thomas A. McQuaide was vacationing with his family in Chicago in a rented cabin that looked out onto Lake Michigan.  The vacation was long overdue for McQuaide, the superintendent of Pittsburgh’s Detectives Bureau.  The son of an Irish immigrant, McQuaide had lifted his family from lower class to upper-middle class.  His meteoric rise began in 1889, when, at the age of 33, he was hired as an operator for the department.  At 5-foot-6, McQuaide was too short to be a patrolman, but he climbed the ranks anyway, being named sergeant of the South Side police station 42 days after being hired to answer phones.

McQuaide woke at dawn, got dressed in a navy blue suit, and sat on the cabin porch.  With Lake Michigan in front of him, McQuaide drank coffee and read the newspaper.  As he flipped through the paper, one story jumped out at him:

Ferguson Contracting Company Owner Murdered and Robbed
Assailants Dynamite Culvert and Steal Company’s Payroll

            PITTSBURG – Samuel T. Ferguson, owner of the Ferguson Contracting Company, was murdered yesterday, when someone detonated explosives that were wired to a culvert in the road he was traveling just outside West Middleton, Pa.
            C.L. Martin, Ferguson’s bookkeeper, was injured in the explosion. 
            Martin, a Cincinnati resident, was rushed to a nearby hospital and remains in critical condition.
            Martin and Ferguson had just withdrawn $3,600 from a Washington, Pa. bank and were headed to the Ferguson Contracting Company’s campsite to pay its employees. The contracting company is currently grading a portion of the Wabash railroad line, which connects Pittsburg with Washington, Pa.
            Louis Liggett owns a farm just down the road from the culvert.  He was plowing his cornfield, when he heard the explosion and looked up.
            “They must’ve set it off the moment those horses were over the culvert,” Liggett said, “because it was raining bits of horses.  Whenever everything settled, a man ran   down the hill out of the woods, grabbed the satchel out of the buggy, and disappeared back into the woods.  I’d never seen him before.”

 

McQuaide folded the newspaper and stared out at the water a moment.  He ran his hand through his graying wavy hair, and then scratched his ear.  McQuaide had big ears, and they curved out at the top of the lobe.  Finally, he stood up and went inside the cabin, where his wife Annie had begun making breakfast.

“Annie,” he said, “I have to go home.”

My great aunt, Joyce Barr, is the last living grandchild of Thomas A. McQuaide.  She has his ears and his hair, and when I look into her 88 year old hazel eyes, I can see that this city has changed in ways she never imagined.  I brought lunch to her Mount Lebanon apartment the Saturday after Labor Day.  Sitting at her dining room table, I picked up my sandwich and opened my mouth to eat.

Aunt Joyce made the sign of the cross.  “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” she said.

I dropped my fish sandwich and quickly did the same.  Thomas A. McQuaide probably would have punched me for touching my food before praying.

“My grandfather died in ’25, when I was two,” she said.  “So I didn’t know him.  But, they had him on ice for a year because they couldn’t find his will.  They didn’t know where to bury him.  It was in all the papers, too.  His funeral was like JFK’s.  They put his coffin on the back of a carriage and marched through the city.  Every police officer who wasn’t on duty came out with their family and lined the streets.  He was very famous for his detective work, and he was very influential.  The Ferguson murder was what really made him.”

Upon returning to Pittsburgh, Superintendent McQuaide summoned his top detectives and the city’s leading journalists to his office.  They told him their theories of who murdered Ferguson and stole the money.  Each theory centered on the mob.  The consensus was that Ferguson had been watched for months.  Superintendent McQuaide didn’t buy any of it.  He visited the crime scene with his best detective, Richard Kelly.  They climbed the hillside across from Liggett’s cornfield.

“The line led from the culvert to right behind this stump,” Detective Kelly said, pointing.  “This is where they found the battery, cigarette butts, burned matches, and footprints that indicated at least two people.”

Superintendent McQuaide squatted behind the stump and looked down the hill at the destroyed culvert.

“A local teamster said he was stopped by two men an hour before the explosion and asked for matches,” Kelly said.  “He’d never seen the men before, but the description he gave for one of the men matched the one Liggett gave for the man who ran down this hill and stole the satchel.”

“They weren’t mobsters,” McQuaide said.  “Mobsters would’ve held them up and given Ferguson and Martin a chance to live.”  He stood and pointed up the road.  “These men watched the buggy for a quarter of a mile, and then calmly detonated the charge.  The men we’re looking for are low-class foreigners, with a background in construction work, and experience with dynamite.”

“OK,” Kelly said.  “Do you want to head down to the Ferguson campsite, talk to the men, and get a list of their payroll?”

“Not yet,” McQuaide said.  “First, I want to get my theory in every newspaper in the region.  These men have more money than they’ve seen in their lives, and they’re spending it.  That satchel was filled with small bills.  That’s how we’re going to find them.”

My Great-Aunt Joyce has a small treasure of photographs and newspaper clippings that piece together her grandfather’s life.  Thomas A. McQuaide was born on Christmas day, 1861, in Pittsburgh.  His father, also named Thomas McQuaide, was an Irish immigrant who moved his Scottish wife and mother-in-law to Pittsburgh in 1850.  The future Superintendent’s father was a barge-hand until he died of dropsy at age 40. 

Tom McQuaide was 12.  He followed in his father’s footsteps and worked on barges for two years.  Then he left the rivers for a job at the Clifton Steel Mill in the neighborhood of Limerick, which is where the Trib Total Media Amphitheater is today.  He moved up the steel mill’s ladder quickly and became a boss-roller while still a teenager.

“He worked in the mills for 15 years,” my great Aunt Joyce said.  “He became a superintendent at the mill, and when the workers went on strike, he picketed with them.  People told him, ‘you’re one of the bosses, you can’t strike,’ but he didn’t care.  He never went back to work in the mills after that.  My grandmother was glad.  She thought the work was beneath him, and she had been after him to do something else ever since the tugboat explosion.”

“The tugboat explosion?” I said.

“Yes, it was called the Mike Dougherty,” she said, searching through her photocopied newspaper clippings.  She handed me a copy.  “Here,” she said.

During a work stoppage at the steel mill in 1885, Thomas A. McQuaide accepted a part-time job as a tugboat deckhand.  On January 11, the Mike Dougherty sailed up the Monongahela, and when it was near Homestead, part of the propeller broke on a chunk of ice.  The crew continued up the river anyway, and as they neared the mouth of the Youghiogheny, one of the valve stems on the boiler broke.  The boiler exploded, killing two men, and blowing Thomas A. McQuaide overboard into the frigid water.  Three other men survived, and years later, after the other survivors died, my great-great-grandfather wrote about the accident for the newspaper.

“They let him write it,” I said, holding up the photocopy of the clipping.  “They could have had a journalist interview him and write it, but they let him do it.”

“He liked to write,” Joyce said.  She held up a scroll.  “In 1898, he wrote a brief family history, but it’s confusing because he switches from the third person to the first person halfway through it.”

Gavin makes similar mistakes all the time.

“And he was very media savvy,” Joyce continued.  “He became friends with many journalists, and there was a lot sensationalism that went on in those days, so when he was mentioned in the newspaper, there were always superlatives in front of his name.  He was always, ‘The Magnificent Tom McQuaide,’ or ‘Tom McQuaide, Pittsburgh’s master sleuth.’  They loved him so much that when he stitched a man’s head back together, they ran a cartoonist’s depiction of it, with a short story.”  She searched through her stack of clippings and handed me the one she was referencing.  “Yes, he was ahead of his time in the way he dealt with the media.”

An old Irish saloonkeeper entered the police station and walked up to the front desk.
“I want to speak to Superintendent McQuaide,” he said.

“The Superintendent is busy at the moment, sir,” the desk clerk said.  “You can either have a seat, or leave your na—”

“It’s about the Ferguson murder,” the old man interrupted.  “The men you’re looking for were in my bar.”

Overhearing the conversation, McQuaide rushed out of his office.  “Did you get their names, sir?  Why do you think they’re the ones who did it?”

McQuaide’s attire was a stark contrast from that of the saloonkeeper’s.  McQuaide was dressed in a gray pinstriped suit, and his collar was pressed to look like wings, while the old man was wearing a faded overcoat and beat up slacks.

“It was just like you said in the paper,” the saloonkeeper said.  “Two Croatian men come in my bar the other day with plenty of money, all small bills.  They had a stack of two-dollar bills this big.”  The old man indicated the size of the stack with his fingers.  “And they was buying drinks for everybody.  I never seen Croatians spend money like this.”

“Let’s go into my office and sit down,” McQuaide said.  “Do you still have the money they paid you with?”

McQuaide escorted the old man back to his bar and interviewed his regulars.  One of the men he spoke with was a Croatian immigrant who lived nearby.  McQuaide hired the man to talk to people in the community and find out if anyone knew where the men had fled.  Then, accompanied by Detective Kelly, he retrieved a copy of the Ferguson Contracting Company’s payroll and interviewed its employees. 

It didn’t take the police officers long to put names with the descriptions of their suspects—Milovar Kovavick and Milovar Pattrovick.  The men were discharged from the company that summer.  Kovavick worked as a “powder monkey,” which was a nickname for someone who helped the blasters set up the dynamite for explosions.Meanwhile, the Croatian man McQuaide had hired discovered that the two suspects had gone to First National Bank, where they bought steamship tickets and had exchanged a large sum of American dollars for Austrian currency.  Kovavick and Pattrovick were aboard the Philadelphia.  Its first stop was London.  McQuaide cabled London authorities and had the men arrested. 

McQuaide and Kelly traveled to London and presented their case in front of a Scotland Yard panel in order to be granted extradition for their murder suspects.  The case made headlines in England and in the United States.  Kovavick and Pattrovick were given separate trials.  After six months in the hospital, Martin recovered from his injuries and testified against both men.  Kovavick was convicted of first-degree murder and hanged on September 4, 1904, while Pattrovick was found guilty of manslaughter and given 20 years in prison.

In 1906, McQuaide was named Superintendent of Police in Pittsburgh.  He held the post until 1914, at which time he retired and founded the McQuaide National Detective Agency, with his son, Franklin.

My Great-Aunt Joyce resembles her father, Franklin, who followed his father’s footsteps and served as Superintendent of Police twice in the 1930s.  Looking at pictures of Franklin with her on the couch, I could see the similarities in her jaw and nose.

“My father adored his father,” she said.  “But, police work was one of the only things they had in common.  My father was quiet and stern, and my grandfather was gregarious, a real mixer.  He grew up poor, and when he started earning money, he bought the finest clothes and jewelry.  He was always dressed to a T.  In 1908, Allegheny City, which is where the North Side is now, became part of the city, and my grandfather became the first Superintendent of what is modern Pittsburgh.  But, my father never got any free rides, no.”  She shook her head, smiling.“He had to earn everything, and he loved my grandfather for that.  When my grandfather died, my dad was crushed.  He refused to go to his house and go through his things.  We couldn’t find the will, and my brother, your grandfather, was in charge of it.  He went to our grandfather’s house in Beechview and went through box after box of papers.  My father and my grandfather were both obsessed with keeping records of criminals, and my grandfather had a lot of files.  Your grandfather had to go through them all until he found the will.  He left us $50,000, which was a fortune in those days.  But, we lost so much after the crash, including the detective agency.”

She patted my hand and smiled.  “I wish I could tell you more, but I didn’t know my grandfather.”

“I didn’t know my grandfather, either,” I said.  “Your brother passed away before I was born.”

My Great-Aunt Joyce leaned back on the couch and stared at me.  Her hazel eyes seemed to look deep inside me.  “He would have liked you,” she said, finally.  “My father would have, too.”

Gavin Jenkins was born in Pittsburgh and raised in Penn Hills and Oakmont.  He graduated from Riverview High School in 1999, and then attended Pitt-Johnstown University, where he majored in creative writing and journalism.  After graduating from UPJ in 2003, he covered sports for the Bedford Gazette, Martinsville Bulletin, and Kittanning Leader Times.  In 2008, he moved to Shenzhen, China to teach English.  During two years abroad, he published short stories in the Beijing Review, the Melting Plot, and was a regular contributor to the Shenzhen Daily.  Dating back to Tom McQuaide, there have been five generations of Pittsburgh Police Officers in his mother's family.  Gavin fights the pressures to follow in their footsteps by teaching a creative writing class at the Oakmont Carnegie Library, applying to MFA programs, and working as a bartender.