October 22 - Pretty Boy Floyd

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On this day, in 1934, the bank robber known as Pretty Boy Floyd was gunned down in a cornfield outside of East Liverpool, Ohio. Charley Arthur Floyd was born in Bartow County, Georgia on February 3, 1904. His family moved to Oklahoma when he was seven and he lived an uneventful life for the next eleven years. His life of crime started in a fairly small way: he stole $3.50 from the post office (the equivalent of about $51 today). He was caught, served a minimal sentence and pretty much disappeared for the next three years. I think it’s safe to assume that he engaged in multiple petty thefts in multiple places before getting caught again, this time in St. Louis, Missouri. Floyd had moved up to payroll theft by this point and this time his sentence was for five years. He was parolled after three and a half years in early 1929. His incarceration didn’t seem to have the desired effect on him as things only escalated from there.

Floyd drifted into Kansas City following his release from prison and found willing partners in criminal elements within that metropolis. He began robbing banks and was suspected in a series of robberies over the next several years, although actual evidence linking him to the crimes seemed to be hard to come by. In 1929 alone, he was arrested and released three different times: twice in Kansas City, once in March in connection with a robbery and again in May for vagrancy, and then once in Pueblo, Colorado, again for vagrancy. He might have looked like a hobo during this period of his life but it was during the same time that he earned his nickname, Pretty Boy.

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Floyd briefly did some legitimate work in the oil industry around Oklahoma (although it may have simply been him casing the joint in preparation of robbing it). For reasons only known to him, he insisted on wearing a button down shirt and dress slacks to work in the oil fields. The rougher workers naturally noticed this and began calling him a pretty boy. If that was the only place it was ever used, that would have been the beginning and the end of his nickname. When he did finally steal the payroll however, the payroll master inserted it firmly into the story by describing Floyd as “a pretty boy with apple cheeks” in the official police report. For the record, Charley hated his nickname (and probably would have shot anyone dumb enough to use it in his hearing) but the press loved it and the name stuck.

Had he stuck to merely robbing banks, Pretty Boy Floyd might have stayed a low to mid-level criminal, bouncing in and out of jail for decades. His status, as it were, became elevated because people started dying whenever his gang pulled a job. It started with an Akron, Ohio police officer, killed in a robbery on March 8, 1830. Pretty Boy was arrested for that murder but couldn’t be proven to have been at the robbery and released. He was arrested for a Sylvania, Ohio robbery a few months later and actually convicted of the crime. Sentenced to 15 years in an Ohio prison, he served none of it, escaping from custody. All of this activity brought him to the attention of the FBI and landed Pretty Boy Floyd on their 10 Most Wanted list. He proved to be a slippery character to catch again.

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The killings (and the robberies) continued. In March 1931, Pretty Boy was suspected in the murder of two rum runners. His gang killed a patrolman in Bowling Green in April. He himself killed a federal agent in July. The following April, the sheriff of McIntosh County, Oklahoma was killed trying to arrest Floyd. With all that going on, you might think that law enforcement would be throwing everything they had into taking him down. And it isn’t that they weren’t. They just had a bigger obstacle standing in their way then they could overcome: public opinion. People saw Pretty Boy Floyd and his gang as modern day Robin Hoods and did all they could to aid and abet him. Why? Somehow a myth got started that whenever the Floyd gang robbed a bank, they would destroy mortgage documents while they were there. To common citizens wallowing in the Great Depression, the chance to get out of debt like that was the stuff that dreams were made of. The fact that there is zero evidence of any mortgages being even accidently destroyed during one of their heists wasn’t enough to quash those dreams either. But the myth was strong enough to keep Pretty Boy out of the clutches of the law.

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Federal pressure to bring Pretty Boy in reached a boiling point on June 17, 1933 after a shootout that became known as the Kansas City Massacre. When the smoke cleared from the fight, four law enforcement members lay dead, including one federal agent. Pretty Boy and his associate, Adam Richetti, became the prime suspects. Both men would deny with their dying breaths that they had anything to do with the incident and there was only sketchy evidence that they were even in Kansas City on the day in question, but J. Edgar Hoover was convinced of their guilt. As a result Pretty Boy moved up to the number two slot on the List. It would still be another 16 months before he was finally caught.

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On July 23, 1934, federal agents gunned down Public Enemy #1, John Dillinger, outside a theater in Chicago and Pretty Boy moved into the top spot. He would elude capture for three more months only to be finally done in by a foggy night. On their way west from Buffalo, New York on October 18, 1934, Pretty Boy, Richetti and two women slid into a telephone pole in eastern Ohio because of the reduced visibility. Nothing was injured except the car. Floyd and Richetti sent the two women into nearby Wellsville to get a tow truck and have the car put back into working order, while the men whose faces were in every post office in the country waited by the side of the road. It turned out to be a fender bender both men would quickly regret.

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Just after dawn the next morning, two motorists saw a couple of guys in suits (and not threadbare hobo suits but obviously classy duds) sleeping near the road and thought that was a little suspicious. They informed the Wellsville chief of police, John Fultz, when they got into town. Fultz took two of his officers out to the sight to investigate. As soon as Floyd and Richetti saw the law, Richetti took off for the woods. Pretty Boy drew a gun and engaged in a brief battle with the officers, wounding Fultz, before entering the tree cover himself. Other members of the force joined the hunt. Richetti was captured fairly quickly but Pretty Boy remained on the lam. The FBI gladly added their own agents to the search shortly thereafter.

It’s hard to know where exactly Floyd hid out for the next couple of days. What we do know for sure is that he made his way to East Liverpool, about five miles away, by October 22. He had a friend who owned a pool hall there, where Pretty Boy reportedly had his last meal. He was then hitching a ride out of town when officers spotted him and he tried to make a run for it on foot, through a nearby cornfield. What you think happened next depends entirely on which version of the story you want to believe. Some say that local police fired first and wounded him enough to drop him in his tracks. The FBI’s official report said the locals weren’t even there. The locals claim the FBI says that because they ordered a local man to finish Floyd off at point blank range and then tried to cover it up. Whatever way it happened, the outcome was the same: Pretty Boy no longer matched his hated moniker and would never have a chance to destroy anyone’s mortgage ever again.

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Since his demise, most portrayals of Pretty Boy Floyd have tended to romanticize him and his actions. Woody Guthrie even wrote a song in 1939 about his exploits that compared foreclosing bankers to outlaws, with the moral edge given to the outlaws. Some have even gone so far as to claim that Floyd’s crimes were just a natural result of the crushing economic forces of the Great Depression (in spite of the fact that his started stealing stuff several years before the stock market crash). When really he was just a spectacular example of a ruthless criminal who got what he deserved in the end. Which, of course, doesn’t make him any less entertaining.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Roger E. Broggie