One afternoon in the twilight of the 1920s, just as the decade’s bootleg spree was turning into a murderous hangover, Charles Arthur Floyd became known as Pretty Boy.
Beulah Baird, a dark-haired beauty not yet turned twenty, gave Charley his new handle the first time she laid eyes on him.
They met in Kansas City, in a ramshackle boardinghouse at 1410 Holmes, located in an unsavory neighborhood not far from the lively downtown district. It was at that address that Sadie Ash, a strong-jawed former Sunday school teacher, rented furnished rooms to help support the eight children she had brought to the city from a small town in rural Missouri. One of her daughters became a clerk, another girl was a waitress, and one of the Ash boys hired out as an ironworker.
Two of Sadie’s other sons—William and Wallace—were swallowed up by the city’s wild side. Wallace Ash had once been wrongly accused of murder during a bank robbery in Dadeville, Missouri, but managed to prove his innocence. Since coming to Kansas City, the two Ash boys had become involved with various illegal activities, including gambling and peddling narcotics. When a fellow gambler became belligerent and claimed Wallace was cheating during a high-stakes downtown poker game, young Ash reportedly stabbed his accuser several times. Ash was taken into custody, but he was soon released after paying a fine of a few hundred dollars. He walked out of the courthouse and went straight home to Mama and wife Beulah.
Sadie had come to be known as Mother Ash. She proudly earned a reputation as a naughty landlady who rented furnished rooms to ex-cons, prospective cons, and fugitives evading the law who needed a safe cooling-off place until the heat had subsided. Men in cheap suits, who carried guns and changed their names as often as most people changed their socks, showed up at Mother Ash’s place to get some uninterrupted sleep, enjoy the company of a hussy, or wolf down a braunschweiger sandwich.
It was over a friendly card game at Mother Ash’s where Charley Floyd encountered Beulah Baird Ash. Flush with cash from a recent run of bootleg booze, Choc was sporting a new necktie and shined shoes. His trousers were creased razor-sharp. He had just been to the barbershop, and his dark chestnut hair was slicked back with fragrant pomade. His suit coat was hung over the back of the chair and his shirt sleeves were rolled up, revealing a fresh tattoo on the inside of his left arm. It was a rose, and inside the bloom was the image of a nurse in a hat. Beulah walked in from the kitchen carrying a tray. She placed a stein of beer before Choc and sat down beside him.
“Hello, pretty boy,” she said, “where did you come from?”
Choc looked up from his cards and saw a slim young woman with bobbed hair and brown eyes smiling at him. He smiled right back and told her his name.
“I’m Charley Floyd.”
Then he played out his hand—a royal flush. He scooped up the pot. Beulah had brought him luck.
In the years that followed, the legend of how the name Pretty Boy came to be was told more than a dozen different ways, but the Floyd family knew from Charley himself the real story.
Nonetheless, a whole mythology was spawned around his colorful moniker. Some people remembered that back in St. Louis in 1925 when the paymaster from the Kroger payroll heist had identified Charley as one of the holdup men, he had described him as “a mere boy, a pretty boy with apple cheeks.” Others said that the alias had been acquired in St. Louis all right, but they claimed it was Detective Sergeant John Carroll, later the city’s chief of detectives, who looked over the robbery suspects and spoke of Choc as being “a pretty boy.”
Others believed that Choc got the name Pretty Boy from friends down in his treasured Cookson Hills. The New York Times speculated that “Floyd returned to Sallisaw, where hill folks were impressed by his pocket comb and careful pompadour ‘slick as axle grease’ and dubbed him ‘Pretty Boy.’” But that was not true, either. Relatives and friends always called him Charley or Choc, and only those who did not really know him ever used the name Pretty Boy.
The most popular opinion of all was that an infamous Kansas City madam, Annie Chambers, was the first person who uttered the name Pretty Boy. Choc supposedly ambled into her palace of sin, in its heyday a twenty-four room gilded mansion with a wine parlor and brass beds. He was said to be looking for some female companionship and he met none other than Annie Chambers herself, a lusty, bawdy house madam who had catered to the wealthiest and most influential men of her time. Annie supposedly looked the handsome Choc up and down and smirked, “I want you all to myself, pretty boy.” It was a colorful tale but, like the other stories, it was false.
By the time Charley Floyd was trying to establish a foothold in Kansas City, Annie Chambers was pushing ninety years of age, was virtually blind, and was crippled with rheumatism. On top of her age and physical condition, Miss Chambers had also found religion in her twilight years, and her mansion, a landmark on the city’s north side, was transformed into a haven for derelicts and became known as the City Union Mission. Instead of painted ladies pouring bubbly, Salvation Army workers ladled out hot soup and Scripture.
The various myths about how Choc got his famous nickname made good copy, but it was unquestionably the beguiling Beulah who was responsible for coming up with the name. In fact, Choc did not like the name Pretty Boy very much and used it only occasionally himself. He said that it was “all a joke anyway,” but nonetheless the name stuck and eventually created a colorful and flamboyant image for the young Oklahoman. It was also an image that would contribute to Choc’s inevitable ruin.
Yet every time he showed up at Mother Ash’s house on Holmes Street to play cards or visit with one of his friends, Choc was greeted by Beulah with that name.
Choc started spending more time at Mother Ash’s, but he was careful to keep some distance between himself and her attractive daughter-in-law. She was, after all, married to Walter Ash, whose brother William was married to Beulah’s sister, Rose. Besides being small-time hoodlums, the Ash brothers were generally suspected of acting as informants for the local police. Choc figured it was not worth the risk to mess with the wife of a jealous husband who might also be a stool pigeon. Walter Floyd had not raised a fool. Good old country horse sense prevailed.
At last, Choc was beginning to make a few useful contacts in Kansas City. He hooked up with Red Lovett, another ex-convict he had served time with at the Jeff City penitentiary. Lovett was a proven bank robber and, like Choc, he had also been picked up and questioned about the Sears Roebuck robbery. It was Lovett who had long before told Choc about the opportunities in Tom’s Town.
“When you get out,” advised Lovett, “head for K.C.”
Other familiar faces in Kansas City were James Bradley and Bob Amos, former inmates Choc knew from the pen. Bradley, a career criminal who went by several bogus names including the aliases Bert Walker, Thomas Alexander, Tom Clark, Roy Brown, and Bob Randall, had been sprung from a prison farm near Jefferson City on October 2, 1929. Penitentiary officials always believed the escape had been engineered by Charley Floyd. As 1929 drew to a close, Kansas City was beginning to look like the site for a Jeff City reunion. Charley went back and forth between his bootleg suppliers in the city and the oil patch towns of Oklahoma, where there were plenty of customers ready to drink something more than hastily cooked moonshine.
James Henry Audett, better known in police circles as Blackie, met Choc about the same time as the Oklahoma bootlegger was feeling his way around and acquiring his street wisdom. Audett offered a different perspective than some about Choc’s Kansas City experience.
A native of Calgary, Audett had a few years on Charley Floyd and had also started his criminal career at a much earlier age. Audett left Canada when he was a teen, saw action during the Great War, and returned to the United States to become a proficient bootlegger, smuggler, and thief. He escaped from a federal pen where he was serving time for kidnapping, reportedly operated with Jake Fleagle’s bank-robbing gang in the twenties, and also shared a cell with Earl Thayer, the old bank and train robber. It was after he did a stretch in Leavenworth, where he met Oklahoma’s own Frank Nash, that Blackie Audett came to Kansas City. Because of Nash’s recommendation, Audett found a job with Johnny Lazia and the Pendergast machine.
In a colorful book he wrote entitled Rap Sheet, published in 1954, Audett talked about the old days in Kansas City when every whore and hustler in the Midwest showed up to grab their share from the trough.
“Quick as these broads would hit town, they would get shook down by crooked cops for a percentage of whatever they made,” wrote Audett. “And if they didn’t cooperate, they got rousted out of town.”
Getting a hard time from the Kansas City police was something Choc knew about. So he became angry when some of the party girls he spoke with at the sporting houses around Thirteenth and Cherry streets were strong-armed by overly zealous policemen.
“He was quite a kid,” Audett said of Choc. “Good looking, easygoing and a playboy. He liked the girls a lot. And the girls liked him. He spent his money like a drunken Indian when he had it.
“Well, some of the girls he liked pretty well there in Kansas City was squawking their heads off, around that time, about the payoff they had to make to some of the cops on the vice squad. Charlie [sic] Floyd told them girls to hell with it. He told them they didn’t have to make no payoff and he would see to it that they didn’t.”
If what Blackie Audett wrote was true—and there is little reason to doubt his assessment—Charley’s behavior, at least in part, accounted for his continuous difficulties with the power structure in Kansas City.
Besides the crooked police officers who were disturbed by Choc giving free financial advice to the local streetwalkers, there were others with their eye on Mr. Floyd. Thomas J. Higgins, at that time the captain of detectives in Kansas City, also became aware of Charley after some of Higgins’s boys brought Choc for questioning on a regular basis.
“I found this youthful ex-convict living among thieves,” Higgins later said of Floyd, “and I tried to turn him aside from the ways of crime.”
Bert Haycock, another crack Kansas City detective, also tried to follow every move Choc made within the city limits. He combed the underworld dives and pumped his best street informants for any information about Choc’s activities. Haycock was stymied at every turn, but he did not give up, even when he found out that Choc had learned of the detective’s interest in him.
On December 2, 1929, Haycock was sitting in his automobile on south Sixty-first Street when another vehicle drove alongside. Haycock realized he was “on the spot” and dropped to the floor just as a pair of men in the other car opened fire on him. Bullets shattered the windows and ricocheted off the interior of his auto, but the detective managed to escape unscathed. Angry police officers scoured the streets and checked out every back-alley joint and beer flat looking for the gunmen, one of whom Haycock thought he recognized as maybe being Charley Floyd. No arrests were made, and it was never proved that Choc had any involvement whatsoever with the Haycock ambush. Nevertheless, Charley won no popularity contests with either the legitimate policemen or the corrupt cops in Kansas City. He was considered a renegade, a freelance bootlegger who ran whiskey, a hood who had more disdain for the dishonest cops, whom he ignored, than the honest ones.
With the Kansas City police turning up the heat, Choc eventually succumbed to the pleas of James Bradley and Bob Amos, his older friends from the penitentiary. They told him that the time was right for them to leave the area, at least for the time being, and try their hand at something a little more lucrative in a new locale. They had put together a list of banks back east that appeared ripe for the taking, and they wanted Choc to join them. Such an invitation appealed to his boyhood fantasies of Jesse James and Henry Starr. It was an offer Choc did not even consider refusing.
In the early weeks of 1930, Choc Floyd and his friends were “on the scout.” The Kansas City entourage roamed eastward through several midwestern states and finally set up a base of operations in a rented bungalow in Akron, Ohio, an industrial city on the Cuyahoga River in the northeastern portion of the state. Their new hideout was located in, what was at that time, an isolated part of the city at 731 Lodi Street. Windows at each corner gave occupants unobstructed views. The frame residence was painted yellow and the occupants dubbed it their “canary cottage.”
Choc, James Bradley, and Bob Amos formed a partnership with some other known criminals, including Jack Atkins, a tough guy from Toledo. A Kansas City shoplifter in her mid-forties who went by several names, including Nellie Maxwell, Nellie Denny, and Marie Maxwell, came along for the ride to Ohio. She agreed to keep house and cook for the bandits while they worked their way down the banks on their hit list.
At the very top of the list was the Farmers & Merchants Bank in Sylvania, Ohio. Located in northwest Lucas County, Sylvania adjoined the larger city of Toledo, the county seat situated at the place where the Maumee River flows into Lake Erie.
Shortly before noon on Wednesday, February 5, 1930—the day after Charley Floyd’s twenty-sixth birthday—a Studebaker sedan with Michigan license plates cruised into Sylvania and pulled up in front of the Farmers & Merchants Bank at the corner of Monroe and Main. Inside the automobile were Choc and four companions. All five bandits were well dressed and none of them wore masks. The driver remained behind the wheel of the Studebaker, and the others piled out and rushed through the front entrance. Two of them stood just inside the door, Choc ran toward the rear of the bank, and the last robber threatened employees behind a caged railing and shouted, “Stick ’em up! We’re not fooling!”
All of the men were armed with revolvers. At least two of them carried a pistol in each hand. Choc’s primary weapon of choice was a six-shot double-action Smith & Wesson .32 caliber, a model with a swing-out cylinder. Some witnesses later said he was one of the bandits packing two weapons.
At the back of the bank near the safety-deposit boxes and the vault, Choc confronted cashier John C. Iffland. When the bandits first entered the bank, Iffland saw them and reacted. He instinctively shoved the huge vault door closed and twisted a dial that activated a time lock. That meant the vault, which held tens of thousands of dollars, could not be opened until 5:00 P.M. that evening. Choc was furious.
Many years after the robbery, Martha Iffland, ninety-five years old and the widow of the brave bank cashier, could still recount her late husband’s memories. Of course, at the time of the robbery, no one knew who Charley Floyd was. The name Pretty Boy was wholly unknown outside the Sadie Ash boardinghouse in Kansas City. Only later, when his legend spread, would he be identified and linked to the Sylvania bank job.
“Pretty Boy Floyd didn’t like the idea that my husband locked the safe on him,” recalled Martha Iffland. “He held a gun to John’s head.”
When Choc ordered the cashier to open the vault, Iffland told him that was impossible because of the time lock. It would have to remain locked for almost five more hours.
“Floyd said, ‘I’ll give you two minutes to open the safe,’” Martha Iffland recounted.
Iffland responded with the same answer as before. Then Choc lost his temper. According to Mrs. Iffland, Choc swung his pistol and struck her husband on the head with the barrel. Iffland fell to the floor, and Choc gave him a kick and ordered him not to move. (Eyewitness testimony provided shortly after the incident contradicted Mrs. Iffland’s belief that Choc was the bandit who had manhandled her husband.)
Meanwhile, another of the bandits had made his way around the back of the cages and forced assistant cashier E. G. Jacobs, tellers Glenn M. Chandler and Lynn Bischoff, and bookkeeper Jeannette Shull to stand along a wall with their arms in the air. Chandler was marched at gunpoint back to the vault area, and was ordered to open the locked door. Like Iffland, who remained lying on the floor, Chandler said there was no possible way that he could comply because of the timing device. Charles Pittman, an employee from the Lucas County auditor’s office, was in a nearby room checking records and witnessed the robbers threatening Iffland and Chandler.
As the action unfolded behind the cages, the other bandits aimed their revolvers at two customers, Chris Rumpf, Jr., a resident of nearby Adrian, Michigan, and his eighty-two-year-old father, Chris Rumpf, Sr. Both of them were seated in the lobby when the robbery started. The younger Rumpf broke into uncontrollable nervous laughter at the sight of the armed bandits sweeping through the bank.
“Stop that laughing or I’ll put a slug in you,” one of the gunmen commanded. Rumpf did as he was told.
However, the holdup men made a costly mistake when they lined four of the bank employees against the Monroe Street side of the bank. There were large plate-glass windows, and the foursome with their arms stretched toward the ceiling were in plain sight. Directly across the street, George Carter, Jr., a worker at Howard’s filling station, noticed the employees with their hands up. He summoned Ed Howard, the station owner, who also happened to be a vice president of the bank. Howard dashed to the wall telephone and turned in a fire alarm. Bernice Simmons, a Sylvania exchange operator who took Howard’s call, set off a shrill fire siren that aroused the entire community. With her fellow operators, she notified the sheriffs office and the Toledo police.
The earsplitting scream of the electric siren mounted on the Council Building across Main Street from the bank caused the bandits to abort their plans.
“Let’s get out of here!” Choc Floyd was reported to have yelled to the others.
The four of them raced to the door, pausing only long enough to scoop up some cash from two of the tellers’ cages on the way out.
“Floyd backed out to the street with both guns pointed into the bank,” recalled Martha Iffland.
By the time the robbers ran toward the black Studebaker, Ed Howard had retrieved and loaded his shotgun. He cut loose with a charge. The blast missed the getaway vehicle and struck the left-front door of a parked automobile. Carter, the filling station employee, ran into the street to jot down the license number of the robbers’ car, but he beat a hasty retreat when one of the outlaws threatened to shoot him. Within seconds, all the bandits were in their getaway vehicle, and it roared away down Monroe Street, picking up speed as it headed toward Toledo.
Almost immediately, large numbers of Sylvania residents came running from all directions and flocked to the bank. Ralph Van Glahn, the Sylvania fire chief, drove out of a nearby garage in a bright red fire truck with the siren blowing. Harry Ries, the assistant fire chief, left his job at the Cooper Tire Company to be at the scene. Ries grabbed the shotgun from Ed Howard’s hands and leaped onto the fire truck, and away went two of Sylvania’s finest in hot pursuit.
The high-speed chase led them down Monroe Street to Dynamite Road, then zigzagged to Central Avenue, and back to Monroe again. Along the way, Van Glahn and Ries somehow managed to jettison five hundred feet of fire hose in order to lighten the load and increase the truck’s speed. Despite the firemen’s best efforts, the Studebaker outmaneuvered the truck, and the bandits disappeared in heavy traffic in the Auburndale district. However, the pursuers did manage to get the number of the Michigan license plate on the culprits’ car and turn it over to the authorities.
As an all-points police bulletin was issued for the Studebaker and its occupants, employees at the Farmers & Merchants Bank sat around the sealed vault. They congratulated each other for surviving the first holdup in the bank’s history, and they chatted about Iffland’s heroics until 5:00 P.M., when the time lock was released and they could make an accurate check on the amount of money taken in the robbery. They discovered that something under two thousand dollars had been removed from the cashiers’ cages—a lot less than had the vault not been locked.
To the robbers, the loot collected at Sylvania was hardly worth the risk when it was divided. The five outlaws stayed out of sight in their canary cottage in Akron. They played cards, ate their female companion’s greasy meals, and plotted bigger, and hopefully more lucrative, bank jobs.
Those plans were interrupted on Saturday, March 8, 1930. The previous day, Charley had toasted his first-year anniversary as a free man. Late that evening, a bunch of the canary cottage crowd visited an after-hours joint operated by Bill and Bertha Gannon at 111 Kenmore Boulevard in Akron. The desperadoes had no way of knowing it at the time, but the local authorities had just learned that some of the gunmen from the Sylvania bank robbery had not left the area.
“We got a tip that they were in town,” said retired Akron police detective J. Sherman Gandee in 1974 when he was eighty-one years old.
The police were alerted by Bill Denton, pastor of the Furnace Street Mission, in Akron’s Little Italy section. During these years, as many as thirty-five bootleggers operated in a two-and-a-half-block stretch of Furnace Street near the mission. Denton told Earl Wilson, later a famous national columnist, then a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal, about the tip that the preacher had received from a man who was a regular at the mission. The informant did not provide the bandits’ precise location and Denton would never reveal the exact name of the man who supplied him with the information.
That night, the police got lucky when they conducted a vice raid and found some of the gents from the Sylvania robbery imbibing at the Gannon residence. In the raiding party led by Sergeant Kovach of the vice squad were Patrolmen Herbert Michaels, Arthur Possehl, both in plainclothes, and Harland F. Manes, dressed in his uniform.
According to Akron police files, two men who were later identified as Bert Walker and Bob Amos, along with Marie Maxwell and Bertha Gannon, left the residence about 1:30 A.M. on March 8 and attempted to drive away. The foursome had been celebrating Mrs. Gannon’s birthday and were obviously well lubricated. They attracted the attention of the officers gathered nearby, who were about to raid the place.
“They didn’t get very far,” said Kovach shortly after the incident. “At the intersection of Old Kenmore Boulevard and New Kenmore Boulevard, they rammed into a westbound auto. Did a good job of it, too. We ran over and I grabbed the man sitting next to the driver and took him to the police car. Manes got the driver. The women crawled out unhurt.”
Suddenly, the man who Manes was trying to arrest plunged his hand inside his coat pocket, shoved the policeman away, and opened fire with a pistol. Shot point-blank in the stomach, Manes fell to the ground. Other officers opened fire and apparently struck the suspect in one of his arms, but he managed to escape in the darkness. Manes was rushed to Peoples Hospital for emergency treatment.
Akron’s Chief of Detectives Edward J. McDonnell was awakened at 2:00 A.M. by a telephone call from Kovach informing him that a police officer had been badly wounded and the assailant was still on the loose. McDonnell alerted his best men, including Gandee, to go to the scene of the crime. Then McDonnell dressed and drove to the hospital.
“I never had a chance,” Manes whispered to McDonnell from his hospital bed. “He pulled the gun before I could do a thing.” Manes said he would recognize the gunman if he saw him again.
Gandee prowled around the premises on Kenmore Boulevard and was present when Patrolman Patrick Conley found a revolver stashed in an ash barrel behind the house. Six shots had recently been fired and the caliber matched the gun used to shoot Manes. The Gannons and some of the girls who worked for them were questioned at length, but they were of little help. Officers noticed red clay on the soles of Bertha Gannon’s shoes, however. They knew there was an area of town banked with red clay because of a new real estate development. Then police officers further searched the residence and found a telephone number scribbled on the wall in the sitting room. They checked it out and found it was in the area where the red clay was located. These clues led them straight to the canary cottage at 731 Lodi Street.
About 5:45 P.M., a small band of Akron policemen, armed to their teeth, gathered fourteen hours after the shooting near the suspected bandit hideout. Chief of Detectives McDonnell, along with Gandee, led a whole cadre of officers in what was described by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as “one of the roughest captures in the history of the police department.”
The lawmen slowly crept up on the bungalow with their guns at the ready. Lights were burning inside and they could see movement behind the drawn shades.
“The front door was unlocked,” said Gandee. “We stationed some men behind the house and went in. There was a machine gun lying on a couch in the living room. We cleaned fourteen guns out of that place before we were through.”
McDonnell and some of his men broke through the door of an upstairs room and found a woman bathing the fresh gunshot wound of Bradley, alias Bert Walker. Covering Walker and the woman, McDonnell ordered one of the detectives to look under the bed, where there had been some commotion. When the officer got down on his knees and took a peek, he saw the form of a man. It was Choc Floyd.
“If he doesn’t come out when I count two, blow his damn head off,” shouted McDonnell.
Detective Bruce Ward, who had been a close friend of the wounded patrolman, did not wait for the chief to start counting. Ignoring the barrel of the riot gun another officer had trained on the bed, Ward dove underneath and grabbed Choc’s leg. He hauled Choc out and administered “one of the most severe cuffings in Akron police annals,” according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Besides seizing the arsenal of weapons that included a submachine gun, two sawed-off shotguns, a high-powered rifle, five pistols, and some nitroglycerin, the detectives arrested Choc Floyd, Jim Bradley (aka Bert Walker), and the Maxwell woman, who was described by the suspects as their housekeeper. Bob Amos was still in custody.
Choc took the beating he received in the upstairs bedroom without so much as a whimper. He and Bradley were taken in squad cars to Peoples Hospital, and one at a time they were brought before Manes, who had suffered a relapse and was growing weaker by the moment. Choc was brought in first. Manes stared at him for a long time, but finally shook his head and said that he was not the man who had shot him. Manes immediately recognized the wounded Bradley, however, and the officers knew they had their man.
Later under intense grilling, Choc was described as cheerful, but he would still admit nothing to the detectives, including his true name. He told the cops he was from New York and had just arrived in town the night before. Officers noted that on the suspect’s inside left forearm was the tattoo of a “Red Cross nurse in rose.” They booked him as Frank Mitchell, alias “Pretty Boy” Smith, number 19983, at police headquarters in downtown Akron. Bob Amos, using his Johnny King alias, was also booked. He and Charley were held under $25,000 bond as material witnesses.
On Sunday, Officer Manes rallied for a time but then began to decline. An appeal went out for blood, and within ten minutes, twenty policemen were at the hospital with their sleeves rolled up. It was too late. Manes died at 10:05 A.M.
Jim Bradley was arraigned the following day. He was presented as Bert Walker to the grand jury in Akron. He was eventually charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Harland Manes. The suspects were kept under heavy guard at the jail in Akron to prevent any of their accomplices from trying to free them.
Manes was buried on March 13. He was a six-year veteran of the police force, and had a wife but no children. Manes was remembered as a quiet man with a proud war record, having served in most of the major battles in France. Hundreds of police officers and American Legionnaires turned out to escort the coffin. Thousands of citizens lined the streets of Akron in tribute to the fallen officer as his funeral procession moved solemnly through the heart of the city, passing the county jail beneath the window where his slayer was housed. Harland Manes was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery with full military rites.
For a few days following the raid on the Akron hideout, police authorities in Ohio considered Choc and the others as prime suspects in the shooting death of William J. Malone, a watchman for the Standard Oil Company. However, subsequent tests conducted by ballistics experts from Akron and Toledo failed to match the bullet found in the slain watchman with bullets recovered from weapons seized in the Lodi Street raid.
During the continuing investigation, more problems surfaced for Choc and his friends. Toledo detectives John Hovey and Frank DeLora went to Akron and found that one of the three sets of extra license plates uncovered in the suspects’ car matched the number of the Michigan plate on the Studebaker used in the Sylvania bank robbery the month before. Charles Pittman, of the county auditor’s office, and Lynn Bischoff and John Iffland, two of the employees at the Farmers & Merchants Bank, were also brought to Akron. The trio of witnesses singled out the suspects during a lineup under the spotlights at the city jail.
Contrary to the version given later by Iffland’s widow, Pittman told detectives that it was the man called Walker, and not Choc (known then by the alias Frankie Mitchell), who had slugged Iffland when the vault could not be opened. Choc Floyd apparently was not guilty of striking the cashier with a pistol and kicking him while he was down.
After their two-month stint in the Akron jail, Choc and Amos were transferred to Toledo. On May 20, 1930, they were both officially charged with the February 5 bank robbery at Sylvania. Choc’s new home for the next six months would remain the Toledo jail, where the bulls knew him as number 21458.
The prosecution had a strong armed-robbery case against Choc. He had little doubt that he was headed back to the penitentiary, and the idea sickened him. The Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus was as tough and overcrowded as the pen in Jefferson City, Missouri. On April 21, 1930—a month before Choc was transferred from Akron to Toledo—one of the worst fires in the nation’s history swept through Ohio’s penitentiary. More than 320 inmates burned to death out of a population of 4,300 housed in a prison designed to hold only 1,500. Choc would spend much of his time in Toledo contemplating his upcoming trial and punishment.
Throughout this early period of the 1930s, crime proliferated greatly. Hard times spelled doom and gloom for farmers and factory workers, but not for those versed in the ways of crime. None of these outlaws would be caught dead peddling apples on a street corner—not when there were still banks in operation.
As wanton crime spread, so did the fame of many Depression-era criminals. They became as well known, although far less venerated, as major league baseball stars, and became household names as familiar as Babe Ruth, Jimmy Foxx, or Dizzy Dean.
Floyd was hardly the only bandit on the verge of “stardom.”
John Herbert Dillinger was also poised on the edge of criminal prominence. Born June 22, 1903, in a middle-class residential neighborhood of Indianapolis, he was the son of a hardworking grocer. Dillinger’s mother died when he was three. He grew to resent his stepmother, and as a juvenile he got into frequent scrapes for carousing and stealing coal. Dillinger quit school at the age of sixteen, and worked in a machine shop until boredom set in. When his father moved the family to a farm near Mooresville, Indiana, Dillinger quickly tired of rural life, just as Choc Floyd had in Oklahoma.
Shortly after his twentieth birthday, Dillinger got into trouble with the law when he stole an automobile from a church parking lot. Later that year, he joined the navy but immediately regretted the move. The young seaman, assigned to the USS Utah (a battleship that would be destroyed in 1941 at Pearl Harbor), finally jumped ship for good when it docked in Boston. He returned to Indiana, married a sixteen-year-old girl, and began hanging out with Ed Singleton, a pool shark and ex-con who was ten years older than Dillinger.
On the evening of September 6, 1924, approximately a year before Choc Floyd committed his first armed robbery, Dillinger and Singleton got liquored up and robbed sixty-five-year-old Frank Morgan as he walked home with his weekly grocery-store receipts. Dillinger, who had known the old man since childhood, slugged Morgan on the head with a large bolt wrapped in a handkerchief. Morgan fought off his attackers and Dillinger and his accomplice fled empty-handed.
Dillinger was later arrested at the family farm. Singleton pleaded not guilty and was sentenced to two years. Dillinger took his father’s advice and confessed to the crime. He was convicted of assault and battery with the intent to rob, and conspiracy to commit a felony, and received joint sentences of two to fourteen years and ten to twenty years in prison. Later that year, Dillinger entered the Pendleton Reformatory. He was stunned by the severity of his sentence and the leniency shown his older partner in crime. As Ruby Floyd would also do, Dillinger’s young wife divorced him. When his first attempt at parole was denied, Dillinger became increasingly bitter and hardened.
In the summer of 1929, Dillinger requested and was granted a transfer to the state prison at Michigan City, Indiana. He told authorities he wanted to move to this prison in order to play on the convict baseball team. In reality, the relocation enabled Dillinger to be reunited with Harry Pierpont and Homer Van Meter, incorrigibles he had first met at the reformatory. They introduced Dillinger to convicted bank robber John Hamilton and other seasoned bandits.
While Choc Floyd was awaiting trial in Toledo, Dillinger was being schooled in the art of bank robbery in the Indiana pen. It would be his home until May 10, 1933, when Dillinger would finally gain parole and launch his period of infamy as public enemy number one.
At this time, Lester M. Gillis was also starting his climb toward the limelight. Born in Chicago on December 6, 1908, to immigrant parents from Belgium, Gillis grew up scared but mean around the stockyard district. The slum neighborhood was ruled by a pack of young toughs called the Five Points Gang. His diminutive size—slightly more than five foot four inches tall and only 135 pounds as an adult—was a constant irritation to the cocky street fighter.
In order to survive and compensate for his physical limitations, Gillis became adept with a switchblade and developed a reputation as a bantam rooster who was not afraid to inflict pain. One criminal historian described Gillis as “something out of a bad dream.”
In and out of reform school as a youngster, Gillis graduated from stealing cars and muscling whores and bookies to become an enforcer for the racketeers. Some law-enforcement officials even believed that in the late 1920s Gillis went to work for Al Capone’s organization but was given the heave-ho when they found him to be unreliable. Instead of intimidating his shake-down targets and, at the most, giving them a good beating, it was rumored Gillis simply shot them to death. A few of his acquaintances from those times even felt Gillis enjoyed killing people.
In 1930, Gillis was roaming the streets, a year away from being convicted in a jewelry-store robbery that would result in a term at the state prison at Joliet, Illinois. By then, he was known by an array of aliases, such as “Big George” Nelson, Alex Gillis, Lester Giles, and Jimmy Williams. However, the name he cared for the least—“Baby Face” Nelson—was beginning to stick. And, during the next few years after Baby Face escaped from prison and went on a bank-robbing spree, it was a name that would go down in criminal history.
Baby Face Nelson, product of the urban slums, had little in common with Choc Floyd, who had grown up in the country. In the 1930s, though, other farmers’ sons, like Floyd and Dillinger, took to the outlaw trail.
One of the most ruthless of these was Clyde Barrow. Born at Teleco, Texas, on March 24, 1909, Barrow was one of eight children from a poor sharecropper family, a family that made the stable Floyds look prosperous by comparison. Some of the folks who knew Barrow recalled that even as a boy he had a sadistic streak. They said he was always into mischief but that he also found pleasure in torturing songbirds and barnyard critters. He dropped out of school after the sixth grade, and along with older brother Melvin Ivan Barrow, fondly known as Buck, eventually became a poultry and car thief and small-time robber.
Tired of rolling drunks, the Barrow boys were responsible for a string of robberies in the late twenties in the West Dallas area, where their tenant farmer father had moved to run a filling station. After a running shootout with police near Denton, Texas, with Clyde at the wheel of their getaway car, a wounded Buck Barrow was taken into custody, tried, and convicted of armed robbery. He was sent off to the Eastham prison farm.
Clyde continued to operate on his own. In January 1930, at the time Choc Floyd and his friends were sizing up their list of banks in Ohio, Barrow met a nineteen-year-old Dallas cafe waitress who would become his accomplice for the balance of his short and angry life.
Her name was Bonnie Parker.
A bricklayer’s daughter, Parker was born in Rowena, Texas, on October 1, 1910. When Clyde met the petite Bonnie, she was already married to Roy Thornton, who was serving a ninety-nine-year sentence in the Texas pen. Bonnie was pining away for her convicted husband. Most of the entries in her diary from that period are riddled with lines such as “Blue as hell tonight”; or “Have been crying. I wish I could see Roy”; or “Drowning my sorrows in bottled hell.”
Clyde was not the kind of man to be put off by the heart and her hubby’s name tattooed on Bonnie’s thigh. He soon won her over with his array of guns and the promise of relief from a humdrum life that, in Bonnie’s own words, left her “bored crapless.” At only five foot seven inches tall and 130 pounds, Barrow was no matinee idol. He reeked of cheap thrills and danger, however, and to Bonnie, that was a vast improvement over slinging hash for slim tips in a hamburger joint.
Shortly after they met, Barrow was picked up in connection with the robbery in Denton, but there was insufficient evidence to hold him. Authorities in Waco, however, had an interest in Barrow. He was transported there, and on March 2, 1930, he was charged with several burglaries and car thefts. On March 11, Barrow and two other prisoners escaped from the jail in Waco, using a pistol Bonnie had smuggled inside during one of her visits. Clyde’s freedom did not last long. On March 18, he and his friends were recaptured halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton in southwest Ohio, the state that was currently hosting Choc Floyd and his cohorts.
Barrow was returned to Waco, and on April 21, 1930—the day of the deadly Ohio prison fire—he was sent to the penitentiary at Huntsville to begin serving a fourteen-year sentence. He would remain there for only a short time. By February 1932, Barrow would be paroled, back in circulation, and reunited with his girlfriend. The couple would terrorize several states for two years and become known simply as Bonnie and Clyde.
Just as Choc Floyd created his own identity and helped shape an image that would haunt him for the rest of his life, likewise John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde went through their own metamorphoses. They were wrapped in cocoons of their own making. Before they fell victim to their own devices, however, they would savor the fleeting limelight and honestly believe their own publicity.
Another young man who knew the full value of publicity was J. Edgar Hoover. In Washington, D.C., Hoover spoke of a “criminal army” on the march and suggested that crime was “sapping the spiritual and moral strength of America.” Coveys of marauders swarmed throughout the nation. Not all were kindred spirits with the social bandits of the past. Many were driven by pure greed and blood lust. Some, like Baby Face Nelson and Clyde Barrow, were cold-blooded killers. They toted Thompson submachine guns and automatic pistols, and preyed on rural banks, post offices, and businesses struggling to survive.
By mid-decade, there would be so many people operating on the other side of the law that the Justice Department would say that for every doctor there were twenty criminals. By then, however, the cometic rise of this tribe of devils would sputter and die. Dillinger, Nelson, Barrow, and Parker would all be snuffed out.
So would the Oklahoma bandit that Beulah Baird Ash had named Pretty Boy.