10

“PRETTY BOY” FLOYD

He was a farm boy from Georgia whose earliest crimes were stealing cookies from a general store and later helping other teenagers switch infants from one baby crib to another in the back of a revival tent. He grew up on a farm in the Akins community near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, a town that John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath . Children like Charles Arthur “Charley” Floyd grew calluses there tilling the soil, while some of their fathers “farmed in the woods” making moonshine. His father, Walker Lee Floyd, was one of them.

And in the evenings, boys like Charley listened to stories of bank and train robberies, gun battles and vigilante justice from the nearby Cookson Hills and beyond. Charley himself particularly admired Emmett Dalton, the only survivor of the disastrous 1892 raid on Coffeyville, Kansas, in which the Daltons tried and failed to rob two banks at once.

Since Charley hated hard work in general and cotton picking in particular, he chose another path. He stole $350 in pennies from the post office inside the Akins general store. Three years later, in August 1925, little more than a year after he married Ruby Hargraves, Charley left the Cookson Hills pistol in hand, headed for St. Louis and returned the next month with a new bankrobbing partner named Fred Hildebrand. They were sporting new suits and driving a fancy Studebaker roadster. Two days earlier, with another man, they had robbed a payroll courier of $2,000 in cash from the Tower Grove Bank of St. Louis. A few days later, Charley was arrested and returned to St. Louis. On December 8, he was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary.

The state prison at Jefferson City offered dim cells and darker prospects for the prisoners who worked twelve-hour days in conditions that outside observers called slave labor.

While there, Charley learned high-end criminal skills from St. Louis and Kansas City safecrackers, burglars and armed robbery specialists. After he was released on March 7, 1929, he was spotted in Kansas City by the local police, arrested on vagrancy charges and told in no uncertain terms to head for Oklahoma.

He became an oil field roustabout in Earlsboro, Oklahoma, but was fired when the bosses learned about his prison record. Charley began running bootleg whiskey to Oklahoma and elsewhere from Kansas City, where he was arrested for vagrancy in May, only to be arrested later in Colorado on similar charges. Worse, his father was shot to death in an argument over some lumber in mid-November, prompting Charley to head north.

“Where did you come from, pretty boy?” Legend has it that a madam named Annie Chambers asked Charley this question, but it was Beulah Baird Ash who spotted him during a December 1929 card game in a Kansas City hotel that catered to criminals on the run. She became Charley Floyd’s girlfriend fifteen months later, when her husband, Wallace Ash, and his brother William turned up dead. But now, in January 1930, Charley had started the next phase of his criminal career in Ohio.

When he robbed the bank at Sylvania, ten miles northwest of Toledo, on February 5, 1930, five men came in yelling, “Hands up!” while two confronted the cashier. Even though the safe was locked, the gang scooped up about $2,000 ($11,400 today) just as an alarm was sounded. Minutes later, a fire truck with its siren wailing chased them out of town. The firemen got the license number but lost them in traffic.

Charley was casual in small towns. While the getaway driver kept the motor running, the Floyd gang crashed through the door and yelled, “Hands up!” Cash in hand, they left with two or three bank employees standing on the running boards to discourage the police from shooting, with Charley saying, “Hold on tight and don’t you worry.” Some fifty years later, Elmer Steele, one of their drivers, claimed that he saw Charley tear up a few mortgages. Well, maybe, but it’s hard to imagine taking the time to find and destroy all that paper when the law might be just down the street.

Floyd was arrested on March 8 in Akron, Ohio, for robbing the Sylvania Bank. On Wednesday, December 10, 1930, he was on a train from Toledo bound for the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. The guards left the passenger car for just a minute, and that’s all it took. He rolled over the prisoner to whom he was chained, broke the chains, ran for the bathroom, busted out a window and jumped down a steep embankment into thick, tall grass near the little town of Kenton. The guards stopped the train and walked just a few inches from him. But Pretty Boy was too deep in the tall grass for them to find him. When darkness fell, he began the long walk to the safety of criminal havens in Toledo.

Back in Oklahoma, Floyd was universally admired by his neighbors, who didn’t mind him robbing banks. Few in the rural American Southwest saw much wrong with robbing the moneyed men who owned banks and railroads. This was especially so in Oklahoma, which had more bank robberies than any other state in 1912, thanks to outlaws such as Al Spencer, Jelly Nash and Henry Starr, who were inspired by the Reconstruction exploits of Frank and Jesse James. Henry Starr had been killed in 1921 during one of the first attempted bank robberies by automobile in American history. A True Detective magazine writer who rode with policemen and sheriffs looking for Floyd during the summer of 1932 claimed that the country people of eastern Oklahoma clammed up whenever they were asked about Floyd’s whereabouts.

In January 1932, the Oklahoma Banker’s Association claimed that the people in eastern Oklahoma were protecting Pretty Boy, and they were probably right. Oklahoma bank insurance premiums had doubled over the past year, and Lieutenant Governor Robert Burns called a “council of war on banditry” that month, saying, “Floyd has terrorized the entire east central district of Oklahoma. Already six killings and ten bank robberies have been charged to his gang. He must be stopped.” Burns was exaggerating the numbers but promised to make machine guns and automatic rifles available to law officers.

Eventually, Charley robbed at least sixteen banks, an American record exceeded by only two men: Alvin Karpis of the Barker gang and John Dillinger. The only killing Charley ever talked about was a former sheriff whom he killed in early April 1932. “Erv Kelley nearly got me,” Floyd said later. “There was only one thing to do. It was either him or me, so I let him have it. He had the same idea I guess. We fired at the same time. I never saw Kelley until he was falling. I fired five shots…and four of his shots hit me, one hitting me on the right hip and hitting a gun. The bullet hit the gun but it did not hit me.”

Seven months later, on November 1, the Floyd gang drove into Sallisaw with newbie Aussie Elliott at the wheel and Floyd’s longtime partner, George Birdwell, shining up his Thompson machine gun in the back seat. Their arrival was hardly a surprise. In fact, Floyd’s grandfather Charles Murphy Floyd, several of the old man’s cronies and other Floyd family members were in town that day for the occasion. When the bandits stopped in front of the two-story red-brick Sallisaw State Bank, Charley sported a new suit and shined shoes as usual. He bounded into the barbershop next door, warning everybody to stay away from the telephone. “We’re gonna rob the bank,” Charley told everybody within earshot. One old farmer encouraged him to “Give ’em hell!”

While his crew scooped up $2,350, hardly the best take of his career, Floyd shook hands all around, put a banker on the running board and told him to “hold on tight,” even as six packages of nickels and half dollars broke open and scattered on the sidewalk. Some five blocks later, they slowed down for the banker to jump off.

When it was over, more than a few people in Sallisaw wondered how police chief Bert Cotton could have missed the robbery since he was parked only seven car lengths from the bank. No matter, the county attorney, Floyd’s childhood friend Fred Green, vowed to prosecute Floyd to the full extent of the law if he was captured.

Images

Smug John Dillinger. Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries .

That would not be easy. Floyd and Adam Richetti robbed a bank in Mexico, Missouri, on June 14; killed a sheriff in Bolivar; and drove on to Kansas City, where law officers spotted them. While there, on June 17, 1933, three or perhaps four gunmen ambushed several lawmen and Floyd’s old associate Frank “Jelly” Nash in the Union Station parking lot. Nash and four law officers were killed. Three days later, after being publicly named as a suspect, Floyd sent a postcard from Springfield, Missouri, to the Kansas City police denying involvement. Even so, three months later, Floyd and Richetti went into hiding near Buffalo, New York.

After John Dillinger was killed in Chicago on July 22, 1934, the FBI made Floyd public enemy number one. Since he had been suspected as a participant in a shootout near Springfield, Missouri, on January 2, 1932, in which six law officers were massacred, he was already on Hoover’s short list even before Kansas City thug James La Capra claimed that underworld henchman John Lazia had arranged for Adam Richetti and Floyd to help rescue Nash from the FBI.

FBI agent Melvin Purvis flew to East Liverpool, Ohio, the very evening of the day in October 1934 when Floyd was spotted with Richetti and some girlfriends who were helping them spend their bank robbery money. Floyd spent his spare time cooking spaghetti and baking pies. On October 13, the Buffalo Courier-Express ran a front-page story on Pretty Boy, which made him extremely nervous. He and Richetti pointed their Ford for Hell’s Half Acre, an outlaw haven not far from East Liverpool, Ohio, on the Pennsylvania border, where State Line Jenny operated a saloon.

Pretty Boy and Richetti robbed a bank in Tiltonsville, Ohio, on October 20, taking $500. On the way out, Floyd told a scared little girl who was crying not to worry. But then they wrecked the Ford in a fog bank and were turned in to local police. After a quick gunfight near Wellsville, Richetti was captured, but Pretty Boy escaped.

Floyd offered a farmhand named Peterson ten dollars to drive him to Youngstown, but Peterson’s car soon ran out of gas. Floyd then commandeered another car and forced a florist to drive him toward Lisbon, Ohio, the northernmost town that saw combat during the Civil War. They avoided a roadblock at Lisbon but were chased by two deputy sheriffs into the countryside. After a brief gunfight, Floyd fled into the trees.

The next afternoon, Sunday, October 21, Richetti was positively identified, prompting Melvin Purvis to fly into Wellsville that night. He knew that Floyd was not far away. At about noon the next day, Charley paid for a lunch at the farmhouse of Robert Robinson near East Liverpool and moved on. But the Robinsons told a local constable, who relayed Floyd’s description to a Federal Bureau agent working at the East Liverpool police station. At about three o’clock, Floyd arrived at the farm of Ellen Conkle, a widow whose land was between the towns of Clarkson and Calcutta, Ohio. “Lady, I’m lost and want something to eat, can you help me?” He was unshaven, his shoes were scuffed and he told Ellen that he’d been drinking and hunting squirrels.

She fed him spare ribs, potatoes, fresh bread, pumpkin pie and coffee. Pretty Boy skipped the rice pudding but read the East Liverpool Review , which featured an article about the massive manhunt Melvin Purvis was conducting to find him. He said the dinner was fit for a king, paid her one dollar and decided to wait for her brother Stewart Dyke, who was husking corn out back. He wanted a ride to Youngstown.

Floyd climbed into the driver’s seat of the Model A Ford Stewart Dyke had parked next to a corncrib and began looking at a map. At 4:00 p.m., Stewart and his wife approached the car after finishing the day’s work; they refused to take him to Youngstown but agreed to take him into nearby Clarkson. Just as the car began moving, two Chevrolets full of law officers scouring the country for Floyd hove into view on Sprucevale Road. Melvin Purvis was in one of the cars.

Floyd ordered Stewart to drive to the very back of the corncrib, which was a shed elevated above the ground by eight concrete pillars. Floyd cursed, pulled his gun and ran under the corncrib, but then he started running across the pasture behind the house toward some nearby woods. By the time the law officers yelled for him to halt, he was five hundred feet away on the crest of the hill, darting left and right.

Lawman Chester Smith had been a sharpshooter during World War I. He knocked Floyd to his knees with the first shot, but Floyd got up and started running again. A second shot hit him in the side and brought him down to stay.

After a few questions about the Kansas City Massacre that Floyd wouldn’t answer, Purvis asked if he was Pretty Boy. “I’m Charles Arthur Floyd,” he said, just before he died.

He was thirty.