It’s September 16, 1925, and a handsome-looking fella walks into the Tower Grove Bank in St.
Louis with two other men.
The man suddenly whips back his suit jacket and produces his beloved Thompson sub-machine
gun.
“Everyone get down on the floor, this is a bank robbery,” the man shouts, just as
his two accomplices brandish their pistols.
“No one’s gonna get hurt, just do as we tell you,” says the man as he sticks that
gun in front of a teller’s face.
That teller has no idea that she is standing in front of a man who will become known as
possibly America’s most infamous bank robber, the bane of the FBI and without doubt an exemplary
“Enemy Number One.”
Welcome to the life and crimes of Pretty Boy Floyd.
The scene we just described could have been Pretty Boy Floyd’s biggest ever haul.
That day he and his crew walked out of that bank with $11,929, which in today’s money
is something like $174,000.
Not bad for a day’s work, eh.
The reason so much was taken that day is because the bank had the entire payroll for the Kroger
Grocery & Baking Company.
We guess some staff at their outlets were a bit displeased that September.
This guy would rob a lot more banks and he was behind one of the worst events in the
USA’s criminal history, but before we talk about carnage and blood-splattered streets,
let’s have a look at this man nicknamed Pretty Boy Floyd.
First of all, his parents didn’t name their child, first name Pretty, middle name Boy.
His real name was Charles Arthur Floyd and he was born in a place called Adairsville,
Georgia, on February 3rd, 1904.
One thing we know is that Charles had a lot of siblings and the family was dirt poor.
When he was seven years old the parents took the family to live in a place called Akins,
Oklahoma, which to say the least is about as small as small towns get in the U.S.
Even today that town has a population of only about 500.
So Charles lived in what you might call the American Outback, and there his family tried
to eke out a living as farmers.
The poverty and boredom must have been oppressive for the young boy and perhaps that’s why
he got into crime early, with his first arrest at age 18.
The young boy, nicknamed “Choc” because of his fondness for Choctaw beer, was about
to embark on a career that would eventually lead to movies being made about him.
You could say this career of his didn’t get off to a good start, and that’s because
his first bank robbery ended with him behind bars.
That robbery was the one we’ve already mentioned, and Choc and his accomplices were all caught
after spending like they’d won the lottery.
For his crime he served just three and half years, which is surprising given that such
a robbery these days could see a man growing old in prison.
He was married at the time of the robbery and even had a son, but that relationship
fell apart while he was doing his time.
When Charles got out of prison, life in America’s “Dust Bowl” wasn’t exactly a walk in
the park.
It was the early 1930s and the U.S. was experiencing something called The Great Depression, and
perhaps those who got most depressed about those economic downtimes were those stuck
out in the rural hinterlands.
How’s a man to make a bit of money when milking cows doesn’t pay the bills?
The answer to that question is a five-letter word: CRIME.
About this time he got the name Pretty Boy Floyd and that name stuck.
There are mixed opinions as to how he got that moniker, but word on the street is it
either came from his workmates in the oil fields who thought Charles was a snazzy dresser,
or he got the name from a girlfriend.
Whatever was the case, Mr. Floyd was indeed a good-looking fella.
The thing was, though, he really detested that name.
What kind of criminal tough guy gets called “Pretty Boy?”
This handsome man was as fearless as he was easy on the eyes, and he soon fell in love
with his favorite toy.
That was a Thompson submachine gun, loaded with one of those Type L 50-round drum magazines.
You all know what those things look like because you’ve all seen the gangster movies.
Floyd was a bit reckless with that thing and you could say that he got his money’s worth
out of it.
He soon became an associate of bootleggers, the men who were battling to become top dog
in the illegal alcohol trade in the Prohibition years between 1920 and 1933.
Because of his fearlessness and mounting number of crimes, Floyd got quite the name for himself
with the Kansas City underworld.
We’re not going to go into detail about every bank robbery Floyd and his various crews
committed, because if we did you’d be watching this show for hours, Instead we’ll give
you a quick rundown of his robberies and then later get to the crime that made Floyd the
poster boy of badness.
We said Floyd got off to a bad start as a bank robber and you could say his second attempt
didn’t exactly go smoothly.
That was the robbery of the Farmers & Merchants Bank in Sylvania, Oklahoma, on February 5th,
1930.
He actually made a successful getaway but was arrested three days later for the crime
of shooting down a cop…we told you he was reckless with that gun.
Once he was in jail for that murder the cops also put the bank robbery on him, and this
time Floyd was told he was going to spend 12 to 14 years behind bars.
That’s also a pretty soft sentence compared to what you’d get for killing a cop and
robbing a bank these days.
Do that today and the outcome would be a gurney and a cocktail of killer drugs pumped into
your veins.
Anyway, Floyd didn’t much feel like doing those years in prison and so while on a tram
on his way to prison he got out of his handcuffs somehow and jumped to his freedom.
This guy was now really starting to get on the nerves of law enforcement, but it would
be a while until they would catch up with him again.
Floyd embarked on a spree of robberies that would run from 1931 to 1934.
In total he and his accomplices would rob another 15 banks, which isn’t bad going
by any criminal’s standards.
It’s a rough estimate, but in today’s cash Floyd and his colleagues could have taken
as much as half a million bucks from banks.
His last robbery might have been his least successful and that’s because at a very
small bank in Tiltonsville, Oklahoma, he only got away with a paltry $500, or just short
of $10,000 in today’s money.
Still, it was better than milking cows.
There just wasn’t much moo-ney around for farmers back then.
We should tell you now that while the American authorities painted Pretty Boy Floyd as the
worst kind of specimen known to man, a lot of local folks in Oklahoma thought he was
just great.
That’s because sometimes when he robbed bank he didn’t just ask for cash but he
destroyed all the mortgage papers.
What that meant for a bunch of local people of course was their debts were destroyed.
On top of that, he also shared some of the robbery spoils with poor farmers.
That’s why some people called Floyd the “Robin Hood of the Cookson Hills."
We should also fill you in on another matter and that’s the fact that Pretty Boy Floyd
did not go into banks with guns blazing.
Sure, he shot cops and other robbers that kinda got in the way of his criminal activity,
but some of his biographers say he never drew first and he never hurt customers in banks.
This little snippet actually appeared in the newspaper, The Oklahoma Times:
“Like the famed marauder of the English forests, he took money from those who had
it—the banks—and divided the proceeds with the poor.
The penniless tenant farmers kept their mouths shut; they had no scruples about taking contraband
wrested from bankers.”
A guy that actually grew up around Floyd said no one was really afraid of him and he wasn’t
the monster the cops tried to make out.
In fact, he was well-liked and far from the portrayal of the crazed gangster that the
authorities said he was.
Just about every crime in that part of America was being pinned on Floyd, so much so that
his mother once came out and told the press that he hadn’t done one thousandth of the
crimes that the cops said he had done.
If you were alive back then you’d have seen lurid articles in the news daily about this
insane, heartless, merciless outlaw.
Floyd himself once joked, “I guess I've been accused of everything that has happened,
except the kidnapping of the Lindbergh child last spring.”
You could say the media and law enforcement made sure everyone feared this man, and so
in today’s terms you might say Floyd was the criminal alternative of the coronavirus.
And this brings us to the crime of the century, one which the FBI still blames Pretty Boy
Floyd for.
This crime would become known as The Kansas City Massacre.
As the name suggests, it was a bloody affair and one which really got into the hearts and
minds of the American public.
This is how it went down.
A criminal named Frank Nash had escaped prison but the cops had caught back up with him.
Nash was also considered at the time to be one of America’s most successful bank robbers,
but that’s a story for another day.
The cops’ plan was to take Nash by train to the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth in
Kansas.
They were to take Nash to Union Railway Station in Kansas City where he would be picked up
and taken directly to jail.
Pretty Boy Floyd and two associates weren’t keen on that idea and they planned to bust
into that station and get Nash.
Armed with a machine gun and two .45 caliber automatic pistols, the crew set off to the
station in a Chevrolet sedan on June 17th, 1933.
At that station a bunch of cops and FBI agents were waiting for their man, not knowing that
three criminals were there, too.
Of course those guys were heavily armed, so you could say the fight would be two pistols
and a machine gun versus lots of pistols and a couple of shotguns.
When Nash got off the train he was taken by all those guys to the entrance of the station
where a car was waiting for him.
At the time he was handcuffed and surrounded by men, so trying to free him wasn’t exactly
going to be easy.
Nash was pushed into the car and one agent sat on each side of him in the back seat,
while two other agents were about to get into the front seats.
That’s when one of them noticed armed men, one armed with a machine gun, running behind
a parked green Plymouth.
The words that the agents then heard was, “Let ‘em have it!”
What happened next was just that, the armed men let them have and proceeded to open fire
on the cops and the FBI agents.
In total four law enforcement officers were killed, but Nash had also been killed since
one of the bullets went right into the back of his head.
One of the surviving officers would later go on record and say that he heard one of
the gangsters mutter, “They’re all dead.
Let’s get out of here.”
So, those guys got away, but in the melee how could the FBI be so sure it was Pretty
Boy Floyd along with two other men they identified.
The evidence was shaky and to this day some historians doubt that Floyd was involved in
this crime, just as he said he hadn’t been involved in other crimes that had been pinned
on him.
The guy that was supposed to be Floyd was said to have been shot in the shoulder, but
as you’ll soon find out, Floyd was NOT shot in the shoulder.
The police also got a letter a few days later, and that letter is said to have been the real
thing.
It read, “Dear Sirs - I - Charles Floyd - want it made known that I did not participate
in the massacre of officers at Kansas City.
Charles Floyd.”
Some accounts say he was there, others say he wasn’t.
Some of the underworld at the time said Floyd was involved, and other gangsters said he
wasn’t.
Even ballistic tests point to cops shooting their own by accident, gunshots that were
supposed to have come from Floyd.
We may never know if he did it, but the FBI is still certain that Floyd was there.
Pretty Boy Floyd then took the spot of America’s Enemy Number One, which was some feat in those
days.
The whole country was now looking for this crazed killer with good looks and a penchant
for killing cops.
On October, 1934, two guys driving a car were sure they saw a smartly dressed man that looked
just like that guy whose face had been painted across every newspaper in the country.
They told the cops what they’d seen and two policemen went to where they’d seen
the man.
That ended badly, with both cops getting shot, but Floyd took a shot, too, before he got
away.
What happened next is contested, but the fact is the cops were on to Floyd and he was eventually
chased down.
All this happened in rural eastern Ohio and so the cops pretty much targeted any place
where Floyd could be hiding.
One version of events tells us that some cops driving around noticed a suspicious car driving
to the back of a corn crib, so they went to check it out.
When they got there a good-looking man jumped out of the car brandishing a pistol.
But this time he was in no state to fight.
Floyd was already wounded, and he said to those cops, “I’m done for; you’ve hit
me twice.”
The cops on the scene claimed that when they checked Floyd they found a watch and a chain
with ten notches on it- one for each slain cop.
While we may never know if the official story is true or not, the FBI claimed there were
witnesses to the shoot-out, and Floyd wasn’t just killed in cold blood.
But let’s be honest, the FBI at the time told quite a lot of tall stories and the department
was notorious for corruption, so the watch story and the way he died and possibly Floyd’s
involvement in the massacre could all have been a big lie pie.
We at the Infographics Show don’t say that easily, but if you look at all the different
accounts as to how Floyd died, accounts from various cops and FBI agents, they all tell
a different story as to who shot him, where he was shot and how he eventually died.
In 1979, one of the cops that was there said Floyd was indeed injured and by his very own
gun.
He said he didn’t want to kill the man, but only disable him.
The FBI field agent in charge however ordered Floyd executed, and riddled his body with
bullets.
Yet another cop said that wasn’t true either and Floyd died another way and there were
no last words.
The truth is out there, but we’re afraid to say we don’t know exactly what it is.
One thing we can tell you is that Floyd was never shot in the shoulder during the massacre,
as had been made out.
When he was finally laid to rest something like 20 to 40 thousand people attended the
funeral.
Do you have a taste for crime now and do you want to hear more?
Well, if you do, we have for you one of the greatest tales ever told about an American
criminal.
Take a look at this, “The White American Who Climbed the Ranks of the Chinese Mafia
- The White Devil.”