How Did Pretty Boy Floyd Become Public Enemy No. 1?

Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd was a fairly common criminal until he got involved in shootout with federal agents in 1933. Learn about his life and crimes in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/pretty-boy-floyd.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren
Vogelbaum here. Up until June seventeenth of nineteen thirty three,
Pretty Boy Floyd led a relatively unremarkable life in and
out of jail as a Midwestern hoodlum. He was robbing
banks and payrolls, stealing cars, and murdering rival thugs, all

(00:23):
while escaping police custody by jumping from trains and hiding
out in the Trustee Cooks and Hills of Oklahoma. But
on that particular June day in Kansas City, his humdrum
career took a spectacular turn for the worse. At least
that's what Jay Edgar Hoover's Bureau of Investigation decided. And

(00:44):
in those bad old days, you really didn't want to
antagonize the organization soon to become the FBI. It'd be
renamed in nineteen thirty five. According to the FBI, events
unfolded as follows. On October ninetheteenth of nineteen thirty a
murderous crook named Frank Nash was in the United States

(01:04):
Penitentiary at Levenworth, Kansas, serving his third long term sentence
after being pardoned twice before when he escaped. Less than
a year later, Nash managed to help seven other prisoners
bust out of Levenworth as well. In the meantime, the
Bureau of Investigation mounted a giant man hunt that spanned
the continent. They finally tracked down Nash in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

(01:28):
It was then just a simple matter of getting there
fellon back to Kansas via train, but some of Nash's
buddies got wind of the transport and cooked up a
scheme to free him when the train showed up. The
story goes that Floyd and his sidekick, one Adam Ritchetti
happened to drive into Kansas City the day before the
train was due. They met up with Nash's pals and

(01:49):
offered to help with their scheme to free him. When
Nash arrived, seven agents and officers escorted him to a
waiting vehicle. They were getting seated inside when from out
of nowhere, gunmen opened fire on them. Only one of
the officials escaped unscathed, but two were badly injured, and
everyone else, including Nash, the very person the crooks were

(02:10):
trying to free, was shot dead. The gunmen fled, and
Floyd and Richetti were identified as they ran. Pretty Boy Floyd,
who made a habit of boasting about his crimes, maintained
to the very end of his life that he had
nothing to do with what became known as the Kansas
City massacre. But that didn't matter. JEdgar Hoover had already

(02:31):
eliminated John Dillinger, whom he had previously dubbed Public Enemy
Number one, and now he turned his sights on pretty
Boy Floyd. Charles Arthur Floyd was born in Georgia on
February third of nineteen oh four, and his family moved
to Hanson, Oklahoma, in nineteen eleven, an area that had
been just a few years earlier part of the Cherokee Nation.

(02:53):
The family settled down on the edge of the Cooks
and Hills, a territory of thick scrubby brush which had
served to hide many famous outlas laws of the decades,
as it would Floyd himself in later years. A But
if proximity to this law breaking heritage inspired Floyd's subsequent career,
he showed no signs of deviance in his early life.
On the contrary, he was known as a kid who

(03:15):
loved his mother, looked up to his father, protected his
siblings and helped out around the farm, and although the
Floyds worked hard, it was difficult to spraate more than
a meager living from their acreage. At the age of fourteen,
Floyd went off to work as a harvest hand on
larger farms, and there he met other traveling workers who
exposed him to a rougher, tougher mode of existence. When

(03:38):
he returned home, his family felt he had changed. There
seems to be no agreement as to how Floyd acquired
his nicknames. Some say it was applied in his teenage
years due to his carefully tended pompadour, Others that he
earned it by working in the oil fields in a
white dress shirt. Floyd himself allegedly hated the name and

(03:59):
preferred to by Chalk, which was a reference to his
passion for a local Oklahoma beer called Choctaw. On May
sixteenth of nineteen twenty two, Floyd was arrested for the
first time. The crime was the theft of three dollars
and fifty cents in dimes, nichols, and pennies from a
local post office. Although he was later acquitted due to

(04:20):
a lack of witnesses. It was the beginning of a
long hostile relationship with the law. In the months that
followed the Kansas City massacre, the Bureau mounted a giant
man hunt for its new public Enemy number one. Floyd
was doing a decent job of laying low in evading
police ambushes until he and Richetti wrecked a car in
rural Ohio on October twentieth of nineteen thirty four. Their

(04:44):
two lady companions drove the car to the nearest town
for repairs while Floyd and Richetti reclined on the side
of the road to wait. A passing motorists spotted Floyd
and Richetti in suits, snapping next to their guns and
reported their incongruous appearance to the local police chief, who
went to have a look. But when the police chief
showed up with his team and approached the two men,

(05:06):
the gangsters opened fire. Floyd scrambled up the embankment and
managed to flee in a hail of police bullets, but
Richetti was out gunned before he could escape. Once Richetti
was identified, the police realized that the escapee was none
other than the Bureau's Public Enemy Number one. By that evening,
famed FBI agent Melvin Purvis who had been instrumental in

(05:27):
capturing Dillinger, arrived with his team. In the meantime, Floyd
had flagged down a passing car, which then ran out
of gas. Floyd, with that driver in tow, commandeered a
second car and its driver, but when the three men
encountered a roadblock, Floyd ordered the car turned around and
they fled, Pursued by the police. At a critical juncture,

(05:47):
Floyd jumped from the car and escaped into the woods,
firing behind him as he ran. He wandered the woods
for nearly forty eight hours until he stumbled across a
farmhouse inhabited by a widow named Ellen Conkle. Claiming to
be a lost Floyd managed to get an excellent hot
meal from Conkle, but it was to be his last.
A local farmer had spotted Floyd and phoned the cops.

(06:10):
When they showed up, Floyd ran across a field of
corn stubble, heading for the tree line, but nine officials
opened fire. Floyd fell wounded. The officials caught up and
Purvis questioned him about the Kansas City massacre, but Floyd
refused to talk, and in just minutes he was dead.
Floyd's funeral was massive. More than twenty thousand people showed

(06:32):
up to pay their respects or gawk, as the case
may be. In the years after his death, the legend
of pretty Boy Floyd continued to grow. Like many outlaws,
he developed a reputation as a robin hood of sorts
who would destroy mortgage documents whenever he robbed a bank, and,
as is the case with most other alleged robin hoods,
this generosity has never been proven, but that hasn't diminished

(06:56):
his fame nor his reputation. Today's episode is based on
the article how pretty Boy Floyd became the FBI's Public
Enemy Number One on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by a
Scene Quran. Brain Stuff It's production of iHeartRadio in partnership
with how Stuffworks dot Com, and it is produced by
Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the

(07:18):
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