Infamous America - PRETTY BOY FLOYD Ep. 5 | “Kansas City Changed Everything”

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Charles Floyd enters the most tumultuous part of his career. He loses a partner during a disastrous bank robbery and then gains a new one. But Floyd and his new partner are quickly accused of one of the pivotal acts of violence of the Gangster Era: the Kansas City Massacre. When the brazen daylight assassination makes headlines across the country, Floyd and his partner become two of the most wanted men in America. Check out the Jordan Harbinger show today! jordanharbinger.com/start Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join To advertise on this podcast, please email [e-mail] For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please visit AirwaveMedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World, Once Upon A Crime, and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank Nash woke up as the train pulled into Union Station. His wrists were sore from his handcuffs. He had bruises on his ribs and a knot on his head from when two bureau agents took him into custody. Now, as the train pulled into Kansas City early in the morning, Nash was just one stop away from returning to Leavenworth Prison. He'd been captured in Arkansas by the two agents and a police chief from Oklahoma, and now the three lawmen marched him off the train. They were joined by four more lawmen and the group of eight walked through the station.

The original plan was to take another short train ride to Leavenworth, but now they were going to drive instead. The group stopped near the exit and one of the lawmen stepped outside and looked around. Everything seemed normal. One of the agents tugged Nash's arm and they walked through the doors, down the steps, and across a parking lot. The lawmen picked up the pace now that they were out in the open. They approached two cars, an unmarked sedan and a Kansas City police cruiser.

The agents ushered Nash over to the sedan and pushed him into the backseat. Then they decided to change the seating arrangements. Right after the cops and the criminal shuffled to their new spots, they heard a voice yell, hands up, hands up. Then the shooting started. People in the parking lot probably screamed, but they would have been and impossible to hear over the roar of the shotguns and the Tommy guns. Frank Nash screamed as well,

but it's impossible to know if he was heard, or even if he was, if it would have mattered. Nash reportedly shouted, for God's sake, don't kill me. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the story of 1930s bank robber, Pretty Boy Floyd. This is episode five.

Kansas City changed everything. November 1932 began with the election of President Roosevelt and Charles Floyd's interview with Oklahoma journalist Vivian Brown. It ended with more upheaval in Floyd's life. His partner, George Birdwell, did something that still puzzles historians. He tried to rob a bank without Pretty Boy Floyd. Late in the month, Birdwell partnered with a man named C.C. Patterson to hit the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Bowley, Oklahoma.

It was the classic setup for a Floyd robbery, a small town bank in a rural setting. Bowley is about an hour east of Oklahoma City and about two hours west of Floyd's hometown of Aiken's. Floyd wasn't part of this robbery, but it was the same strategy, though with a drastically different result. Without Floyd's combination of calm demeanor and likable personality, the robbery went wrong. Birdwell and Patterson stormed into the bank, trained their weapons, on the employees and the customers and demanded the money. After making the demand, Birdwell shot the bank president because he suspected the man had triggered a silent alarm. The employees packed up some money and gave it to Birdwell. But in the commotion, an employee was able to grab a rifle

from the vault, take aim, and fire at Birdwell. Birdwell crumpled to the ground and dropped the money. He was gravely wounded, and Patterson decided it was time to leave. Patterson ordered the employees to carry Birdwell outside. As the little group moved out onto the sidewalk, cops and armed locals arrived. The employees dropped Birdwell and ran back inside, and Patterson and the cops opened fire. A getaway driver waited in a car on the street.

When the shooting started, he stomped on the gas and tried to escape, but he was shot dead through the windshield. Then Patterson was shot and crashed to the ground near Birdwell. When the cops closed in, George Birdwell was beyond help. He bled out on the street outside the bank. C.C. Patterson was arrested and charged with robbery, but doctors did not expect him to survive his injuries. Patterson did survive, though information about him is scarce after that point.

Presumably he went to prison for quite a while. The bank employee who killed George Birdwell received a $500 reward from the Oklahoma Bankers Association. and now the people of Bowley worried their town might be visited by a vengeful pretty boy Floyd. But they worried for nothing. George Birdwell was laid to rest, and newspapers reported that Floyd's wife Ruby was in attendance. Legend has it Floyd attended as well, disguised as a woman, though that's pretty hard to believe. Even though newspapers were notoriously unreliable, it's definitely possible that Ruby went to Birdwell's funeral. No one knows why Birdwell tried to rob a bank without Pretty Boy Floyd, but one of the theories revolves around Ruby.

Birdwell was incredibly loyal to Charles Floyd, but Floyd believed a bully bank robbery was too risky. So if Birdwell did it anyway, it's possible that he did it to make money to help Ruby with some medical bills that had accumulated. It's even possible that Birdwell robbed the bank as a distraction to draw some of the heat off Floyd so Floyd could visit his. his ex-wife. That one might be a little far-fetched, but newspapers certainly speculated about it in the days after the robbery, and it's not out of the realm of possibility. But there were other less notable possibilities as well. Some people suggested that Floyd grew weary of Birdwell's drinking, and the partnership was falling apart. Along the same lines, some believe that Birdwell grew weary of Floyd's relationship with Bula Baird, a relationship that caused Floyd's

to neglect his ex-wife and child. So there are some competing and conflicting theories, but one thing that was obviously certain was that Pretty Boy Floyd needed a new partner. Aside from one small bank job in January 1933, Floyd paused his crime spree. There's some evidence in later years that maybe Pretty Boy Floyd was reevaluating his life.

His loyal friend had just been killed. Floyd had lost multiple friends and accomplices in the past couple years. years. He'd been in multiple shootouts with police and had killed Sheriff Irv Kelly. He'd been forced to jump from a moving train to avoid a long prison sentence. He was wanted for dozens of crimes all over the Midwest and Southern Plains. Maybe he was thinking about retirement. Or maybe he was just thinking that he was going to continue to live fast and then die young. He laid low for the first half of 1933, but spent Mother's Day with his mother Mamie.

Years later, she said that when Charles returned home on that trip, they visited his father's grave. Charles picked out a plot of land next to his father and said, Right there is where you can put me. I expect to go down with lead in me, perhaps sooner than later. As the summer of 1933 approached, two sets of people were on a collision course. One set was a gangster named Frank Nash and the federal agents and local police officers who were trying to take him to jail. The other set was Charles Floyd and his new partner, Adam Roshetti. Roshetti was five years younger than Floyd and had a reputation for being tough and aggressive.

Rishetti was smaller than Floyd and always ready to prove something to a doubter. Like Floyd, Roshetti had seen the inside of a jail cell by the age of 21. And also like Floyd, Rishetti was attracted to a Baird's sister. When Rishetti teamed up with Floyd, that brought him into the end of the jail cell by the age of the orbit of Bula Baird's sister Rose. Roshetti and Rose struck up a romance almost immediately, and according to one author, it was probably a rendezvous with the Baird sisters that took the two bank robbers to Kansas City on June 16th. But on the way, there was a problem in Bolivar. Bolivar, Missouri is about 120 miles south of Kansas City. Somewhere outside town, Floyd and Roshetti's

Pontiac broke down. A farmer passed by. and did the outlaws a favor. He offered to tow their car into town. So Floyd and Rishetti hopped into the back of the farmer's truck and rode into Bolivar. By a stroke of luck, Roshetti's brother Joe was a mechanic in Bolivar. The farmer dropped the Pontiac and the two bank robbers at Joe's garage. Joe met them and got to work on the car. While Floyd made small talk with the locals, Rishetti stewed. He had already had several healthy poles of whiskey that morning. By chance, the town sheriff, Jack Killingsworth, strolled into the garage. The sheriff wasn't carrying his gun, but when Roshetti saw him, he panicked and drew his weapon.

Rishetti waved the gun at the sheriff and the other people in the garage and forced them to line up against the wall. Rishetti's lack of composure had turned this simple pit stop into a fiasco. The robbers grabbed their weapons from the Pontiac and transferred them to the sheriff's car. Then they loaded the sheriff into his own car and tore out of town. They narrowly avoided a high-speed shootout with a police cruiser that raced up behind them. Roshetti was about to open fire when the sheriff waved his hat out the window. The pursuers got the point and backed off. As the trio drove north toward Kansas City, they stopped a motorist named Walter Griffith. The outlaws and the sheriff piled into Griffith's car, kept Griffith as a second hostage,

and took off again. They arrived in Kansas City after nightfall. They called someone, most likely Bula, and after a short wait, another car arrived. The outlaws transferred their weapons from Griffith's car to the new car and then instructed the hostages to drive back to Bolivar. If the hostages had to stop along the way,

they should tell no one about their adventure and make no phone calls. Griffith and Sheriff Killingsworth said they understood, and Floyd and Roshetti disappeared into the night. Two days later, newspapers across the region printed Killingsworth's account of the dash across Missouri. Much like Vivian Brown's interviews, the sheriff's reflections helped shape and reinforce

the myths of Pretty Boy Floyd. Killingsworth called Floyd, a right nice fellow, and said, he would kill a man, but not unless he had to, but I don't think any 10 men could capture him alive. Killing'sworth also added that he didn't think Floyd had anything to do with the recent mayhem in Kansas City. That mayhem was one of the pivotal events of the gangster era. It pushed J. Edgar Hoover to give his federal agents the freedom to do almost anything to bring down outlaws like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.

And the brazen, ruthless acts of violence in Kansas City vaulted Floyd into the unofficial spot of public enemy number two, right behind Dillinger. though Floyd's participation in the Kansas City Massacre is one of the great mysteries of the era. At the center of what was to come was Frank Nash. Floyd and Nash might have crossed paths at the very beginning of Floyd's outlaw career, when Floyd might have been running moonshine for John Callahan in Wichita, Kansas. Frank Nash's criminal record is the stuff of underworld lore. A felon since 1913, Nash had cracked safes, and robbed banks all across the plains.

He had joined Al Spencer's gang in the early 1920s and escaped the gun battle that killed Spencer. He ran with the Barker family and knocked over banks with Alvin Creepy Carpus. But his run seemed to end when he was arrested and sentenced to 25 years at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. After six years inside,

he'd earned enough trust to be allowed to run errands outside the prison. In October 1930, he left to run an errand and never went back. He was officially an escapee and a fugitive from justice, and in June of 1933, three years of freedom abruptly ended. Nash was vacationing or hiding out in the resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Guests of the city's hotels and spas ran the gamut. It was not unheard of for a state governor, a Hollywood star,

a heavyweight champ and a mob boss to share the same sauna. It was also common knowledge that local law enforcement made a rule of protecting the balance, assuming they got their cut. On June 16, Nash was at a cigar shop that was run by the mob when he suddenly found himself surrounded by three armed men. Nash was certain they were there to kill him, but they weren't hitmen. Two were agents with the Bureau of Investigation, Joe Lackey, and Frank. Frank Smith and the other was Otto Reed, a police chief from Oklahoma.

A bureau report from the event states that Nash was strongly entrenched with the local police department in Hot Springs. So basically, Nash was paying the local cops to keep his presence a secret. But the bureau had tracked him down and quietly captured him, so it was not to alert the local police. Now Frank Nash was going back to prison. But the agents knew that word of Frank's arrest would travel fast. As they raced out of town, they organized a plan with the bureau headquarters in the region. They would hurry to Fort Smith, Arkansas, and board a night train to Kansas City. In Kansas City the next morning, they would rendezvous with additional lawmen to bolster their strength. Then they would all take a quick train trip up to Leavenworth.

Overnight, the plan had to change. There would be an hour layover in Kansas City before the train left for Leavenworth. Waiting for even one hour was too dangerous. It was decided that the team would pile into cars immediately upon arrival in Kansas City and drive to Leavenworth. The ride should take less than an hour. When the train arrived in Kansas City, a group of seven lawmen, four bureau agents, two local cops, and the police chief from Oklahoma hustled Frank Nash through Union Station. They made it out to the parking lot where an unmarked bureau sedan and a Kansas City police car waited. Agent Frank Smith, Agent Joe Lackey, and police chief Otto Reed crammed into the backseat of the sedan.

Frank Nash slid into the front seat, and that was when someone shouted at the group, and the shooting started. Three gunmen opened fire with Tommy guns and shotguns. Kansas City officer Bill Grooms returned fire at the man who shouted, but Grooms was cut down. immediately. Officer Frank Hermanson also died in the first volley. They were outside the vehicles and vulnerable, and so was Agent Ray Caffrey. He was about to get in behind the wheel of the sedan when the gunshots threw him against the car and knocked him to the ground. He died a short time later on the way to the hospital, and being inside a car was almost as bad as being outside. The assassins raked the sedan and tore it to shreds. In the

In the front seat, Frank Nash yelled at the gunman to spare him, but he was riddled with bullets. In the backseat, agents Lackey and Smith dropped down to the floorboards. They were wounded, but managed to survive. Police Chief Otto Reed wasn't so lucky. He was trapped between the two agents and died at the scene. That left only Agent R.E. Vetterly alive and mobile. When the shooting started, he ducked behind a car and sprinted to the train. train station to call for help. But by the time reinforcements arrived, the shooting had long

since stopped and the killers had escaped. The parking lot was carnage. Two police officers were dead. A bureau agent was dead. An Oklahoma police chief was dead. And Frank Nash was dead. The barrage may have lasted less than a minute, but the impact was enormous, even beyond the physical damage and the loss of life. The Kansas City Massacre, as it was about to be called, changed the status of Pretty Boy Floyd and changed J. Edgar Hoover's philosophy of how to fight criminals who are willing and able to do something like that.

The aftermath of the Kansas City Massacre was Bedlam. Before the bodies of the four dead lawmen and Frank Nash were cold, the scene outside Union Station was a media circus and a forensics nightmare. Hundreds of onlookers, reporters, and photographers trampled the sight of the shootout, while city police and arriving reinforcements from the bureau canvassed the area to try to understand exactly what happened. Some witnesses said four gunmen, but most agreed it was three, had surprised the lawmen and the criminal. Witnesses thought the gunfire lasted less than 30 seconds, and then the shooters fled in an automobile. The current location of the gunman

was unknown, and so were their identities. And that was the part that was about to impact Charles Floyd. When the news broke that Floyd and his partner Roshetti had kidnapped a Missouri sheriff and then hijacked a motorist and then driven to Kansas City the night before the massacre, it was an easy step to speculate that pretty boy Floyd led the attack at Union Station. The stories of the massacre almost immediately featured Floyd as a suspect. authorities and newspapers knew he was in Kansas City that day from the firsthand reports of Sheriff Killing'sworth. The sensationalism of the terrifying act

was only made better by linking it to the notorious outlaw. And it wasn't totally out of the realm of possibility, despite Floyd's likable personality and Robin Hood image in Oklahoma. He had been in multiple shootouts with law enforcement and had killed Sheriff Irv Kelly. So maybe the speculation wasn't coming. completely out of line. But for what it was worth, all of Floyd's shootouts with the law were at times when he was on the verge of being caught. He decided that shooting his way out

was the only option. He had never participated in a pure assassination like the Kansas City massacre. With the possibility still on the board, witnesses began trying to identify the killers. A salesman in the station picked out the pictures of Harvey Bailey and Mad Dog Wilbur, Underhill. Bailey was one of the most prolific bank robbers of the 20th century, and Underhill was a robber and killer who was known as the tri-state terror. Bailey and Underhill were recent partners after Underhill had escaped from prison with the help of Frank Nash. Another witness believed, but wasn't sure, that one of the gunmen was a notorious local criminal named Vern Miller. Agent Smith and Lacky hadn't gotten a good look before they ducked down to the floorboards of the car

so they couldn't help with the identifications. It was Lottie West, a social worker for the local Travelers' Aid Society who pinned the crime on Pretty Boy Floyd. When she spoke to the police, she described a man who was much larger than Charles Floyd. But when she was shown a picture of Floyd, she was certain that he was one of the shooters. While not completely reliable, the media ran with her story. Because of the discrepancy, many in law enforcement were skeptical. Floyd was certainly capable of violence under the right circumstances, but an assassin for hire didn't seem to fit his persona,

and Floyd himself was quick to deny responsibility. Three days after the massacre, the chief of detectives for the Kansas City Police Department received a handwritten postcard. Experts compared the writing to the veiled threat that had been sent to the governor of Oklahoma the previous year, probably by Charles Floyd.

The writing was a match. The postcard read, Dear Sirs, I, Charles Floyd, want it made known that I did not participate in the massacre of officers in Kansas City. Floyd signed it with his name

and the card was postmarked Springfield, Missouri. That was 200 miles from Kansas City, but in truth, Charles had run much farther. Charles Floyd and his wingman Adam Rischetti were out of sight in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Some who believed Floyd was a trigger man claimed he had been shot by one of the officers, so his absence from the headlines wasn't just to lay low, it was to recover also. But whether or not they were two of the gunmen, Floyd and Roshetti made a prompt exit from Kansas City, possibly within 24 hours of the massacre. After Floyd was quickly linked to the crime,

it was an easy decision to run. They couldn't go to Oklahoma. Floyd's home state would be crawling with cops. It's believed they roamed the Midwest for a few months and then moved farther east. They brought the Baird sisters with them, Bula and Rose, and the foursome eventually settled in Buffalo, New York. They rented an apartment, and the two outlaws rarely left during the day. The group looked like two married couples, and they called themselves the Sanders and the Brennan's. Even though they stayed out of the spotlight for the second half of 1933, J. Edgar Hoover didn't forget about Pretty Boy Floyd. He just had more pressing matters at the moment. John Dillinger was public enemy number one. And even though he was the most

prominent, he was just one of hundreds of criminals who were on the loose in the heartland. Many were heavily armed and fearless. Hoover's young bureau was at an early crossroads, and now he had to make a decision. He seemed to embrace the classic language of the Old West wanted posters that had featured the name of Floyd's boyhood idol, Jesse James. Outlaws like Jesse James were wanted, dead or alive. In previous years, Hoover wouldn't allow his agents to carry guns. They were supposed to be well-dressed, well-groomed investigators who only assisted local lawmen in making arrests. They weren't door kickers, to use a modern expression. But that changed in the wake of Kansas City. Shortly after the massacre, Hoover sent a telegram to a reliable agent in San Antonio,

Texas, and asked him to use every available resource to catch the killers. The agent responded by saying, with what? P-shooters? In three words, the agent made the problem plain and simple. The criminals were armed to the teeth with rifles and shotguns and now machine guns. Agents couldn't fight them with six-shot revolvers. Hoover reportedly changed his policy that very day. He instructed his agents to grab any weapon available and learn how to use it fast. One week later, the Bureau of Investigation bought its first two Tommy guns.

The agents were going to fight fire with fire, and Hoover made his new mandate clear. He said of the gangsters, they must be exterminated, and they must be exterminated by us. And the agents had plenty of work ahead of them. John Dillinger seemed unstoppable. He and his gang marched all over the Upper Midwest, robbing banks, killing people, and staging elaborate prison breaks. Dillinger was the first person to earn the soon-to-be legendary title of Public Enemy Number One on a federal level. Al Capone was called Public Enemy Number One four years earlier by local authorities in Chicago. But Dillinger was first on the Bureau's list.

And the second half of 1933 didn't belong solely to Dillinger. George Barnes, more colorfully known as Machine Gun Kelly, kidnapped an oil tycoon in Oklahoma. Kelly and his gang successfully ransomed the man for $200,000, but that was the end of Kelly's career. Two months later, he was arrested by the Bureau. During the raid, the Bureau claimed that Kelly shouted, Don't shoot G-Men, and thus coined the famous nickname for FBI agents.

Over the course of that year, from the summer of 1933, when the Kansas City massacre happened to the summer of 1934, lawmen on every level, federal, state, and local, took down celebrity outlaws and small-time crooks alike. Machine Gun Kelly joined Al Capone at Alcatraz Prison. Harvey Bailey, who was suspected as one of the Kansas City gunmen, was caught and sent to Alcatraz also. Wilbur Underhill, another suspected gunman, was killed in a shootout with a federal task force.

Vern Miller, a third Kansas City suspect, was found dead in a ditch in Michigan, though that was a gang hit and not the work of police. Johnny Lotzia, the crime boss in Kansas City, was gunned down in a brutal shooting that featured an interesting twist. Bullet casings from his murder matched the weapons that were used in the Kansas City massacre. All things considered, it was probably more likely that members of the local Kansas City crime world committed the massacre. But it was still that event that kept Pretty Boy Floyd

in the crosshairs of J. Edgar Hoover. And by the summer of 1934, Charles Floyd, who had just turned 30 years old, would be the most wanted man in the country and the new public enemy number one. Next time on Infamous America, Charles Floyd emerges from hiding, and a simple drive from Buffalo to Ohio

turns into a disaster that leads to the final hours of the life of Pretty Boy Floyd. That's next week on the season finale, you're on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge

all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This season was researched and written by Jamie Lyko, original music by Rob Valier. I'm your co-writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer.

Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and V-Barrell media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, Once Upon a Crime, and many more. Thanks for listening.