Pretty boy Floyd

This article is about the criminal Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd; for the band named after him, see Pretty Boy Floyd (band) .

Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd (born February 3, 1904 in Adairsville , Georgia , † October 22, 1934 in Clarkson , Ohio ) was an American criminal. Floyd, who got his nickname for his good looks, was best known for a series of high-profile bank robberies and murders in the 1930s. Today he is best known for the romanticization of his deeds in numerous films and for the folkloric song Pretty Boy Floyd by Woody Guthrie .

Live and act

Pretty Boy Floyd (around 1930)

Charles Arthur Floyd grew up as one of seven children in a farming family in Adairsville, Georgia. At the age of ten, he and his family moved to the Cookson Hills, Oklahoma. In 1921, at the age of seventeen, he married Lee (Ruby, according to other sources) Hargrove. The marriage had a son, Jack Dempsy Floyd.

A popular legend has it that Floyd was originally involuntarily forced into the criminal milieu after he assaulted a sheriff's assistant who was rude to his wife. According to historical sources, his motive for becoming a criminal was simply financial hardship.

After various minor thefts, Floyd was first arrested on September 16, 1925 in St. Louis, Missouri, while attempting to steal wage packets, and sentenced to five years in prison.

After his release, he teamed up with several other criminals in Kansas City with whom he committed a number of bank robberies over the next few years. During this time, Floyd was nicknamed Pretty Boy by the press for his good looks, which is where he became famous. The name probably goes back to the testimony of a paymaster who had been robbed by Floyd, who described the perpetrator to the police as a pretty boy with apple cheeks (a handsome guy with apple-cheeked cheeks).

In Sylvania, Ohio, Floyd's gang was finally arrested during a bank robbery. On November 24, 1930, Floyd was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. However, he managed to escape during the transport to the prison by throwing himself out of a window of the transport vehicle. Back in freedom he was able to rebuild his gang.

In the years that followed, Floyd was blamed for a long line of bank robberies. It remains unclear how many of these actually went to his account and which were wrongly attributed to him. The FBI meanwhile elevated him to the status of a Public Enemy, an enemy of the state.

Between his actions, Floyd stayed in towns near his childhood town, where he was kept hidden by locals. According to legend, his helpers acted out of appreciation for his generosity and because of their hatred of the big banks, which at the time were seizing the farms of numerous insolvent farmers. It is more likely, however, that Floyd simply bribed his helpers to his side.

In 1931 Floyd was involved in numerous murders: in March, his gang shot alcohol smugglers Willy and Bob Ash near Kansas City; in April, he killed policeman Ralph Castner in Bowling Green, Ohio, who tried to arrest him during a bank robbery. and in July he shot dead ATF agent Curtis Burke in Kansas City.

Together with his partner George Birdwell, Floyd raided banks in Earlsboro, Konawa, Maud, Marble City, Morris, Shamrock, Tahlequah and, on December 12, 1931, even two banks in one day, in Castle and Paden, Oklahoma. The state governor then offered Floyd a reward of $ 56,000 and set up a special commission.

On April 3, 1932, Floyd and Birdwell were caught in a shootout with police officers in Bixby. Floyd was injured in both legs and scrotum in the exchange of fire from the retired Sheriff Erv Kelley, who was reactivated specifically for the hunt for Floyd, while Kelley was hit and killed seven times by Floyd. The rest of the police command (Agent Crockett Long of the State Bureau of Investigation, Sheriff Jim Stormont of Okmulgee, Police officers ML Lairmore and JA Smith, ex-Sheriff's deputy Will Counts, and private investigator AB Cooper) were unharmed while Floyd and Birdwell escaped.

The death of the popular sheriff, who was reputed to have hunted down more criminals than any other official in Oklahoma history, sparked a public opinion that was beginning to decline sympathy for Floyd.

When on June 17, 1933, four police officers and an FBI man died in a firefight between the police and unknown criminals in Kansas City, in which Floyd is said to have been involved (although this has not been proven with absolute certainty), FBI commissioned Chef J. Edgar Hoover tells agent Melvin Purvis to devote himself exclusively to the hunt for Floyd and to bring him down at any cost. After the death of John Dillinger , Floyd was declared New Public Enemy No. 1 by the FBI; H. placed on the first rank of the wanted list of the investigative authorities. The bounty on him at the time was $ 23,000.

The attack on the Tiltonsville Peoples Bank committed by Floyd and his accomplice Adam Richetti on October 19, 1934 put investigators on his trail. While Richetti was caught soon after, Floyd avoided arrest by taking a hostage and escaping in an automobile.

A task force led by Purvis was finally able to locate Floyd on October 22, 1934 on the Conkle family farm near East Liverpool, Ohio. When Floyd, who had pretended to be a stray hunter to his hosts in order to get a meal, tried to flee on foot from the approaching officers, they opened fire and met his arm first, then after he was told to stand to stay, still ignored, at the shoulder. He died a few minutes later, around 4:00 am, while Purvis telephoned Hoover to inform him of his success.

Contrary to the wishes of his mother, whose telegram was delayed by the authorities, Floyd was publicly laid out by the local police in the Sturgis Funeral Home (a funeral home), so that more than ten thousand curious people had the opportunity to meet the notorious criminals in person see, did not want to be missed, could parade past his coffin like a procession before it was removed. Shortly afterwards, the body was transferred to Oklahoma, where he was buried in Akins Cemetery in Salisaw.

In 1993 the East Liverpool Historical Society and the Ohio Historical Society made the place between the villages of East Liverpool and Rogers, where Floyd was shot, identified with a commemorative plaque as part of a joint project.

Floyd in American pop culture

Pretty Boy Floyd went down in American folklore soon after his death.

The beginning of this development was laid by the singer Woody Guthrie, who released the song Pretty Boy Floyd in March 1939 , which tells Floyd's life in transfigured colors. The lyrics of the song praises Floyd's generosity to the poor and raises the question of whether robbery is a more honest form of crime than financial practices ( "Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen . " ). Guthrie's song was later covered by countless country and folk music artists: Bob Dylan , the Byrds (album Sweetheart of the Rodeo ), Guthrie's son Arlo Guthrie (album Precious Friend with Pete Seger), James Taylor , Joan Baez and Jimmy Faulkner . In addition, an American and a Canadian band leaned their names on Floyd.

With the film Pretty Boy Floyd by Herbert J. Leder from 1960, in which John Ericson played the title role, the cinematic processing of Floyd's life began. In 1970, the film A Bullet for Pretty Boy ushered in a whole series of gangster films in which Floyd's part was sometimes taken over by well-known actors: Steve Kanaly ( Dillinger ), Martin Sheen ( The Story of Pretty Boy Floyd , 1973) and Bo Hopkins ( The Kansas City Massacre , 1975). In the 2009 film Public Enemies , Floyd is played by Channing Tatum .

There is an American glam metal band called "Pretty Boy Floyd".

John Steinbeck built Floyd into his novel The Fruits of Wrath, set in the era of the Great Depression, as a case study of an allegedly innocent good boy who was driven into crime. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana published a semi-historical, semi-fictional biography of Floyd in 1994, in which he is systematically portrayed as the victim of the adverse social circumstances of his time.

The publisher Image Comics presented the mini-series Pretty, Baby, Machine in 2008 , in which Floyd experiences various adventures with Babyface Nelson and Machine Gun Kelly as a criminal trio.

The American boxing superstar Floyd Mayweather gave himself the show name "Pretty Boy" based on him and is always announced as Floyd "Pretty Boy" Mayweather before a fight.

literature

• Jeffrey King: The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd , 1998.
• Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana: Pretty Boy Floyd , slea
• Michael Wallis: Pretty Boy. The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd , New York 1992.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Pretty_Boy_Floyd.htm , the artist's official website.