Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [14]
On Thursday evening, June 8, 1933, an Oklahoma schoolteacher named Joe Hudiberg finished a poker game in the kitchen of his white frame house outside the town of Cromwell. Hudiberg walked into the warm evening air and stretched. As his friends stepped to their cars, he ambled down to his garage and padlocked the doors.
Locked inside the garage was Hudiberg’s prized black Pontiac—and Pretty Boy Floyd, who had come to steal it. In the darkness, Floyd cursed. This was the way his luck had been going for months now. Charley Floyd— no one but the newspapers called him “Pretty Boy”—was twenty-nine years old that summer evening. He was only five-feet-eight; his shoulders and upper arms were thick and powerful, his face moony and flat. He resembled a young Babe Ruth. Floyd’s eyes were gray and he kept his hair slicked back with a thin part down the left side. Up close you could smell his hair tonic, a whiff of lilac.
Of all the criminals who rose to prominence in 1933 and 1934, Floyd was the only one who was already famous, at least in Oklahoma, where he was a hero to legions of disaffected dust bowlers. Everyone knew his story. The son of upstanding parents, he had been a restive farm boy in his hometown of Akins, working on harvest crews and the occasional burglary, until he robbed a Kroger store in St. Louis in 1925, for which he drew a five-year sentence in a Missouri prison. Paroled in 1930, Floyd moved to Kansas City and tried to go straight but was constantly rousted by police, an experience that left him with a deep sense of victimization. Teaming up with some prison pals, he relocated to Ohio but was arrested after robbing a bank. He jumped out a window on the train ride to prison and fled to Oklahoma.
In the fall of 1931, Floyd began robbing country banks in his home state in earnest, earning his first mentions in Oklahoma newspapers. But it was a crime in which he took no part that catapulted him onto the front pages. On January 2, 1932, two ex-convicts ambushed and killed six peace officers in a shoot-out near Springfield, Missouri, in what remains the largest such massacre in American history. An Associated Press dispatch carried speculation that Floyd was involved, and Oklahoma newspapers leaned heavily on the local angle.
It was the spark that fired the Floyd legend. Floyd, wrote the Muskogee Daily Phoenix, now “steps into the rank of real ‘bad hombres’ with the questionable honor of [killing] 11 men, all officers, to his credit. The exploits of Billy the Kid . . . pale before the cool, monotonous killings of the fair haired ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, who has introduced the submachine gun and the armored vest to the Oklahoma bad men.” The notion of a modern-day Billy the Kid was too appealing for the newspapers to ignore. In January 1932 alone Floyd was identified as robbing banks in three separate towns, only one of which he probably robbed. It didn’t matter. The Daily Oklahoman called for mobilization of the National Guard; on January 14 insurance rates on rural Oklahoma banks were doubled, a move blamed directly on Floyd. Governor William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray announced a $1,000 reward for his capture.
It was a classic case of media hysteria, of hype that would shape reality that would in turn create a legend. Every morning that winter brought a story of Floyd’s exploits, a bank robbed, a supposed sighting, speculation where he might strike next. Lawmen combed eastern Oklahoma in a futile manhunt. Floyd understood the situation