Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [238]
Talks with Comstock went on for one week, then two, as he sought information about reward monies and state charges Floyd faced in Ohio. Hoover grew impatient. “[T]his matter must be pressed, and pressed vigorously,” Hoover wrote Cowley on May 31. “This matter has now dragged along for several weeks, and we don’t seem to be any nearer toward the getting hold of Floyd than we were when the original negotiations were entered into.”10 Brantley stayed in contact with Comstock for two more weeks but eventually came to believe the attorney’s only contact had been Ruby Floyd, not her husband. Comstock “impresses me as being silly, inane and bordering on senility,” Brantley wrote Hoover on June 15. “[I]t is my best judgment that it is a waste of time, effort and money to deal with him further.”11
An ensuing set of negotiations, this time with a flamboyant Texas minister named J. Frank Norris, at first seemed a little more promising. Norris, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, was a fire-breathing radio preacher with a past—tried and acquitted of murder at one point, accused of burning his own church at another. Ruby Floyd was one of his listeners, and on Father’s Day, June 17, she arranged to have her son, Jackie, baptized at his church. The ceremony was broadcast before an audience of five thousand on Norris’s radio show; a four-minute film of the baptism was incorporated into Ruby’s vaudeville show, which was booked at Fort Worth’s Palace Theatre. Agents shadowed Ruby and her entourage throughout her ten-day stay in Fort Worth.
Afterward Norris telephoned the Dallas SAC, Frank Blake, and offered to negotiate Floyd’s surrender. Hoover, skeptical after the Comstock episode, took a hard line. “I told Mr. Blake I felt we would have to take the attitude that we will agree not to kill Floyd” if he surrenders, Hoover wrote in a memo June 23. “I suggested, in this connection, that [Blake] make it clear that orders are out to kill Floyd on sight, and if he doesn’t surrender in short time, he will no doubt be killed by our men.”12 The same day, Hoover ordered Pop Nathan to concentrate exclusively on Floyd’s capture. “I think the time has come . . . when we should definitely concentrate upon the handling of this case,” Hoover wrote Nathan, adding in a separate memo, “we are going to kill him if we catch him.”13
Ruby’s run at the Palace Theatre ended on June 27 and she returned to Oklahoma. But the Reverend Norris would not give up. He pleaded with Pop Nathan to let him take an agent to Oklahoma to meet with Floyd’s mother. To the surprise of almost everyone at the Bureau, Norris was as good as his word, and on July 10 an agent accompanied the reverend to a meeting with Mrs. Floyd and Pretty Boy’s siblings. The scene devolved into a gripe session, with his family insisting Floyd had been hounded by police into a life of crime. Still, it represented the first time in nearly a year of investigation the Bureau was able to assemble the names and addresses of Floyd’s immediate relatives.
They were getting nowhere. Though agents combed the towns of eastern Oklahoma and northern Arkansas for months, there hadn’t been a confirmed sighting of Floyd since the previous summer. By July, four months after identifying Richetti’s fingerprint and a year after the massacre itself, the Bureau had a tentative theory of the case—that Floyd and Richetti had somehow teamed with Verne Miller—but other than a single fingerprint, they had no evidence to back it up. They talked to dozens of informants who claimed to know Miller or Floyd, but none produced anything suggesting the two outlaws knew each other.
The mystery of the massacre began to unravel only on July 10, when the Kansas City Mob boss Johnny Lazia was shot down as he stepped from his car outside the Park Central Hotel. The killing initially