Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [258]
“Sorry, buddy,” Peterson said.
“That’s all right,” Floyd said.
He turned to the teenager, George McMillen, and offered him the ten dollars. “Will you take me?” Floyd asked.
“I will,” McMillen said, taking Floyd’s money.
Once in McMillen’s Ford, Floyd said to stick to the back roads.
“I suppose you know who I am,” Floyd said at one point.
“Don’t believe I do,” McMillen said.
“My name’s Floyd. Pretty Boy Floyd.”
McMillen stared.
“The radios are flashing it all over the country, the papers are full of it,” Floyd said.
“I don’t know [anything about] it,” McMillen said. “I’m just back from Cannon’s Mill and haven’t been readin’ the papers except the funnies or to look through the paper for a job.”
Five minutes later McMillen’s car stalled. Above the road was a set of greenhouses owned by a florist named James H. Baum. Baum sold his flowers at his shop in Wellsville; his biggest customer was the local funeral home. He and a friend were stacking lumber when Floyd and McMillen walked up his driveway. “How about some gas?” Floyd asked, motioning down to the stalled Model T. “I’ll pay you for it.”
“I haven’t any gas,” Baum said.
Floyd eyed Baum’s Nash sedan. “How about draining some out of your car?”
Baum shook his head. “Can’t get it out,” he said.
Floyd asked if Baum would take them to a gas station, and Baum agreed. McMillen went, too. Climbing into Baum’s Nash, Floyd pulled his gun. “Now, Dad,” he told Baum, “I want you to do just what I say.”
He told Baum to drive north toward Youngstown, keeping to the back roads. They bumped along muddy dirt tracks for nearly two hours, eventually reaching the highway ten miles north. Just as they gained speed, they spied a roadblock. Two deputies had placed a railroad car across the road. A long line of automobiles was waiting to pass.
At the roadblock, Deputies George Hayes and Charley Patterson watched the Nash stop and turn around. It looked suspicious. “Let’s go,” Hayes told Patterson. The two men hopped into their car and tried to give chase, but were slowed by the snarl of stopped cars.
Ahead, in the Nash, Floyd peered through the back window. “Here comes someone,” he said to Baum. “Step on it.” The mouth of a hilly dirt road—so swaybacked locals called it “Roller Coast Road”—opened to the left, and Floyd told Baum to turn onto it. The Nash roared into the little road and sped east into the woods north of East Liverpool. The deputies followed. A half mile down Roller Coast Road, they began honking their horn. At that point, James Baum decided he had had enough and stopped the car. The deputies’ car stopped about fifty yards behind it. From the backseat, Floyd rose and fired. His shot blew out the back window of the Nash, then struck the deputies’ windshield. The deputies ducked as Floyd scrambled out of the car and ran into the woods.
By nightfall Columbiana County was in an uproar. Farmers in black armbands, signifying their status in the gathering posse, spilled into Wellsville, milling around the riverside jail complex. Inside, Chief Fultz tried to question Adam Richetti. Locked in a cell, Richetti gave his name as Richard Zamboni. He said his partner was a Toledo gambler; inexplicably George McMillen had told no one that the “gambler” had identified himself as Pretty Boy Floyd.
Sunday morning the manhunt for the missing “gambler” continued. An overnight rain had erased any footprints Floyd left. He had disappeared into the wildest area of Columbiana County, a dim maze of steep wooded hillsides that lined Little Beaver Creek. Around one o’clock Sunday afternoon, Ray B. Long, the sheriff in Steubenville, Ohio, arrived in Wellsville to join the posse. Shown into the jail, he recognized Richetti from a Wanted poster. “That’s Adam Richetti,” he told Fultz. “He’s wanted in the Kansas City Massacre.” He called Richetti by his name, and Richetti admitted who he was.
Sheriff Long said they had to call the FBI. Fultz objected; he was enjoying his