Floyd, Pretty Boy

▪ American gangster

byname of  Charles Arthur Floyd  

born Feb. 3, 1904, Bartow County, Ga., U.S.

died Oct. 22, 1934, near East Liverpool, Ohio

      American gunman whose run-ins with police and violent bank robberies made newspaper headlines.

      In 1911 Floyd moved with his family to Oklahoma, eventually settling in Akins. Originally a farmer, he was drawn into crime by the poverty of the Dust Bowl. After serving a term in prison (1925–29) for a payroll robbery, Floyd mixed with gangsters in Kansas City, Missouri, and adopted the machine gun as his professional trademark. He teamed up with others to rob banks in Ohio (where he was captured in 1930, but subsequently escaped), Michigan, and Kentucky. After nearly being apprehended by the police in 1931, Floyd returned to Oklahoma, where he was protected by the locals who called him “the Robin Hood of the Cookson Hills” for his destruction of mortgage papers during bank robberies. Floyd's criminal activities continued, and in 1933 he was accused of participating in the Union Station massacre, in which three police officers, an FBI agent, and a prisoner were killed. Though Floyd denied involvement in the incident, authorities intensified efforts to capture him, and the following year he was gunned down by FBI agents who were pursuing him in an Ohio field. There has been some speculation that Floyd was initially just wounded, and it was only after refusing to answer questions that he was fatally shot by a federal agent.

Additional Reading

Biographical studies include Michael Wallis, Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd (1992); and Jeffrey S. King, The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd (1998). Allegations that Floyd was framed for the Union Station incident are detailed in Robert Unger, The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI (1997).

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