Legendary gangster Pretty Boy Floyd was killed in a gun battle with law enforcement 75 years ago today. The FBI marked the anniversary with a special report on their Website.
Pretty Boy Floyd has a special place in the history of the Orange County Sheriff's Department. Seventy-five years ago last March he was the subject of the very first radio car bulletin broadcast by the Sheriff's Department. Patrol units were alerted to be on the lookout for Pretty Boy Floyd, reported in the vicinity of Anaheim.
To see a Department Blog item on the 1934 broadcast click here.
The FBI annivesary report said in part:
Law enforcement had been closing in on Floyd over the past two days. Floyd, just 30 years old, had been in trouble with the law for about a dozen years. He’d stolen money, robbed banks, and reportedly killed some ten people. But it was his participation in the so-called Kansas City Massacre—a brazen attack in June 1933 that killed four lawmen, including a Bureau agent—that brought the FBI into the chase.
Floyd had been traveling across the country in the fall of 1934 with another conspirator in the Kansas City attack—Adam Richetti, an ex-sheriff turned bad—and their two girlfriends, when the net tightened. On the wet, foggy evening of October 20, not long after the foursome had crossed into Ohio, Floyd ran their car into a telephone pole. Floyd and Richetti camped out nearby as the women went to have the car repaired. The men were eventually spotted, and law enforcement was called.
For the full FBI report click here.
For the FBI file on Pretty Boy Floyd, which shows some of the effort to locate him in California in March, 1934, click here.