Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  On May 20, 1934, a posse consisting of Deputies Bob Alcorn, Ted Hinton, ex-Texas Ranger B. M. ‘Manny’ Gault, Bienville Parish, Sheriff Henderson Jordan, Deputy Prentiss Oakley and led by retired Texas Ranger, Frank Hamer, observed the gang’s movements and lay in wait at a well used drop point for Bonnie and Clyde. They only had a few hours to wait for the two outlaws to arrive and when the infamous two showed up and stopped their car, the team opened fire on their vehicle with automatic weapons. Bonnie and Clyde were struck multiple times in all parts of their bodies. Some of the bullets travelled through the car door, through Bonnie’s body, entered Clyde and exited the vehicle on the other side. Because Bonnie and Clyde had survived so many skirmishes in the past, the police approached the bullet-riddled car with caution, but Bonnie and Clyde were slumped over dead. Bonnie was holding her weapon but neither she nor her lover had the chance to use them. The car was towed to Arcadia, Louisiana, with their bodies still inside the cabin. When the bodies of the two were autopsied, they each had in excess of sixty bullet wounds. Just after the posse gunned down Bonnie and Clyde, they searched their stolen vehicle and found multiple firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and licence plates from many different states.

  Bonnie’s mother refused to allow her daughter to be buried next to her long-time lover, and she lies at Crown Hill Memorial Park in Dallas, Texas, on the opposite side of town from Clyde’s final resting place.

  Bonnie and Clyde’s adventures inspired the 1967 film starring Fay Dunnaway as Bonnie and Warren Beatty as Clyde. The film was met by rave reviews and won critical acclaim. Today, Bonnie and Clyde’s death car is on display in a little town called Primm, at the Whiskey Peaks hotel near the State line where Nevada meets California. The car is enclosed in a glass display, along with replica artefacts from the famous adventures of these everlasting romantics. Bonnie and Clyde continue to be featured in popular culture on a regular basis and their romantic image is sure to never die. The legend lives on to this day, now almost a century after their manic, but memorable, crime spree. People visit the site of their final battle in Louisiana and every year a festival is held by enthusiasts in Gibsland in honour of their memory.

  ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd

  Charles Arthur Floyd, one of the twentieth century’s most recognised and notorious criminals, was no typical bank robber. Donning the nickname ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, he was responsible for the deaths of ten men. Like many investigations in history, many of Floyd’s actions, including his final encounter with law enforcement, are shrouded in controversy. Charles Arthur Floyd was a man with a problem with society and absolutely no idea how to express his distaste. Unlike most people who might conduct peaceful demonstrations, Floyd brought his emotions to fruition in acts of disgusting violence.

  Charles Arthur Floyd was born on February 3, 1906, in Georgia, into a large, poor farming family. His parents were constantly trying to avoid bankruptcy and in desperation turned to boot­legging to feed their family. In 1921, Floyd married Ruby Hargrove, and like many young couples they decided to find a new place to live and start their family. After numerous failed attempts to find work, Floyd decided that he would have to get money through less conventional means. It was around this time he decided to invest some of the little money he had and buy a gun.

  When Charles was eighteen years old he committed his first major offence by holding up the local post office and stealing $350 in pennies. The police immediately suspected him and he was arrested, but they had to release him because his father had given him a solid alibi. It was only a short time later that Floyd committed his second major offence, this time travelling to St Louis and robbing a supermarket. Floyd took $16,000 that was held in the store safe and fled home with his pockets overflowing with packaged bills. It was not long before the money started to burn a hole in his pocket and he purchased some very expensive items. He spent the money on anything and everything he wanted, from new clothes to expensive meals in restaurants. The police finally became suspicious when Floyd was seen driving a brand new car. They arrested Floyd on this evidence and, when they searched his home, they found the money still in wrappers. His guilt was clear and the evidence was incontrovertible. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison for the crime. After serving only three years in Jefferson City Penitentiary, Floyd was parolled. He hated prison so much, that on his release he vowed that he would never return – and he didn’t. While Floyd was in prison his wife gave birth to their son and then she divorced him.

  It was after Floyd was released from prison that he committed his first murder. The murder, though in cold blood, was not unprovoked. Floyd was given the news that his father had been killed in a shoot-out with his neighbour. The enraged Floyd took his father’s hunting rifle and went next door to claim his revenge. Their neighbour, J. Mills, did not live another day. Floyd’s anger festered and he soon became a hit man in Liverpool, Ohio. He worked jobs for bootleggers, possibly feeling by protecting them he was somehow honouring his father. His crimes became known in the criminal underworld and to law enforcement alike. Floyd moved to Kansas City, where many gangsters and other harsh criminals were known to frequent. He learned how to effectively use a machine gun, a weapon favoured by the gangsters of the time. It was also during this time that Floyd got his famous nickname ‘Pretty Boy’, a name given to him by a brothel madam by the name of Beulah Baird Ash. Although he hated the pseudonym, it stuck with him through the remainder of his career.

  Floyd committed his first bank robbery at the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Sylvania, Ohio. Floyd’s crimes continued over the next decade in the surrounding states, and he was officially blamed for the death of ten men and the robbing of as many as thirty banks. He was known for making notches in his pocket watch for every man that he killed. Floyd was never one to hide himself from his victims and never wore a mask. He was also exceptionally polite to those in the places he robbed. Floyd was always well presented and kept his hair in order by slicking it back.

  Charles Arthur Floyd first killed a police officer on April 16, 1931. The shoot-out with the police started after Floyd was shopping with William Miller who was also known as ‘Bill the Killer’, Beulah and her sister Rose. It was only after they left the shop that the police arrived. The bloody shoot-out on the city street left police officer Ralph Castner and William Miller dead, the twenty-one-year-old Beulah was injured by crossfire and Rose was captured by the police. The ever clever and resourceful Floyd escaped in a car.

  Floyd is associated with many violent crimes but few as destructive as the one remembered as the ‘Union Station Massacre’. On July 17, 1933, Floyd and his cohort Adam Richetti allegedly took part in the killing of five men. Among the slaughtered that day was an FBI agent by the name of Raymond Caffrey. The men were killed as they tried to stop Floyd from freeing underworld ganger Frank ‘Gentleman’ Nash. Floyd maintained to his dying breath that he had nothing to do with the deaths of those men or the plot to release Frank Nash and was not present for the entire affair. Because of the crimes that they committed together, especially the major Union Station incident, the entire crime fighting body of the USA was on hot pursuit of Pretty Boy Floyd and his associate Richetti. Because of the death of the notorious criminal, John Dillinger, on July 22, 1933, Floyd was promoted to the acclaim of ‘Public Enemy Number One’ on the FBI most wanted list. The establishment put a reward on his head of $23,000 for his capture – dead or alive.

  The end was near for Floyd, even he was not invincible, although so far the police had been unable to keep him locked up. On October 19, 1934, after robbing a series of banks in the surrounding area, Floyd and Richetti were recognised and the police showed up to apprehend the two men. After a shoot-out the police scored a victory in the form of the capture of Adam Richetti. Floyd escaped capture by stealing a car and fleeing.

  On October 22, 1934, just three days since the capture of his long-time buddy, Pretty Boy Floyd’s luck finally ran out. Floyd was just getting in the car that
would take him to the bus station when the police came up the road. He fled the vehicle and ran for the cover of the nearby forest. The police officers involved, led by Chief McDermott, ordered Floyd to halt and surrender. When Floyd drew his .45 calibre handgun another police officer on the scene, Chester Smith, opened fire with his rifle. The shot struck Floyd in his wrist and he dropped his gun. Determined not to be captured Floyd fled yet again as the police continued to shout orders to stop. The police team opened fire on Floyd with full force and took him down. He died minutes later from his injuries but not before he uttered the words, ‘I am Charles Arthur Floyd’. Tucked in his belt was a second handgun, one that Floyd never got to use. In fact, Floyd was killed in a shoot-out where he never fired a single shot. Richetti was executed in 1938 after a series of appeals, including one that tried to claim he was insane.

  Following the death of the USA’s Public Enemy Number One, there was much controversy. It was said that the circumstances surrounding his death were not as they had been told previously by the police. He was thought that Floyd had in fact been shot at point-blank range in execution style by the police, after they had shot him multiple times already. This has never been proven and does not exist in the official account from the FBI of the day’s events.

  Floyd’s mother did not allow what the public wanted most of all, a open casket. His coffin was shipped back to Oklahoma, where it was viewed by many thousands of mourners and curious onlookers, before being placed in the ground. Floyd’s funeral was attended by 20,000 people. Floyd’s body rests in Atkins, Oklahoma, where he had told his mother he wanted to be buried a year prior to his death.

  The life and exploits of the eternal lawbreaker Pretty Boy Floyd were immortalized in a song by Woodie Guthrie in 1939, just five years following Floyd’s death. Floyd’s gravestone was stolen in 1985 and had to be replaced. The marker that stands on the site of the final battle was stolen in 1995, but has since been recovered and re-erected. Several movies have been made that chronicle the life and times of Floyd. His name has become part of pop culture and he remains a household name three-quarters of a century after his death. As Woodie Gurthrie put it so well in his song, ‘some will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen’. There could be no better way to describe Floyd’s distaste for authority. He felt like it was all just some form of robbery, but of course it all depends on how you look at it. Floyd wasted his life in such an inferno of hatred for the society he could never participate in and perhaps always knew it would end in his own downfall.

  Ned Kelly

  Ned Kelly is one of those criminals who polarizes opinion. Some remember him as a folk hero and masterful criminal, along the lines of the mythical Robin Hood. Others regard him as a common ill-educated convict who got his just desserts. He was, what the Australians call, a bushranger, which basically means a felon who conceals his whereabouts in the wilderness, or ‘bush’, as it is called down under. He was the equivalent of a highwaymen in the UK or an outlaw in the USA.

  Edward (Ned) Kelly was the first son born into a family of eight children in the winter of 1854–55. His parents were of Irish stock, impoverished and socially disadvantaged. His father died when he was eleven years old, having been convicted of cattle rustling and harshly treated in jail. This left an embittered Ned and his brothers with the responsibility of supporting their mother and sisters. Without the prospect of securing decent jobs, the brothers turned to petty crime as a way of making ends meet. Consequently, they became acquainted with the protectors of the law from an early age and so the die was cast.

  Ned’s first serious brush with the law came at the age of fourteen, when he assaulted and robbed a Chinese pig farmer named Ah Fook, for which he served ten days in custody. Following this experience he fell in with an established bushranger named Harry Power – real name Henry Johnson – who was Ned’s senior by thirty-six years. Power’s influence led to his being arrested and sentenced to three months hard labour for violent intimidation. He had assaulted a costermonger named Jeremiah McCormack, and then delivered an indecent note to the man’s wife, Kelly McCormack, which was accompanied in its envelope by a calf’s testicles. From that point onwards Ned’s reputations was established and the only way was down, or up, depending on one’s point of view.

  Following his release from prison, another bushranger, Isiah (Wild) Wright, lent Ned a stolen horse, which he used to ride to the town of Greta. The horse was recognised and Ned was apprehended, but not before an attempt to resist arrest which saw Ned overpower and humiliate the arresting officer, Constable Hall. This time Ned was sent down for three years, having enjoyed only a few weeks of freedom. Ned had become a repeat offender, a recidivist.

  When Ned was next released he had transformed into the true villain of the peace. Before long he became involved in a large-scale cattle-rustling operation with his new father-in-law and his brothers. Constable Fitzpatrick, who attempted to put a stop to their criminal activities, ended up with injuries, including a broken wrist. Ned and his brother Dan went into hiding, knowing that they faced certain imprisonment for both the cattle rustling and the assault of a police officer. Now Ned had the title ‘wanted fugitive’ to add to his growing criminal resume. This was the start of the infamous Kelly Gang, which terrorised the area of north-east Victoria for two years from 1878.

  THE GANG

  Ned and Dan Kelly were joined by Joe Byrne and Steve Hart. The four of them secreted themselves in a wooded area north of Mansfield in Victoria, known as the Wombat Range. In late October 1878, four undercover police officers set about trying to capture them, or at least return with their bodies, for the members of the gang each had prices on their heads. The officers disguised themselves as gold prospectors and set off on their mission. Their names were Kennedy, Lonigan, McIntyre and Scanlan.

  By chance the policemen set up camp only a mile away from the Kelly Gang, who were alerted to the presence of the officers when they used their guns to bring down some birds for food. When the Kelly Gang arrived to recce the strangers’ camp, they immediately realised that the law was upon them despite their masquerade. Only two officers were in camp at the time so the gang decided to overpower them and so improve their chances of escaping from the area.

  However, one officer was killed and the other was made hostage. Then a shoot-out resulted in the other two officers dying when they returned to the camp. One of the hapless victims had been executed as a measure of mercy to put him out of his misery, having already received a fatal injury, but this was seen as an act of unimaginable brutality by the Australian authorities. Ned also took and discarded the dying man’s note to his wife. The Kelly Gang had become public enemy number one.

  Perhaps concluding that they now had nothing to lose, but their lives, the Kelly Gang now evolved into a troop of bank robbers. Their first heist saw them take £2,000 from the National Bank at a place called Euroa on December 10. They took a number of staff and general public hostage in the process, but they escaped without harming anyone – well, not physically anyway. The next bank job took place on February 8–10, 1879, in the town of Jerilderie. They took a number of hostages and then robbed the bank of another £2,000.

  Sometime before the Jerilderie robbery, Ned Kelly suddenly decided to declare himself – in writing – a political dissident in defence of his criminal activities. His Jerilderie Letter, sets out his agenda; his political manifesto. In the 8,000 word letter, he attempted to absolve himself of any blame by voicing his disgust at the prejudicial and unjust treatment of Irish Catholics in Australia, the USA and Ireland itself. He also attempted to explain that all of his former wrongdoings were the result of police antagonism and conspiracy. The letter was left behind when the gang departed with the request that it should be published as a pamphlet for general distribution. It never was.

  Ned also burned all of the Jerilderie townsfolk’s mortgage deeds, apparently to set them free of their debts. This gesture did not go unnoticed by the everyday population of Australia,
who subsequently began to view him as something of a man of the ordinary people instead of just a lowly criminal – ‘taking from the rich and giving to the poor’. Others chose to read between the lines of his letter, concluding that his true ambition was to plan an armed uprising, a coup, against the British Empire and declare north-east Victoria an independent state, presumably with him as rebel leader.

  Following the events at Jerilderie, the police made a concerted effort to close in on the Kelly Gang. They got their first lucky break over a year later when the gang turned to revenge and retribution. An old friend of theirs had turned police informer, so they decided to punish him by death. Joe Byrne murdered Aaron Sherrit at his home on June 26, 1880. The killing was witnessed by four policemen who, in fear for their own lives, hid the whole night long before reporting the murder.

  The Kelly Gang had presumed that the death had been reported the previous evening, so they set up an ambush for early the next day. They took around seventy hostages in a place called Glenrowan and set about sabotaging the railway’s tracks so that the police train would derail. However, the unexpected delay gave a hostage an opportunity to warn the police by waving a candle, as night time had by then fallen.

  The gang evaded capture by holing themselves up in the Glenrowan Inn for the night with a number of hostages. At dawn they made their final stand wearing their famous armour, which was fashioned from iron plough parts. Each had a helmet and various body plates, which weighed a total of around 44 kg (7 stone). With so much additional weight and the armour so crudely designed, it only served to encumber their movements rather than provide protection.