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Resurrecting his career from a base in St. Paul, Bailey mentored a number of young bank men who congregated at the city’s notorious Green Lantern tavern, including Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker brothers. Arrested on a Kansas City golf course in 1932, he led a massive prison breakout on May 31, 1933, and went back to robbing banks.
    The last of the great Jazz Age yeggs was the man whose smuggled guns freed Bailey from prison, his friend Frank “Jelly” Nash. Nash, a stout figure with a comic toupee who began his career robbing trains on horseback in his native Oklahoma, was a Leavenworth escapee who also worked out of St. Paul, robbing banks with Bailey and the Barker Gang.
    All three of these men—Eddie Bentz, Harvey Bailey, and Frank Nash—were destined to play roles in the Great Crime Wave of 1933-34. It was Nash who accidentally triggered the war with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. He did it not with a bank robbery or a high-profile kidnapping, but with the simple desire for a quiet Arkansas vacation.

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    A MASSACRE BY PERSONS UNKNOWN
     
    June 8 to June 15, 1933
     
     
     
    From a newsman’s point of view, the month of June opened quietly. In Washington, senators debated the Roosevelt administration’s industrial recovery bill. Each morning brought a worrisome new headline from Germany; on Tuesday, June 6, it was the ouster of Otto Klemperer, a Jew, as conductor of the Berlin State Opera under the “non-Aryan” section of the Civil Service act. In India, Mahatma Gandhi was fasting to protest mistreatment of the “untouchables” caste. All that week readers of the New York Times followed daily updates of Texas pilot James Mattern’s attempt to break the around-the-world speed record; at the moment, he was hop-scotching across Siberia. In Chicago, a dust storm blew in off the plains, toppling trees, downing power lines, and sending thousands at the newly opened World’s Fair scurrying for shelter.
    On Thursday evening, June 8, 1933, an Oklahoma schoolteacher named Joe Hudiberg finished a poker game in the kitchen of his white frame house outside the town of Cromwell. Hudiberg walked into the warm evening air and stretched. As his friends stepped to their cars, he ambled down to his garage and padlocked the doors.
    Locked inside the garage was Hudiberg’s prized black Pontiac—and Pretty Boy Floyd, who had come to steal it. In the darkness, Floyd cursed. This was the way his luck had been going for months now. Charley Floyd— no one but the newspapers called him “Pretty Boy”—was twenty-nine years old that summer evening. He was only five-feet-eight; his shoulders and upper arms were thick and powerful, his face moony and flat. He resembled a young Babe Ruth. Floyd’s eyes were gray and he kept his hair slicked back with a thin part down the left side. Up close you could smell his hair tonic, a whiff of lilac.
    Of all the criminals who rose to prominence in 1933 and 1934, Floyd was the only one who was already famous, at least in Oklahoma, where he was a hero to legions of disaffected dust bowlers. Everyone knew his story. The son of upstanding parents, he had been a restive farm boy in his hometown of Akins, working on harvest crews and the occasional burglary, until he robbed a Kroger store in St. Louis in 1925, for which he drew a five-year sentence in a Missouri prison. Paroled in 1930, Floyd moved to Kansas City and tried to go straight but was constantly rousted by police, an experience that left him with a deep sense of victimization. Teaming up with some prison pals, he relocated to Ohio but was arrested after robbing a bank. He jumped out a window on the train ride to prison and fled to Oklahoma.
    In the fall of 1931, Floyd began robbing country banks in his home state in earnest, earning his first mentions in Oklahoma newspapers. But it was a crime in which he took no part that catapulted him onto the front pages. On January 2, 1932, two ex-convicts ambushed and killed six peace