Richetti was identified as another gunman involved in the attack.[1]
Check the sourcesFederal Bureau of Investigation ↗
origin: imported
June 17, 1933. Ninety-three years ago this morning, a group of law enforcement officers walked across Kansas City Union Station at approximately 9:30 a.m. with their prisoner, a notorious federal escapee named Frank "Jelly" Nash. They had every reason to think this was a routine transfer. Seconds later, gunfire erupted from multiple directions. When the shooting stopped — it lasted only moments — four law enforcement officers and the prisoner they were escorting lay dead. The Kansas City Massacre, also known as the Union Station Massacre, had just become one of the bloodiest ambushes in American law enforcement history.
Frank Nash had been a problem for the government since at least 1913, when he received a life sentence in Oklahoma for murder. He proved impossible to contain. On October 19, 1930, Nash escaped from the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas — a maximum-security federal facility — and spent the next three years evading capture while continuing a career that included bank robbery and other violent offenses. When federal agents finally ran him down and arrested him in the summer of 1933, they made arrangements to return him to Leavenworth. Special Agent in Charge Edgar C. Vetterli, the FBI's special agent in charge of the Kansas City office, personally coordinated the transfer. There was no sign anything had gone wrong.
The men waiting at Union Station had been busy since the day before. Vernon Miller, a career criminal with a personal stake in the outcome — he was a close friend of Nash's — had organized the rescue operation. He recruited Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, one of the most-wanted bank robbers of the Depression era, and Floyd's accomplice Adam Richetti. Their journey to Kansas City had not gone smoothly: their vehicle broke down on the morning of June 16, stranding them briefly before they pushed on. By the morning of June 17, they were in position.
