MORE VIOLENCE
Just one man, Adam Richetti, was convicted of murder in the case of the Union Station Massacre. He was executed in Missouri's gas chamber Oct. 7, 1938. (Four mobsters were tried for plotting the ambush. They each received the maximum sentence at the time: two years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine.)
Richetti's two machine-gun wielding accomplices were widely believed to have been Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd and Vernon Miller.
During the October 1934 gun battle that ended with Richetti's arrest, Floyd suffered two fatal bullet wounds. Miller, meanwhile, did not live to see the end of 1933. He escaped an FBI trap to capture him in Chicago, only to fall into the hands of a New Jersey crime boss' henchmen.
Miller's battered corpse was found Nov. 29, 1933, in a ditch on the outskirts of Detroit. He had been strangled.
THE AFTERSHOCK
The possible role of Floyd in the shooting is much disputed in the 1997 book The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI by University of Missouri-Kansas City Professor Robert Unger.
 There's no disputing the fact the men ambushed never had a chance. When the smoke cleared, Kansas City detectives Frank Hermanson and W.J. Grooms, Federal agent Raymond Caffrey, and McAlister, Okla., Police Chief Otto Reed were all dead. Reed was helping escort Frank Nash, the convicted murderer the gunmen were supposedly trying to free. Nash was also cut down in the rain of gunfire.
Before the Massacre, Hoover's FBI had no arrest powers and its agents did not carry guns. Today, agents not only wear guns but, in many instances, also the badges of their predecessors who were killed in the line of duty -- men like Raymond Caffrey.
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