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Memphis-born George "Machine Gun" Kelly (born George Kelly Barnes) was unlike most of his contemporary "celebrity" gangsters in that he didn't come from a poverty-stricken background--his father was a well-to-do insurance company executive and George was raised in very comfortable circumstances. Kelly graduated high school and actually attended college (Mississippi A&M, studying agriculture). His academic career was a bust, however, as his grades were poor and he was constantly receiving demerits for getting into trouble, so he left after four months. He married and fathered two children, but his inability to keep a job doomed the marriage and his wife eventually left him and took the kids with her.
Kelly then hooked up with a small-time bootlegger in Memphis, and for the first time in his life, he began to make some real money. However, after several arrests, he left Memphis with a new girlfriend and a new name, George Kelly (he dropped the name "Barnes" because he despised his father), and headed west. He continued his bootlegging career, but in 1928 got caught smuggling liquor onto an Indian reservation--a federal crime, although the hapless Kelly apparently didn't know it--and was sentenced to three years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He got out after a year, but his luck didn't hold out. He was arrested in New Mexico on bootlegging charges and sent to state prison there. Upon his release, he went to Oklahoma City and hooked up with a small-time gangster and bootlegger named Steve Anderson. He fell for Anderson's girlfriend, a convicted robber and ex-prostitute named Kathryn Thorne who was suspected by local police of murdering her last husband. She left Anderson for Kelly and they married in 1930.
It was Kathryn who brought out Kelly's "talents" as a big-time criminal; up to that time he had been a pretty small-time bootlegger. She was determined to make her husband "Public Enemy #1", more famous than John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd or any of the other notorious gangsters of the era. She bought him a Thompson submachine gun and had him constantly practice with it (which didn't do much good, as he didn't like the loud noise it made when fired and he was never much of a marksman). However, Kathryn would take his spent shells from target practice and pass them around to her underworld friends as "souvenirs" from the many robberies she claimed her husband had committed. Her marketing campaign began to pay off, and soon "Machine Gun Kelly" gained a reputation (completely unjustified) as a tough, cold and hardened bank robber. In order to please his domineering wife, the intimidated Kelly participated in the robberies of several small-town banks across Texas and Mississippi. His gang would burst in waving their machine guns, while Kelly (whom many witnesses described as "looking terrified") cleaned out the registers. Even the FBI fell for Kathryn's publicity campaign, putting out flyers describing Kelly as an "expert machine gunner". Not satisfied with robbing small-town banks, Kathryn came up with a scheme to get them some "real" money--they would kidnap wealthy Oklahoma businessman Charles Urschel. Kelly and two accomplices broke into the Urschel mansion where the millionaire was playing cards with friends. True to form, Kelly's planning for the operation left much to be desired--he didn't know what Urschel looked like and had no idea which, if any, of the card players was him, so he and his gang wound up taking all of the men. When they later positively identified Urschel they let the other men go, sending along with them a demand for a $200,000 ransom. The ransom was eventually paid and Urschel was released unharmed. However, he had deliberately left his fingerprints all over the house where he was being kept, and even though he had been blindfolded he was able to pay enough attention to his surroundings (noises, smells, etc.) so that the FBI eventually determined where he had been held. They raided the house and arrested one of the kidnappers, who identified Kelly and the rest of the gang. Kelly and his wife were on the run, traveling around the Midwest and spending their share of the ransom money (not knowing that the serial numbers of the bills had been recorded and were being traced whenever they turned up). They eventually went back to Memphis, where they holed up in a rooming house. It didn't take the feds long to find out where they were, and on the night of 9/26/33, FBI agents and Memphis police raided the building. Kelly was trapped in a stairwell by cops and FBI agents aiming machine guns at him, and shouted the famous words, "Don't shoot, G-men! Don't shoot!" He and Kathryn were quickly arrested and flown back to Oklahoma to stand trial for the Urschel kidnapping. They were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Kelly was sent to Leavenworth, where he bragged to reporters that he would soon break out. That got him transferred to the infamous--and much harder to break out of--Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay, being one of the first prisoners to be housed there. Away from his wife's influence, Kelly became a model prisoner, popular with guards and inmates alike. He was transferred back to Leavenworth in 1951, and on 7/18/54, died there of a heart attack.
