When you hear the name Machine Gun Kelly, you probably think of a tall guy with face tattoos and a penchant for pop-punk. But long before the musician hit the scene, there was the "original" version. George Kelly Barnes. Better known as George Machine Gun Kelly, he was a man whose reputation was largely a work of fiction—crafted not by him, but by his wife.
Honestly, the real story of George Kelly is way more interesting than the cardboard cutout "tough guy" image the FBI pushed in the 1930s. He wasn't a cold-blooded killer. In fact, he never actually killed anyone. He was an upper-middle-class kid from Memphis who dropped out of college and basically stumbled into a life of crime because he was bad at holding down a regular job.
He was a bootlegger. A bank robber. A kidnapper. But a "public enemy"? That's where things get murky.
The Memphis Kid Who Couldn't Stay in School
George wasn't born in the gutter. He was born in 1895 to a wealthy insurance executive. He grew up in a nice neighborhood, went to a good high school, and eventually enrolled at Mississippi A&M (now Mississippi State) to study agriculture.
It didn't stick.
George was a terrible student. His highest grade was reportedly a C-plus in "physical hygiene." He spent more time racking up demerits than studying crops. Eventually, he quit, eloped with a girl named Geneva Ramsey, and tried to settle down. But George had a taste for the fast life and a very low tolerance for 9-to-5 boredom. When his father-in-law passed away—the one guy who seemed to keep George on the straight and narrow—he regressed hard into the world of illegal booze.
Kathryn Thorne: The Architect of a Monster
If George Kelly Barnes was the actor, his second wife, Kathryn Thorne, was the director, producer, and publicist. They met after George had already done a stint in Leavenworth for bootlegging. Kathryn was "tough" in a way George simply wasn't. She grew up in the criminal underworld and knew how the game worked.
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She's the one who bought him his first Thompson submachine gun.
She basically forced him to practice with it in the woods until he could knock walnuts off a fence. But she didn't stop there. Kathryn would take spent shell casings from his target practice and hand them out to underworld associates like souvenirs. "This is from my husband, Machine Gun Kelly," she'd say. She was building a brand. She wanted him to be the next Al Capone or John Dillinger, even if George was more of a "small-time" guy at heart.
It worked. The nickname stuck, and suddenly, this former agriculture student was one of the most feared names in the Midwest.
The Crime That Changed Everything: Kidnapping Charles Urschel
By 1933, the Great Depression was in full swing. Bank robberies were getting harder because the banks didn't have any money left. So, George and his partner, Albert Bates, decided to go for a "big fish."
On a hot July night, they burst onto the porch of Charles Urschel, a wealthy Oklahoma oil tycoon. Urschel was playing bridge with his wife and friends. The kidnappers didn't even know which man was Urschel, so they just took both men at gunpoint and sorted it out later in the car.
They held Urschel for a $200,000 ransom—about $4.8 million in today's money.
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They kept him at Kathryn’s mother’s ranch in Paradise, Texas. This is where the story gets legendary. Urschel was blindfolded the whole time, but he was incredibly smart. While the gang thought he was just a helpless victim, he was counting footsteps. He was memorizing the sounds of planes flying overhead. He even noticed that at a specific time every day, a heavy rainstorm hit—except for one day when it didn't.
When he was finally released after the ransom was paid, he gave the FBI enough detail to pinpoint exactly where he’d been held.
The Myth of "Don't Shoot, G-Men!"
We’ve all seen the movies where the FBI bursts in and the gangster cowers, yelling, "Don't shoot, G-Men!" Most people think George Machine Gun Kelly coined that term during his arrest in Memphis on September 26, 1933.
The truth? It probably never happened.
The FBI’s own contemporary reports from the raid don't mention the phrase at all. In reality, George was caught in his pajamas, probably hungover, and surrendered without much of a fuss. The "G-Men" story was likely cooked up later by J. Edgar Hoover’s PR machine or the newspapers to make the Bureau look more heroic. Hoover needed a win, and George Kelly’s capture was the perfect "movie moment" to sell the FBI to the American public.
Once he was behind bars, the "tough guy" persona evaporated instantly.
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At Alcatraz, his fellow inmates gave him a new nickname: "Pop Gun Kelly." They thought he was a joke. He spent his time telling "big fish" stories about his crimes that nobody believed. He was a model prisoner—quiet, polite, and completely non-violent. He worked in the prison industries and never caused a lick of trouble.
He died of a heart attack at Leavenworth on his 59th birthday, July 18, 1954. He’s buried in a small cemetery in Texas under a headstone that simply says "George B. Kelley."
Why the Story of George Kelly Still Matters
The life of George Machine Gun Kelly is a perfect case study in how the media and the government can collaborate to create a "monster" for their own purposes. George was a criminal, sure, but he wasn't the bloodthirsty villain portrayed in the tabloids. He was a man caught between his wife’s ambition and J. Edgar Hoover’s need for a national hero.
If you're looking to understand the real history of the Prohibition era, it’s worth looking past the nicknames.
- Check the primary sources: Always look at FBI case files versus newspaper clippings from the era; the discrepancy is usually where the truth hides.
- Visit the history: The Urschel home in Oklahoma City is still a private residence, but you can see the ranch area in Paradise, Texas, where the kidnapping unfolded.
- Read the nuance: Books like Infamous by Ace Atkins do a great job of stripping away the Hollywood gloss to show the desperate, often bumbling reality of these "famous" outlaws.
To truly understand the 1930s crime wave, start by researching the "Lindbergh Law," which was passed just before Kelly's kidnapping of Urschel. It changed kidnapping from a local crime to a federal one, which is exactly why the FBI was able to step in and end George Kelly's career so quickly.