Machine Gun Kelly and the birth of the G-Men
MY sister has an old LP by a group called Sleeper, titled Smart.
The cover features a fantastic photo of group of men I take to be astronauts.
Do you know who these guys are? – E.
They were the Mercury Seven, a group of astronauts announced by NASA on April 9, 1959.
They piloted the manned spaceflights of the Mercury program from May, 1961, to May, 1963.
Our picture shows, back row, from left, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper. In the front row, Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter.
Smart was the first of Sleeper’s three albums, the others being The It Girl and Pleased To Meet You, and featured their first Top 20 hit, Inbetweener.
I’M a big fan of the classic gangster movies of the 1940s starring the likes of Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart.
In them, FBI Agents are often called G-Men, and I’d like to know where this comes from. – P.
G-Man is American slang for an FBI Agent, and is believed to be a shortened version of the phrase “Government Man”
In FBI mythology, the nickname is said to have originated during the arrest of gangster George “Machine Gun” Kelly by agents of the Bureau of Investigation, a forerunner of the FBI, in September, 1933.
Finding himself unarmed, but surrounded, Kelly supposedly shouted: “Don’t shoot, G-Men! Don’t shoot, G-Men!”
The event was dramatised in the 1959 film The FBI Story.
With the popularity of film noir and gangster films during the 1940s and 1950s, “G-Men” became a popular term for FBI Agents.
Machine Gun Kelly (real name George Francis Barnes Jr) was a gangster during the prohibition era.
His nickname came from his favourite weapon, a Thompson submachine gun.
His most infamous crime was the kidnapping of oil tycoon Charles F. Urschel in July 1933 for which he and his gang collected a $200,000 ransom.
After his arrest and trial, Kelly was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in Leavenworth Prison in 1954, on his 59th birthday.