- Was incarcerated in Alcatraz from August 1934 to 1951.
- Although he was known by his infamous nickname "Machine Gun" Kelly, he didn't like machine guns--the noise they made scared him--and it's almost certain that the only time he ever actually fired one was during target practice. He never did learn to shoot well and he certainly never killed anyone.
- His "fearsome" reputation as a hardened criminal and expert gunman was wholly an invention of his second wife, a former prostitute and suspected murderess named Kathryn Thorne. She was obsessed with making him more famous than real killers like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and waged what amounted to a successful marketing campaign to convince the underworld, the public and lawmen that her husband was a cold-blooded, dangerous killer. He was, in fact, nothing of the sort--a fleshy, heavyset, meek man, he was terrified of the machine gun he was supposed to be an expert with and totally under the thumb of his domineering wife, and went along with her schemes because he was unable to stand up to her. Amazingly enough, her campaign worked--the FBI made him "Public Enemy #1" and the newspapers of the day built him up to be almost a super-criminal. The underworld looked up to him and the public couldn't get enough of him. His one true distinction, however, was that he invented the word "G-Man" for federal cops--when the FBI cornered him in a Memphis (TN) rooming house, he threw up his hands and screamed, "Don't shoot, G-Men!". The name stuck.
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