The Legend of 'Machine Gun Kelly'

It was 75 years ago today—September 26, 1933—that wanted gangster George “Machine Gun” Kelly and three others were captured by Bureau agents and local police.

That date might not have meant much to history except for the reporting that followed. As the legend goes, the surrounded and frightened Kelly shouted something like, “Don’t shoot, G-Men, don’t shoot!” Originally slang for all government agents, the term “G-Men” soon became synonymous solely with FBI special agents.

Did Kelly really say those words? Probably not—it appears to have been manufactured by the media. But it quickly grabbed hold of the popular imagination as Hollywood, the press, the American people, and even the FBI accepted it as fact.

Here’s the story behind the myth and how it grew. On July 22, 1933, George Kelly and his gang kidnapped Charles Urschel, a wealthy oil magnate. After Urschel’s family paid a hefty ransom, he was freed. Over the next few months, FBI agents—then a largely unknown group of investigators—tracked down those involved. Kelly was among the last of the gang to be located by the Bureau.

The FBI's earliest account of what happened was written between three and five days after Kelly’s arrest:

“Agent Rorer saw that Kelly…had proceeded into the front bedroom and was in a corner with his hands raised. He was covered by [Memphis Police] Sergeant [name withheld].”

And that was it, quick and quiet; Kelly wasn’t reported to have spoken at all.

When did the “Don’t Shoot, G-Men” storyline begin? It’s unclear. The earliest reference to such a story that we could find was in a Philadelphia newspaper story written many months later. Kelly, according to the reporter, said that he didn’t shoot because, “It was them G’s. Them G’s would have slaughtered me.” According to historian Richard Gid Powers, it was a few months after this version that writer Rex Collier first wrote the myth as we now know it.

By April 1935, the image of the FBI agent as “G-Man” had become part of the popular culture. The movie G-Men, starring Jimmy Cagney, appeared in theaters across the country and was widely successful. It spawned more movies, news stories, films, comic books, radio shows, and even toys and games about the FBI’s G-Men.
In 1956, when reporter Don Whitehead wrote The FBI Story with extensive Bureau help, he included the story as a key event in FBI history. Bureau fact-checkers didn’t question his account, thus tacitly accepting it. The storyline was even included in the FBI's 1985 revision of the official case write-up. In recent years, the FBI's has been correcting the story.

Good myths, though, die hard, and this one does make a great story!

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Print Edition of Informer is Now Available

Tom Hunt, the publisher of Informer is very happy to announce that a print edition of Informer's first issue is on sale through MagCloud, a branch of HP doing top quality, groundbreaking work in the periodicals field. In addition to printing and sales, the MagCloud service provides an online preview and a "subscribe" option, which alerts interested readers by e-mail when a new issue becomes available.

In the future, print (ISSN 1943-7803) and electronic (ISSN 1944-8139) editions of Informer will become available simultaneously.

Informer, The Journal of American Mafia History - Vol. 1, No. 1, September 2008
The Mob's Worst Year: 1957, Part 1, by Thomas Hunt / Capone's Triggerman Kills Michigan Cop by Chriss Lyon / New Orleans Newspaperman Reveals His Role in 1891 Anti-Mafia Lynch-Mob / A Look Back: 100 Years Ago, 75 Years Ago, 25 Years Ago / Book Reviews: Frank Nitti; The Mafia and the Machine; The First Vice Lord; The Complete Public Enemy Almanac / Author Interview: David Critchley / Ask the Informer: Joe DiGiovanni of Kansas City / Current Events: John A. Gotti, James "Whitey" Bulger / Deaths: John Bazzano Jr., Frank "the German" Schweihs, Carl "Tuffy" DeLuna.

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The Godfather is Restored to Its Glory

The Godfather is remembered as a dark picture. But over the years it has become less dark than intended.

The opening scene of the best-picture Oscar winner is the ultimate example. Emerging from shadow is the face of Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), the father who asks Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) for a favor on the day of the Don's daughter's wedding. But when director Francis Ford Coppola saw the 1972 film on a screen for its 25th anniversary, he thought, "Gee, the picture doesn't look like I remember it looking. This very, very beautiful photography of (cinematographer) Gordon Willis over the years had faded."

The movie is back to its inky finest — thanks to an assist from Steven Spielberg — on The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration, available today on a new five-disc DVD collection with all three Godfather films and two discs of bonus features, as well as a four-disc Blu-ray set ($73 and $120, respectively; each film on individual DVDs, $20).

The Godfather was a victim of its own success. It earned $135 million in the USA, which in modern terms would make the film the No. 21 box-office earner of all time, according to boxofficemojo.com.

To meet demand, Paramount quickly made large numbers of copies to ship to theaters. As a result, "the negative was ultimately destroyed through the practice of printing it so much," Coppola says from Buenos Aires while editing the film Tetro.

A decade ago, Paramount stored all its Godfather film elements in a cold vault to help preserve them until a full digital makeover was possible. "No matter how seriously the studio wished to solve the problems at that time, it would not be possible until digital technology provided the tools," says Robert Harris of The Film Preserve, which eventually handled the restoration of both The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II (1974).

Fast-forward to 2005: Coppola, looking to renew the preservation effort, wrote to Spielberg when DreamWorks was acquired by Paramount. Could Spielberg, who had been involved in restoring Lawrence of Arabia, spur on the project? It was an offer Spielberg could not refuse. He took the request to studio chairman Brad Grey, who set into motion the two-year process, overseen by Paramount post-production executive Marty Cohen and done at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging in Burbank, Calif.

No single usable Godfather negative remained that was suitable as a source. In the end, Harris and the preservation team gathered a bunch of backup film elements and an Italian-subtitled print used as a color reference.

Over months, the restoration technicians carefully scanned the material and then began cleaning up the footage in its digital form, 4K files (meaning the video is made up of 4,000 lines of horizontal resolution, more than four times the quality of HDTV).

In addition to digitally removing scratches and repairing damage — more than 1,000 man-hours of dirt removal was performed on The Godfather— the technicians were able to fix errors that were more than three decades old. The restaurant scene in which Michael (Al Pacino) shoots Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and Capt. McCluskey (Sterling Hayden) had been filmed over two nights. But one night's footage had been incorrectly processed, resulting in less detail and a washed-out look — an error that has been corrected digitally.

"Without those innovations, we would not have been able to move forward with the same results," Cohen says. "This is about rebuilding to some degree and putting new paint on the house."

Coppola and Willis consulted on every step of the restoration, which is detailed in a documentary on the new collections. Thanks to the restoration, Willis has regained his title "Prince of Darkness," Coppola says.

"So much of his art was to have the blackness of the black be so vividly black that everything else stood out from it," he says. "The restoration achieved that again."

Thanks to Mike Snider

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Walgreens Supports, But ebay Opposes Organized Crime Measures Before Congress

Companies including Walgreen Co. asked a U.S. House Committee on Monday to crack down on organized retail crime, but online retailers such as eBay Inc. said some of the measures proposed would unfairly hurt their business.

Unlike shoplifting, thieves in organized retail crime steal larger quantities of goods _ from baby formula to over-the-counter drugs _ to resell as part of larger crime rings. The FBI estimates organized retail theft costs retailers over $30 billion each year.

The hearing by the House Committee on the Judiciary was held to consider issues related to organized retail crime, such as the shift from items being resold at flea markets and pawn shops to them being auctioned the Internet.

Two bills in the House and one in the Senate that would address various thresholds and penalties for organized crime are under consideration.

Traditional retailers say the current laws aren't adequate to effectively track and prosecute large-scale cases. Walgreen said some criminals get a "slap on the wrist" due to lagging investigative resources and an unwillingness by authorities to take complicated cases. But online retailers, such as eBay, said they would be unfairly targeted in the proposed legislation and say they already work diligently to help track down criminals.

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Former Head of Chicago Federal Organized Crime Strike Force Opposes the Merging of Mob Unit

The acting U.S. attorney for Pennsylvania's Eastern District announced last week that the office's organized-crime strike force will be merged into a unit prosecuting drug dealers.

This is shortsighted.

A little history: The public first became aware of the national scope of organized crime in 1957, when police in Apalachin, N.Y., raided the private home of Joseph Barbero and discovered a meeting of nearly 100 mob chieftains from across the country. It was a national meeting, and it exposed the broad geographic reach of organized crime.

Until then, organized crime had been regarded as confined to small, localized, ethnic areas. In response to the growing awareness to the contrary, the organized-crime strike forces were created in the 1960s. They comprised an independent, nationwide network of prosecutors, directed by the Department of Justice in Washington, with expertise in conducting investigations into the widespread networks of organized-crime families.

The strike forces were in the forefront of sophisticated federal law enforcement. They initiated the use of the investigating grand jury, the process of immunizing reluctant witnesses, electronic surveillance, and witness protection for cooperating accomplices.

They moved federal law-enforcement agencies into the investigation of labor racketeering on the waterfront, and of the construction, hotel and resort, and casino-gaming industries. They initiated investigation of the misuse of union pension funds. Because strike-force attorneys were not burdened with the day-to-day cases that confront U.S. attorneys, they were able to concentrate on the many activities of the mob.

I'm not talking about prosecuting mobsters for killing one another. That is important, but the real danger of organized crime is the threat to the economic fabric of the country.

I'm talking about prosecuting organized crime as a sophisticated business, which requires experience and expertise in investigation and in the courtroom. The strike-force attorneys were successful because they had the time and skill to concentrate on this highly structured illegal enterprise.

The strike forces were merged into the U.S. attorneys' offices in the 1980s as a result of an internal bureaucratic struggle within the Department of Justice. Once that occurred, it was only a matter of time until those strike-force attorneys would be reassigned to whatever hot area needed support in the U.S. attorneys' offices.

I headed both the Chicago and Philadelphia federal strike forces and was the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia. I sat in both chairs a long time - a total of 15 years as a prosecutor.

My fellow U.S. attorneys often joked that they welcomed the assignment of special task forces to cover the latest crisis, because they would eventually absorb the new personnel and quietly assign them to local-office roles. This should not happen to the strike-force attorneys.

Organized crime's operation has not declined. It simply has become more sophisticated and taken on different forms, and there is a need to pursue organized crime in its modern, more sophisticated mode. Once established in any industry, it does not disappear with the prosecution of a few associates.

The strike-force attorneys do not work alone, but in tandem with units in other cities. Using this exchange of intelligence and skills, they have been able to make significant cases in numerous cities against the full scope of organized crime in national industries.

Joel Friedman, the former head of the Philadelphia strike force, went to Chicago in the 1970s to assist me in setting up a sting operation that he originated in New York. Such cooperative efforts aren't formed in an instant; they take months or years to forge.

Dismantling this machinery at this point destroys years of effort, as occurred when the Carter administration removed the agent operatives from the intelligence agencies. We are still paying for it.

I do not diminish the need for drug prosecutions. Drug dealers have been a major problem for more than 30 years. Numerous national task forces and drug czars have not diminished their influence and significance. Perhaps it is time to rethink the national law-enforcement strategy on drugs, but that's beyond the scope of this article.

Transferring the strike-force attorneys to a drug unit may aid that effort for a short while. However, in time, the strike-force attorneys will simply be removed from organized-crime prosecutions. They will be assigned to the next crisis area instead of devoting their skills to prosecuting the most sophisticated organized crime.

Thanks to Peter Vaira

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