Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [43]
When his mother died and his father took up with another woman, Kelly began getting into trouble. After dropping out of high school, he became a bootlegger, reselling shipments of whiskey he bought in Missouri and Kentucky. He made a stab at college, a single semester at Mississippi A&M, but dropped out; his father disowned him. An ambitious young man who longed for finer things, Kelly soon eloped with Geneva Ramsey, a Memphis millionaire’s daughter. He went to work for his father-in-law’s construction company and fathered two, but his life began to crumble after Geneva’s father was killed in an accident.
His mother-in-law bought him a parking garage and a dairy farm to run, but Kelly preferred bootlegging. In 1924, when he was twenty-four, he was arrested, and the judge sentenced him to six months in a work camp. Geneva left him. Despondent, he attempted suicide, swallowing a bottle of bichloride of mercury, but succeeded only in making himself sick. Rather than face jail, Kelly fled to Kansas City, where he soon embezzled enough money as a supermarket clerk to buy a truck.
He used it to transport whiskey as far afield as New Mexico, where he was briefly imprisoned in 1927. When he was arrested selling liquor on an Indian reservation, a federal judge threw the book at him, sentencing him to five years in Leavenworth. It was in prison that Kelly fell in with a group of St. Paul yeggs, at one point lending help on an escape attempt orchestrated by Frank Nash. After his 1930 parole, he headed for Minnesota, where he was quickly accepted at the Green Lantern tavern and began tagging along on bank jobs.
That September, Kelly married Kathryn Thorne, an Oklahoma-born party girl whose second husband—Kelly was her third—died under mysterious circumstances. Kathryn was a haughty self-indulgent alcoholic whose daughter was being raised by Kathryn’s mother. Of all the women the FBI pursued in 1933 and 1934, she was to gall Hoover like no other. “Kathryn Thorne Kelly was one of the most coldly deliberate criminals of my experience,” Hoover wrote in his 1936 book, Persons in Hiding. To Hoover, Kathryn was Kelly’s Svengali, “man-crazy,” “clothes-crazy,” a “cunning, shrewd criminal-actress” who created, marketed, and dominated her husband. “If ever there was a henpecked husband,” Hoover wrote, “it was George [Machine Gun] Kelly.”1
As compelling as this portrait sounds, there is no evidence in FBI files that Kathryn was anything more than her husband’s knowing accomplice. She could do little to improve his criminal skills. Kelly was a lousy bank robber, so nervous he sometimes vomited before bank jobs, and was eventually shunned by Harvey Bailey, Verne Miller, and other St. Paul yeggs. He was no better at kidnapping. In January 1932, Kelly and a partner kidnapped an Indiana businessman named Howard Woolverton; Kathryn had picked his name out of a phone book. Kelly was forced to release Woolverton when his family was unable to raise the ransom.
Between forays to Chicago and St. Paul in search of partners, Kelly lived at Kathryn’s home on East Mulkey Street in Fort Worth, Texas, where the couple quickly attracted the attention of police. The good-natured Kelly befriended a cop or two, at one point even helping police apprehend a neighborhood burglar. But he longed to be a bank robber. According to Hoover, Kathryn acted as a kind of press agent for her husband, boasting of Kelly’s exploits in an effort to get him work. This may have been true; Kathryn did like to brag about Kelly, especially when she drank. Eventually Kelly hooked up