G-man

Origins and use in media

• According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term 'G-man' was first used in the year 1928.
• The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for the American usage of the term 'G-man' was in 1930, from a biography of Al Capone by F. D. Pasley.
• The nickname may have originated during the September 1933 arrest of the gangster George "Machine Gun" Kelly by agents of the Bureau of Investigation, a forerunner of the FBI. Finding himself unarmed, Kelly supposedly shouted, "Don't shoot, G-men! Don't shoot!"
• The term was the basis of the title for the 1935 film G Men, starring James Cagney, which was one of the top-grossing films of that year.
• In 1936, the Three Stooges short film A Pain in the Pullman references Curly Howard to a 'G-man'.
• Kelly's surrender is dramatized in the 1959 film The FBI Story. The encounter with Kelly is similarly dramatized in the 1973 film Dillinger. The film was followed by a television series called '.
• The Spanish Rock band Hombres G got its name in 1983 from the Spanish translation of 'G-man' and after the James Cagney film G Men.
• In the video game franchise Half-Life, introduced in 1998, one of the main characters is a "sinister interdimensional bureaucrat" called G-Man, who speaks in a cryptic manner and places the main character Gordon Freeman into stasis at the end of the first game.
• The 2011 film J. Edgar includes a reference to the surrender scene in the 1959 film The FBI Story.
• In the 2011 film ', Charles Xavier refers to his team as the "G-Men", but Moira MacTaggart states that they are something different, and decides to name the team "X-Men". Charles finds the name amusing and keeps it.
• In the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V, government agents encountered throughout the game are occasionally referred to as G-men.