Everyone’s heard of the myths and legends of Rasputin. He was supposedly stabbed, poisoned, shot, and drowned throughout his life until he eventually died. But there is another man, much closer to home—with has much less fame—but just as durable in his ability to defy the hands of death. Cue Michael Malloy, a 60-year-old-ish unemployed, homeless Irish-American with no friends or family around him besides a bottle of alcohol. Malloy visited the pub daily in the twilight era of the Prohibition era and usually drank so much he ended up blacking out. Even worse, he never paid his tabs.
But a group of men, including the owner of the illicit pub, Tony Marino, saw Malloy’s self-destructive habits. And instead of being sensible and telling him to scram or get a job, they decided to kill him. But this would not be any normal murder. That would be too simple. They were going to make it big at the same time by committing insurance fraud. They took out three life insurance policies on Malloy’s life while one of them pretended to be Malloy’s next of kin. If they succeeded, they would receive $3,576 or about $54,000 in today’s cash. With the policies in play, the boys initiated their plan by letting Malloy drink his way to death by granting him an open-ended tab. But much to the group’s dismay, that didn’t happen.
During the first three days, Malloy drank until Marino’s arm was tired and sore from holding the bottle. He drank and drank like the world was going to end. But for some reason, his kidneys didn’t explode. On the fourth day, Malloy walked in the pub not looking any different than before. So the boys decided to up the ante. Instead of giving him whiskey and gin, they were going to give him wood alcohol or methanol. For reference, just four percent of wood alcohol can blind a person and according to the Smithsonian, “by 1929 more than 50,000 people nationwide had died from the effects of impure alcohol” tainted by wood alcohol, so they expected him to drop dead like a fish. They gradually changed Malloy’s alcohol from whiskey to wood alcohol but he kept drinking the same as normal with no signs of the reaper approaching other than the usually side effects of drunkenness. He continued to drink wood alcohol daily, and the plot was getting quite expensive so the boys had to think outside the box.
Malloy had a penchant for seafood. So when he was delivered a “complementary” plate of spoiled oysters drunken in alcohol, he devoured all of it and was no worse for wear. The boys mixed in spoiled sardines and shards of metal inside of a sandwich, hoping the concoction would kill him, but he wolfed it all down and asked for another one! At that point, killing Malloy was not even about the money, but about personal pride. So they took him out after he was drunk one night, threw him into the snow, and doused him with water hoping he’d freeze to death. The next day Marino found Malloy in the basement of his shop complaining about a “wee chill.” Then they got a friend who owned a cab and ran over Malloy twice after he dodged the car’s earlier attempts at killing him. Malloy was then left in the snow as the group got scared by an incoming car.
The gang waited. One of the boys called up hospitals posing as Malloy’s brother but neither the newspapers nor did the hospitals reveal information of a deadly car accident. In fact, one of the boys plotted to kill another random drunk and pass him off as Malloy but before he could Malloy limped in the bar with new bandages and said, “I sure am dying for a drink!” Fortunately for the gang, Malloy only remembered the taste of alcohol and bright lights in his eyes before ending up bedridden at a hospital. At this point, the gang went berserk.
The boys had enough. They decided to outright kill him with their own hands and make sure Malloy was dead for good. With a towel wrapped around his face, and a hose of gas flooding his lungs, Malloy died. They got a friendly doctor to fake a death certificate and cited the cause of death “lobar pneumonia”. The group only received $800 in total from the first policy. But when one of the members decided to collect the money from the other two policies, the agent astonished him with the question “When can I see the body?” The man replied that Malloy was already buried and promptly, an investigation followed.
With that the “Murder Trust” of the first five members of the gang were convicted for first-degree murder and were sentenced to death by electric chair. Some say the grinning ghost of Malloy was present at the courthouse that day. Thus the strange tale of Michael Malloy ends. The lesson learned from all of this? Don’t murder people. don’t commit crime, and be safe!

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