November 16, 2015 • 27 mins
In 1932, a speakeasy owner and several friends planned to commit a murder to cash in fraudulent insurance policies. But carrying out their plot was much more difficult than they anticipated.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, fun How
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm tray Cybe Wilson. And sometimes
when we're working on a podcast episode, uh one or
(00:21):
the other of us, I think this has happened to
us both, we'll run across some other idea along the way.
And that's actually how today's episode came to be. When
I was working on the research for the Marianne Cotton episode,
which you may recall she poisoned a lot of people,
including her children, with arsenic I came across the mention
of today's subject in Deborah Bloom's book, The Poisoner's Handbook,
(00:42):
and I was completely intrigued, to say the least. I
remember talking to my husband about it, and I scribbled
it in a notebook for future reference because I knew
I wanted to do an episode on it later, and
eventually I transferred that to the list of episode subject
ideas that I keep on my phone. But in truth,
I didn't need to do any of that, because I
we have not stopped thinking about this story since it
came to light. In my universe, this is not a
(01:06):
pleasant story, but it is definitely fascinating and it is
frankly mind boggling. It features both some horrific callousness people
treating other people in ways that it's just stomach churning,
but it also features this very very intriguing level of
almost superhuman resilience. So spoiler alert, it doesn't really end well,
(01:28):
but it is a really, really fascinating tale and one
worth hearing, in my opinion. So we're talking today about
Mike Malloy, a k a. Mike the Durable, who was
an alcoholic, homeless immigrant who became the focus of a
murder plot in New York in the nineteen thirties, and
his nickname was incredibly apt. We know even less about
Mike Malloy than any other relatively obscure person we talked
(01:53):
about on the podcast. Basically, here's what we know. Sometime
between eighteen seventy two in eighteen seventy four in Ireland,
he was born, and then at some point after that
he immigrated to the United States magically in the interim
of having become an adult, or he could have become
an adult after, we don't really know. We do know
(02:14):
that he had a serious drinking problem. There's the facts
about Mike Bloy that we have. Yeah, nobody really knew
much about him, unfortunately. Uh. And it's it's one of
those things where we're used to that sort of nebulousness
only look back a little further in history. But even
though he is a little closer to the modern era,
we still just have precious little information about him. He
(02:36):
didn't seem to have any family or friends. He had
no steady job, although he had at one point worked
as a fireman and an engineer, and he occasionally made
a little money here and there by taking on odd jobs,
although often he would do these in trade, where he
would take alcohol in lieu of cash payment for things
like sweeping up and taking out the trash. He did
(02:56):
not appear to have any place that he called home.
July of two three men sat in a speakeasy at
thirty eight oh four Third Avenue in the Bronx, and
the speakeasy was called Marino's, and these folks were all
having a drink together. It was at the very tail
end of prohibition. The three men were Tony Marino, who
(03:17):
was the owner of the establishment. There was undertaker Francis
Frankie Pasqual and Daniel Kreisberg, who was a fruit vendor.
Their conversation after a while took a little bit of
a dark turn. Mike malloy had been drinking in Marino's
establishment for some time. He regularly showed up at opening,
and he started drinking immediately, only to pass out on
(03:39):
the floor within a few hours. And he had a tab,
but he rarely paid it. Business was not going well
at all for Marino. He needed money. The speakeasy game
was not exactly gangbusters at this point. His friends were
similarly strapped for money. It was a difficult time for
a lot of people. They were all waxing rhapsodic about
(03:59):
this dream that a lot of people, if we're honest
with ourselves, have had, which is that maybe someone would
die and leave them lots of money. Yeah. Keep in
mind that this was, you know, during a point in
US history when some metropolitan cities had nearly a fifty
percent unemployment rate. Like a lot of people were really hurting,
(04:19):
and so it was kind of natural to think about
the many ways many money could magically come into your life.
And somewhere in this discussion about how they could be
on easy Street if only the right person would die.
They started talking about Mike Malloy, who was at this
point passed out nearby, and then they started earnestly talking
about how they might benefit from his death. And naturally,
(04:41):
if you kind of follow the logical steps, keeping in
mind that these are people who do kind of underhanded dealings, anyway,
an insurance fraud scheme was hatched. It seemed like a
perfect idea to the three men. Mike had nothing, and
he was such a drunk that he seemed to already
have one fot in the grave. It's almost like a
plot in a serial killer story about someone who prays
(05:04):
on homeless people because no one will notice that they
are gone. They also thought they wouldn't have to do
much except to give him the means to literally drink
himself to death. If they just gave him access to
all of the alcohol, they thought he would do the
hard work for them. And this kind of plan, though,
as I mentioned, these are not necessarily people with the
cleanest of records. UH, this kind of plan was not
(05:28):
new for Marino and Pasqua. The undertaker who had pitched
this idea knew it. In Marino had formed a friendship
with a woman named Mabel Carson. She was a homeless woman,
and Marino had coerced her to take out a life
insurance policy that named him as the beneficiary. Carson's policy
was worth two thousand dollars, and once the inc on
(05:49):
that one was drying, it was finalized. So was Marino's plan.
During that winter, he selected a really chilly night to
get Mabel Carson as drunk as he could. He prepared
a bed for her to sleep in by saturating the
mattress and the bedclothes with ice water, and he left
it under an open window. He undressed her, put her
(06:09):
to bed, and waited for her to die. Her official
cause of death was bronchial pneumonia, and the life insurance
policy was paid out to Marino, and that was that.
And so among these three men, this was decided Mike
Malloy would be used in a similar fraud scheme. But
in order for these three men plus the bartender Joseph
(06:31):
Red Murphy, who ended up kind of looped into it,
to all take part in this death and pay out
on Mike Malloy, it was going to require a little
more work than that initial fraud scheme that Marino had done. Specifically,
it was going to need more paperwork because there were
more people involved. So first they had to find ways
that they could all be beneficiaries of life insurance policies
(06:53):
on malloy. And this wasn't so much that they each
had to be named, but they had to have enough
money coming in that it was worthwhile for them to
all split up the funds. So they had to have
multiple policies, and this part of the plan actually took
five months to put together. An undertaker, Frankie Pasqual, had
headed up that part of the plot. Eventually they secured
three policies. One was with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in
(07:15):
the amount of eight hundred dollars in the fictitious name
of Nicholas Mellory and Pasqual had arranged to have witnesses
who would identify Mike's body as this fictitious person. The
other two were with Prudential Life Insurance Company and each
was in the amount of four hundred and ninety four dollars.
The two policies from Prudential had double indemnity clauses, and
(07:37):
if you don't know what that is, it basically means
if the person dies from accidental causes, the payout is doubled,
so knowing that they had connections that could doctor a
death certificate and identify the body as they wished. To
the conspirators, at this point, this seemed like a surefire
way to increase their income, with that double indemnity clause
(07:59):
all too old. At the plan worked, the men were
looking at a payout of two thousand, seven hundred and
seventy six dollars, and just as a quick aside on that,
if you look through various accounts online, that number comes
up different in a few cases. Um I ended up
going with a newspaper from the time of the actual
(08:19):
legal events that happened later where they kind of total
out the policy. So you may see a different number,
that's the one that we went with. And so once
that was all settled, once they had all of this
insurance paperwork squared away, all that was left was to
let Mike Malloy drink himself to death and collect on
those three policies. Before we get into the great links
(08:42):
that this so called murder trust went to trying to
kill Mike Malloy, let's pause and kind of catch our
breath for a second with a word from one of
our sponsors. Now, back to our story. So to carry
out this plan, Tony Marino simply told Mike Malloyd that
the speakeasy had a new policy was or relaxed more
open ended bar tab. He claimed he was trying this
(09:04):
in an effort to stay competitive with other speakeasies, So
basically that was just going to let Mike drink as
much as he wanted without worrying about the money. They
could all figure it out later, and Mike drank uh.
Tony made sure that Mike's glass got refilled as quickly
as it emptied, and it seemed surely no human could
(09:24):
keep up the pace of alcohol consumption that Mike managed.
He just kept down in glass after glass of whiskey
until he finally thanked Tony for the lovely evening and left.
Came back the next day ready to once again enjoy
the luxury of an open bar tab with no stress
about how he would pay it. He drank himself into
oblivion one more time, but once again he did not
(09:46):
drink himself to death. He did the same thing on
the third day, and on the fourth day got to
the point where the conspirators were hoping that maybe he
would get so drunk that he'd get a head injury
because he would pass out and slow to the floor
and hit himself on the way down, or maybe he
would choke on his own vomit, because alcohol alone was
(10:07):
not doing enough to kill him. And at this point
there was a brief discussion about ending things quickly by
simply shooting Mike, but that was dismissed in favor of
poisoning him. It was decided that they would start serving
Mike would alcohol to try to kill him. And you
may remember from our fairly recent episode on Moonshine that
wood alcohol was widely known to cause people to go blind.
(10:30):
At this point, it had been one of the problems
of prohibition was people mixing this in Tens of thousands
of people had died from drinking alcohol that was tainted
or impure, so they knew one that like it wasn't
unusual for people to drink tainted alcohol during this time,
and to that wood alcohol was very toxic. So bartender
Red Murphy bought some tins of wood alcohol from a
(10:52):
paint shop, and after serving Mike Malloy a couple of
shots of whiskey, he switched over to pouring from the
wood alcohol. Tins. Mike drank them down with a smile,
and he never indicated that he noticed anything was amiss.
And perhaps more surprising, Mike never showed any physical signs
of poisoning. He certainly was still alive, returning to the
(11:14):
speakeasy day after day for more drinks, and he was
being served more and more wood alcohol, and then one evening,
after several days of this, he abruptly fell to the floor.
This murder trust thought they had finally managed it. Surely
this was Mike finally dying. Pascual felt for a pulse, though,
and Mike was still alive. His breathing had slowed down considerably, though,
(11:37):
so the man waited, thinking that they were just watching
Mike Malloy's last moments on earth. They thought they heard
a death rattle, but in this case it was a long,
slow inhale, But what followed was a loud snore than
more snoring. Mike was asleep, not dead, and he woke
up several hours later, ready for another round. And at
(12:00):
this point the conspirators started brainstorming other murder methods. Violence
was once again brought to the table, but voted down
in favor of let's try some more poisoning of a
different type. So this time they decided that they were
going to soak oysters in denatured alcohol and then serve
those two Mike, which they did, and for his part,
(12:21):
Mike seemed to quite enjoy his meal, and he washed
it down with a drink which was more wood alcohol.
The next horrifying step taken by a now very determined
murder trust was once again based around food. This time
it was uh worse than even the other awful things
they had already tried. They made him a sandwich, but
(12:42):
on this sandwich were what rotten sardines, mixed with pieces
of metal and, according to some accounts, also glass. So
the results of this are almost comedic, despite the fact
that the entire business had gone beyond cruelty at this
point to become this sort of twisted and grim group determination.
(13:02):
Mike ate this sandwich that they served him while the men,
these men trying to kill him, waited and they watched.
But Mike loved it so much that he asked if
they would make him another. But all this poison and
foreign material, while it logically must have been having some
kind of effect on his body, did not appear appear
to be killing Mike in any sort of a media way,
(13:25):
and that was really infuriating to the men who were
trying so hard to kill him. Additionally, the cost of
their plot was really starting to add up. They were
paying all these monthly insurance premiums, they were giving him
loads of free alcohol, they were buying the ingredients to
try various other ways to poison him. Plus more conspirators
(13:46):
had had to come on board in small ways throughout
this plan, and they all needed other smaller payouts for
their parts of the deal to keep their mouths shut.
And it was the middle of winter at this point,
so forrustrated that previous attempts had not worked out, Marino
thought maybe the freezing approach might work. It had, remember,
(14:07):
killed his previous victim. So after getting Mike blackout drunk
once again, the men drove him to Katona Park, carried
him through the snow to a park bench. They removed
his shirt, and they dumped water on him as he
lay there unconscious, and then they basically just left him
to die in the cold night air. He came back
to the bar the next day. He had crawled back
(14:28):
through the harsh winter weather approximately half a mile Murphy
had let him in and he slept the rest of
the night there. So because he had survived all of
this horrible cruelty up to this point, Mike's resilience was
now prompting these killers to go ahead with a more
violent approach. But instead of shooting the homeless man, they
(14:48):
decided that they should run him over. So they brought
in a cab driver named Harry Green into their conspiracy,
and Green was willing to do this job for a
hundred and fifty dollars worth of the insurance money. The
men all rode with the unconscious Mike and the cab
to a spot away from the speakeasy. Then, as they
were propping him up, meaning for Harry Green to make
(15:10):
a final run at him, they panicked when they saw
a flash of light. They thought somebody had caught them
in the middle of their villainous efforts. After they determined
that the light was merely somebody turning on a light
in their home, they stealed themselves to try again, and
this time the cab made contact. Mike's body hit the
hood of the car and then fell to the ground
(15:32):
as the car passed over him, and then Green backed
up over Mike malloy to ensure that he held up
his end of the deal, and the men left the scene.
The next day, Bartender Murphy made calls to local hospitals
and morgues, posing as a man trying to find a
missing sibling to see if any John Doe had been
(15:52):
brought in, but no accident fatalities were known of that
any of the places he phoned. These men were completely
be fuddled until five days later when Mike walked back
into the speakeasy. He had woken up in the hospital.
He had been found in the street and brought in
by a couple of concerned cops. He did not have
any recollection of what had really happened to him, although
(16:14):
he did remember cold night air and bright lights. He
was definitely injured, but he was very much alive. And
good question is whether the hospital noticed anything wrong with
him after all of this intense drinking and eating of
things like metal. Yeah, he was treated for some bone fractures, uh,
And I read in one account, but I wasn't able
(16:35):
to verify it that he had fractured his skull. But
apparently they did not uh make any discoveries about say,
a bunch of metal in his gut um. So finally
a cheap tenement room was rented by the men, and
once again the gang got Mike blackout drunk, and they
(16:58):
carried him to this room, which several blocks away from
the speakeasy, and they ran a rubber tube from a
gas light fixture into his mouth, which was secured in
place with a towel that they tied around his face.
That is where Mike finally died on February, and had
taken seven months from the point where the conspirators had
(17:19):
first conceived of their plot to kill him. Although most
of those months were spent putting together the insurance paperwork,
there were about two that were focused on actually trying
to murder him. A shady doctor named Manzella, which was
somebody that Frankie Pasqua knew, filed the death certificate and
it listed lobar pneumonia, which is acute inflammation of the
(17:41):
pulmonary lobe, as the cause of death. Mike malloy was
buried in a pauper's grave in Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County,
all of which was arranged by Pasqual. On March, First
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and issued a payout check in
the amount of eight hundred dollars on the policy that
had been fraudulently taken out with them. At check was
(18:01):
issued to Joseph Murphy. The bartender kept sixty dollars, and
then he gave the rest to the undertaker, who then
gave a hundred and fifty dollars to Marino and a
hundred and fifteen dollars each to Green and Creesburg. This
was the only payoff that actually ever came of this
whole horrible intrigue. Yeah, when Frankie Pasqual attempted to collect
(18:22):
the other two policies that they had put together with Prudential,
that insurance agent asked to see the body, and Pasqua
told him that he could not because the deceased had
already been buried. His inability to produce an actual body
for the Prudential Prudential insurance agents raised some eyebrows. That
(18:42):
was coupled with the fact that a whole lot of
people were involved with this scheme at this point, and
tongue started wagging about the unbelievable story, and that set
the wheels in motion for the murder trusts and doing.
Before we get to this investigation, let's pause and have
a word from a sponsor. So, as we mentioned before
(19:02):
the break uh, there were definitely people talking about the
long drawn out process of Mike's death, and it's possible
that that prudential agent who wanted to see a body
was a little suspicious of this situation as well. And
eventually someone put in a tip to District Attorney Samuel J.
Foley that foul play was involved and an investigation was open.
(19:23):
In May three, on Folly's orders, Mike Malloyd's body was
exhumed and an autopsy was performed on it. This autopsy
showed that he had been asphyxiated with gas. He did
not die of pneumonia, and once the results of the
autopsy were in Pasqua, Marino, Kriesburg, Murphy, and Green were
all arrested and charged with murder. Dr Manzella, the one
(19:47):
who had written the false death certificate, was charged as
an accessory after the fact. According to Folly's case against
the murder Trust, not only did the men commit this
horrible crime, but in the period between when they ran
Malloy over the time when he reappeared in a desperate
bid to produce some deceased person. So they could collect
on their policies. They also tried to murder another homeless person,
(20:10):
but they abandoned that effort when they were spotted by
a witness. All of the accused men were found guilty
when the jury reached their verdict in October of nineteen
thirty three. On June eighth, four, Frankie Pasqual, Tony Marino,
and Daniel Creuzberg were all put to death by electrocution
at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. According
(20:31):
to an account of the electrocutions printed in The Reading Eagle,
Pascal was frightened as he marched to the chair, Marino
was smiling, and Creuzberg claimed he was all right when
asked how he felt, but he was obviously trembling. The
day that Pascua, Marino, and Creesburg were put to death,
Joseph Red Murphy, the bartender at Marino's, was given a
two weeks stay of execution. His lawyers claimed that they
(20:54):
had new evidence proving that Murphy's mental state was such
that he could not be held accountable for his part
in the murder plot. He had, according to their statement,
been in a home for quote defectives prior to the
events that led to Mike Malloy's murder, and he could
not have comprehended what he was taking part in. But
despite all of this work on the part of his
legal team, Joseph Murphy was put to death the following month. Green,
(21:18):
the taxi driver who ran Mike Malloy over, and Manzella,
the doctor who falsified the death certificate, we're both sent
to prison for their parts in the crime. So that
is the unfortunate and ghastly story. I know we're past
Halloween story. I know I have that sort of weird
taste for them a cob, but it's also just so
(21:40):
it really does kind of boggle your mind when you
think about. For me, it's the two pronged angle of like,
just how incredibly horrifyingly callous can people be, Like, this
is a human being, but to then they just treated
it like a problem to be solved in whatever grizzly
way they could come up with. And too, just from
(22:01):
a scientific standpoint, I wish we knew more about like
why this one human seemed able to withstand an incredible
amount of things that should have done him in. Yeah,
So it's fascinating in both of those lights for me.
I actually do know a person who who died of
(22:24):
of alcoholism, and it was definitely not like the long
drawn out story of Mike Malloy. It was a he
was otherwise relatively young and healthy and had an alcohol
problem and went way too far one night and died.
So like it also speaks to you how critically dangerous
alcoholism can be. Yeah, and it's one of those things.
(22:48):
I mean, like I said, it's just there's such callousness
at play, and I think it's easy for people to
write off somebody who has maybe been a little bit
kicked around by life and it is maybe not in
the best state. But it completely weirds me out and
unsettles me that that people and I know this is
not exclusive to this case, that people that are in
(23:09):
those situations are often written off as almost non people
at that point, and so it's something that I wanted
to talk about for that reason as well. Do you
possibly have some more cheery listener mail? My listener mail
is show cheery because I knew this was a rough one. Uh,
it's actually a series of listener mails. It's postcards. First
(23:30):
of all, um, I know I posted one of these
on Instagram. I don't think we've actually talked about it
on the show though, but our listener Jennifer has been
traveling around Europe and she has been sending us the
best postcards from her many travels. She is uh has
been traveling with her dad. She sent us one from
Rome which features the cats of Rome. Like I said,
(23:52):
that one is on our Instagram. She sent us a
beautiful one of the Bio Tapestry. She sent us a
beautiful picture from Paris UH the Eiffel Tower, and she
sent us a lovely one of the Lamo Sa Michev,
which is cold but worth a visit. According to her, Jennifer,
this has been so delightful. I feel like we've been
going on this trip with you and it's super fun
for us. I know I took I snapped a picture
(24:14):
of these other three that I mentioned, and I will
put that on our Instagram as well. Uh. And also
we have another one from our listener Lane and it
is a postcard of the Book of Kells and I
will actually read hers because she notes how much we
like postcards. She says, thanks for your hard work on
the podcast. I want to especially thank you for the
posts on marginalized groups such as queer history. Lane share
(24:35):
some personal stuff that I'm not going to share because
that's I didn't check with her first, but loves hearing
about this and says, every time you too get a postcard,
you sound so happy. So when my boyfriend and I
visited Ireland in the UK, I had to get you
on the book of Kells. I'm sure needs no intro.
The exhibit was excellent and apart from the lack of
an elaborate heist to take the book home forever, it
(24:56):
was everything I could have asked for. Thanks again, I
love it. It's a beautiful postcard. Thank you so much
for thinking of us. I'm always so touched that people
would be having these grand life adventures and they would
pause for a moment, go you know who I should
share this with. That's um. That's quite sobering and quite
an honor to me. So I think you think I
have a hard time. Remember I like to send my
parents postcards whenever I travel, and I will get home
(25:19):
and be like, what so the fact that remind or
remember to send little less? Yeah, I'm a selfish jerk.
I don't even think to do it half the time.
I'm busy having my adventure and being a selfish jerk,
so thank you for not being selfish jerks. You guys
are awesome and we love when we get mail from you.
(25:39):
I always love it because our office manager, Tamika, who
I adore, will often come over and she'll be holding
things and like looking at them and be like, you
guys get the best mail, and I'm like, I know,
So thank you for making our office of cheerier place
as well. If you would like to write to us,
you can email us at History Podcast at how stoffworks
dot com. We're on Facebook at facebook dot com slash
(26:00):
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dot com slash mist in History, and at Miston History
dot tumbler dot com. We're also on Instagram, as I
mentioned at mist in History. If you would like to
go to our website and do a little bit of
research sort of related to this episode. If you go
to how stuff works dot com and just type in
the word murder in the search bar, you will get
(26:22):
so much content to keep you busy for hours, including
one about who the first murderer in the United States was.
And you can also visit us at Miston History dot
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(26:42):
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how Stuff Works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics works dot com. Do do Do
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, fun How
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm tray Cybe Wilson. And sometimes
when we're working on a podcast episode, uh one or
(00:21):
the other of us, I think this has happened to
us both, we'll run across some other idea along the way.
And that's actually how today's episode came to be. When
I was working on the research for the Marianne Cotton episode,
which you may recall she poisoned a lot of people,
including her children, with arsenic I came across the mention
of today's subject in Deborah Bloom's book, The Poisoner's Handbook,
(00:42):
and I was completely intrigued, to say the least. I
remember talking to my husband about it, and I scribbled
it in a notebook for future reference because I knew
I wanted to do an episode on it later, and
eventually I transferred that to the list of episode subject
ideas that I keep on my phone. But in truth,
I didn't need to do any of that, because I
we have not stopped thinking about this story since it
came to light. In my universe, this is not a
(01:06):
pleasant story, but it is definitely fascinating and it is
frankly mind boggling. It features both some horrific callousness people
treating other people in ways that it's just stomach churning,
but it also features this very very intriguing level of
almost superhuman resilience. So spoiler alert, it doesn't really end well,
(01:28):
but it is a really, really fascinating tale and one
worth hearing, in my opinion. So we're talking today about
Mike Malloy, a k a. Mike the Durable, who was
an alcoholic, homeless immigrant who became the focus of a
murder plot in New York in the nineteen thirties, and
his nickname was incredibly apt. We know even less about
Mike Malloy than any other relatively obscure person we talked
(01:53):
about on the podcast. Basically, here's what we know. Sometime
between eighteen seventy two in eighteen seventy four in Ireland,
he was born, and then at some point after that
he immigrated to the United States magically in the interim
of having become an adult, or he could have become
an adult after, we don't really know. We do know
(02:14):
that he had a serious drinking problem. There's the facts
about Mike Bloy that we have. Yeah, nobody really knew
much about him, unfortunately. Uh. And it's it's one of
those things where we're used to that sort of nebulousness
only look back a little further in history. But even
though he is a little closer to the modern era,
we still just have precious little information about him. He
(02:36):
didn't seem to have any family or friends. He had
no steady job, although he had at one point worked
as a fireman and an engineer, and he occasionally made
a little money here and there by taking on odd jobs,
although often he would do these in trade, where he
would take alcohol in lieu of cash payment for things
like sweeping up and taking out the trash. He did
(02:56):
not appear to have any place that he called home.
July of two three men sat in a speakeasy at
thirty eight oh four Third Avenue in the Bronx, and
the speakeasy was called Marino's, and these folks were all
having a drink together. It was at the very tail
end of prohibition. The three men were Tony Marino, who
(03:17):
was the owner of the establishment. There was undertaker Francis
Frankie Pasqual and Daniel Kreisberg, who was a fruit vendor.
Their conversation after a while took a little bit of
a dark turn. Mike malloy had been drinking in Marino's
establishment for some time. He regularly showed up at opening,
and he started drinking immediately, only to pass out on
(03:39):
the floor within a few hours. And he had a tab,
but he rarely paid it. Business was not going well
at all for Marino. He needed money. The speakeasy game
was not exactly gangbusters at this point. His friends were
similarly strapped for money. It was a difficult time for
a lot of people. They were all waxing rhapsodic about
(03:59):
this dream that a lot of people, if we're honest
with ourselves, have had, which is that maybe someone would
die and leave them lots of money. Yeah. Keep in
mind that this was, you know, during a point in
US history when some metropolitan cities had nearly a fifty
percent unemployment rate. Like a lot of people were really hurting,
(04:19):
and so it was kind of natural to think about
the many ways many money could magically come into your life.
And somewhere in this discussion about how they could be
on easy Street if only the right person would die.
They started talking about Mike Malloy, who was at this
point passed out nearby, and then they started earnestly talking
about how they might benefit from his death. And naturally,
(04:41):
if you kind of follow the logical steps, keeping in
mind that these are people who do kind of underhanded dealings, anyway,
an insurance fraud scheme was hatched. It seemed like a
perfect idea to the three men. Mike had nothing, and
he was such a drunk that he seemed to already
have one fot in the grave. It's almost like a
plot in a serial killer story about someone who prays
(05:04):
on homeless people because no one will notice that they
are gone. They also thought they wouldn't have to do
much except to give him the means to literally drink
himself to death. If they just gave him access to
all of the alcohol, they thought he would do the
hard work for them. And this kind of plan, though,
as I mentioned, these are not necessarily people with the
cleanest of records. UH, this kind of plan was not
(05:28):
new for Marino and Pasqua. The undertaker who had pitched
this idea knew it. In Marino had formed a friendship
with a woman named Mabel Carson. She was a homeless woman,
and Marino had coerced her to take out a life
insurance policy that named him as the beneficiary. Carson's policy
was worth two thousand dollars, and once the inc on
(05:49):
that one was drying, it was finalized. So was Marino's plan.
During that winter, he selected a really chilly night to
get Mabel Carson as drunk as he could. He prepared
a bed for her to sleep in by saturating the
mattress and the bedclothes with ice water, and he left
it under an open window. He undressed her, put her
(06:09):
to bed, and waited for her to die. Her official
cause of death was bronchial pneumonia, and the life insurance
policy was paid out to Marino, and that was that.
And so among these three men, this was decided Mike
Malloy would be used in a similar fraud scheme. But
in order for these three men plus the bartender Joseph
(06:31):
Red Murphy, who ended up kind of looped into it,
to all take part in this death and pay out
on Mike Malloy, it was going to require a little
more work than that initial fraud scheme that Marino had done. Specifically,
it was going to need more paperwork because there were
more people involved. So first they had to find ways
that they could all be beneficiaries of life insurance policies
(06:53):
on malloy. And this wasn't so much that they each
had to be named, but they had to have enough
money coming in that it was worthwhile for them to
all split up the funds. So they had to have
multiple policies, and this part of the plan actually took
five months to put together. An undertaker, Frankie Pasqual, had
headed up that part of the plot. Eventually they secured
three policies. One was with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in
(07:15):
the amount of eight hundred dollars in the fictitious name
of Nicholas Mellory and Pasqual had arranged to have witnesses
who would identify Mike's body as this fictitious person. The
other two were with Prudential Life Insurance Company and each
was in the amount of four hundred and ninety four dollars.
The two policies from Prudential had double indemnity clauses, and
(07:37):
if you don't know what that is, it basically means
if the person dies from accidental causes, the payout is doubled,
so knowing that they had connections that could doctor a
death certificate and identify the body as they wished. To
the conspirators, at this point, this seemed like a surefire
way to increase their income, with that double indemnity clause
(07:59):
all too old. At the plan worked, the men were
looking at a payout of two thousand, seven hundred and
seventy six dollars, and just as a quick aside on that,
if you look through various accounts online, that number comes
up different in a few cases. Um I ended up
going with a newspaper from the time of the actual
(08:19):
legal events that happened later where they kind of total
out the policy. So you may see a different number,
that's the one that we went with. And so once
that was all settled, once they had all of this
insurance paperwork squared away, all that was left was to
let Mike Malloy drink himself to death and collect on
those three policies. Before we get into the great links
(08:42):
that this so called murder trust went to trying to
kill Mike Malloy, let's pause and kind of catch our
breath for a second with a word from one of
our sponsors. Now, back to our story. So to carry
out this plan, Tony Marino simply told Mike Malloyd that
the speakeasy had a new policy was or relaxed more
open ended bar tab. He claimed he was trying this
(09:04):
in an effort to stay competitive with other speakeasies, So
basically that was just going to let Mike drink as
much as he wanted without worrying about the money. They
could all figure it out later, and Mike drank uh.
Tony made sure that Mike's glass got refilled as quickly
as it emptied, and it seemed surely no human could
(09:24):
keep up the pace of alcohol consumption that Mike managed.
He just kept down in glass after glass of whiskey
until he finally thanked Tony for the lovely evening and left.
Came back the next day ready to once again enjoy
the luxury of an open bar tab with no stress
about how he would pay it. He drank himself into
oblivion one more time, but once again he did not
(09:46):
drink himself to death. He did the same thing on
the third day, and on the fourth day got to
the point where the conspirators were hoping that maybe he
would get so drunk that he'd get a head injury
because he would pass out and slow to the floor
and hit himself on the way down, or maybe he
would choke on his own vomit, because alcohol alone was
(10:07):
not doing enough to kill him. And at this point
there was a brief discussion about ending things quickly by
simply shooting Mike, but that was dismissed in favor of
poisoning him. It was decided that they would start serving
Mike would alcohol to try to kill him. And you
may remember from our fairly recent episode on Moonshine that
wood alcohol was widely known to cause people to go blind.
(10:30):
At this point, it had been one of the problems
of prohibition was people mixing this in Tens of thousands
of people had died from drinking alcohol that was tainted
or impure, so they knew one that like it wasn't
unusual for people to drink tainted alcohol during this time,
and to that wood alcohol was very toxic. So bartender
Red Murphy bought some tins of wood alcohol from a
(10:52):
paint shop, and after serving Mike Malloy a couple of
shots of whiskey, he switched over to pouring from the
wood alcohol. Tins. Mike drank them down with a smile,
and he never indicated that he noticed anything was amiss.
And perhaps more surprising, Mike never showed any physical signs
of poisoning. He certainly was still alive, returning to the
(11:14):
speakeasy day after day for more drinks, and he was
being served more and more wood alcohol, and then one evening,
after several days of this, he abruptly fell to the floor.
This murder trust thought they had finally managed it. Surely
this was Mike finally dying. Pascual felt for a pulse, though,
and Mike was still alive. His breathing had slowed down considerably, though,
(11:37):
so the man waited, thinking that they were just watching
Mike Malloy's last moments on earth. They thought they heard
a death rattle, but in this case it was a long,
slow inhale, But what followed was a loud snore than
more snoring. Mike was asleep, not dead, and he woke
up several hours later, ready for another round. And at
(12:00):
this point the conspirators started brainstorming other murder methods. Violence
was once again brought to the table, but voted down
in favor of let's try some more poisoning of a
different type. So this time they decided that they were
going to soak oysters in denatured alcohol and then serve
those two Mike, which they did, and for his part,
(12:21):
Mike seemed to quite enjoy his meal, and he washed
it down with a drink which was more wood alcohol.
The next horrifying step taken by a now very determined
murder trust was once again based around food. This time
it was uh worse than even the other awful things
they had already tried. They made him a sandwich, but
(12:42):
on this sandwich were what rotten sardines, mixed with pieces
of metal and, according to some accounts, also glass. So
the results of this are almost comedic, despite the fact
that the entire business had gone beyond cruelty at this
point to become this sort of twisted and grim group determination.
(13:02):
Mike ate this sandwich that they served him while the men,
these men trying to kill him, waited and they watched.
But Mike loved it so much that he asked if
they would make him another. But all this poison and
foreign material, while it logically must have been having some
kind of effect on his body, did not appear appear
to be killing Mike in any sort of a media way,
(13:25):
and that was really infuriating to the men who were
trying so hard to kill him. Additionally, the cost of
their plot was really starting to add up. They were
paying all these monthly insurance premiums, they were giving him
loads of free alcohol, they were buying the ingredients to
try various other ways to poison him. Plus more conspirators
(13:46):
had had to come on board in small ways throughout
this plan, and they all needed other smaller payouts for
their parts of the deal to keep their mouths shut.
And it was the middle of winter at this point,
so forrustrated that previous attempts had not worked out, Marino
thought maybe the freezing approach might work. It had, remember,
(14:07):
killed his previous victim. So after getting Mike blackout drunk
once again, the men drove him to Katona Park, carried
him through the snow to a park bench. They removed
his shirt, and they dumped water on him as he
lay there unconscious, and then they basically just left him
to die in the cold night air. He came back
to the bar the next day. He had crawled back
(14:28):
through the harsh winter weather approximately half a mile Murphy
had let him in and he slept the rest of
the night there. So because he had survived all of
this horrible cruelty up to this point, Mike's resilience was
now prompting these killers to go ahead with a more
violent approach. But instead of shooting the homeless man, they
(14:48):
decided that they should run him over. So they brought
in a cab driver named Harry Green into their conspiracy,
and Green was willing to do this job for a
hundred and fifty dollars worth of the insurance money. The
men all rode with the unconscious Mike and the cab
to a spot away from the speakeasy. Then, as they
were propping him up, meaning for Harry Green to make
(15:10):
a final run at him, they panicked when they saw
a flash of light. They thought somebody had caught them
in the middle of their villainous efforts. After they determined
that the light was merely somebody turning on a light
in their home, they stealed themselves to try again, and
this time the cab made contact. Mike's body hit the
hood of the car and then fell to the ground
(15:32):
as the car passed over him, and then Green backed
up over Mike malloy to ensure that he held up
his end of the deal, and the men left the scene.
The next day, Bartender Murphy made calls to local hospitals
and morgues, posing as a man trying to find a
missing sibling to see if any John Doe had been
(15:52):
brought in, but no accident fatalities were known of that
any of the places he phoned. These men were completely
be fuddled until five days later when Mike walked back
into the speakeasy. He had woken up in the hospital.
He had been found in the street and brought in
by a couple of concerned cops. He did not have
any recollection of what had really happened to him, although
(16:14):
he did remember cold night air and bright lights. He
was definitely injured, but he was very much alive. And
good question is whether the hospital noticed anything wrong with
him after all of this intense drinking and eating of
things like metal. Yeah, he was treated for some bone fractures, uh,
And I read in one account, but I wasn't able
(16:35):
to verify it that he had fractured his skull. But
apparently they did not uh make any discoveries about say,
a bunch of metal in his gut um. So finally
a cheap tenement room was rented by the men, and
once again the gang got Mike blackout drunk, and they
(16:58):
carried him to this room, which several blocks away from
the speakeasy, and they ran a rubber tube from a
gas light fixture into his mouth, which was secured in
place with a towel that they tied around his face.
That is where Mike finally died on February, and had
taken seven months from the point where the conspirators had
(17:19):
first conceived of their plot to kill him. Although most
of those months were spent putting together the insurance paperwork,
there were about two that were focused on actually trying
to murder him. A shady doctor named Manzella, which was
somebody that Frankie Pasqua knew, filed the death certificate and
it listed lobar pneumonia, which is acute inflammation of the
(17:41):
pulmonary lobe, as the cause of death. Mike malloy was
buried in a pauper's grave in Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County,
all of which was arranged by Pasqual. On March, First
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and issued a payout check in
the amount of eight hundred dollars on the policy that
had been fraudulently taken out with them. At check was
(18:01):
issued to Joseph Murphy. The bartender kept sixty dollars, and
then he gave the rest to the undertaker, who then
gave a hundred and fifty dollars to Marino and a
hundred and fifteen dollars each to Green and Creesburg. This
was the only payoff that actually ever came of this
whole horrible intrigue. Yeah, when Frankie Pasqual attempted to collect
(18:22):
the other two policies that they had put together with Prudential,
that insurance agent asked to see the body, and Pasqua
told him that he could not because the deceased had
already been buried. His inability to produce an actual body
for the Prudential Prudential insurance agents raised some eyebrows. That
(18:42):
was coupled with the fact that a whole lot of
people were involved with this scheme at this point, and
tongue started wagging about the unbelievable story, and that set
the wheels in motion for the murder trusts and doing.
Before we get to this investigation, let's pause and have
a word from a sponsor. So, as we mentioned before
(19:02):
the break uh, there were definitely people talking about the
long drawn out process of Mike's death, and it's possible
that that prudential agent who wanted to see a body
was a little suspicious of this situation as well. And
eventually someone put in a tip to District Attorney Samuel J.
Foley that foul play was involved and an investigation was open.
(19:23):
In May three, on Folly's orders, Mike Malloyd's body was
exhumed and an autopsy was performed on it. This autopsy
showed that he had been asphyxiated with gas. He did
not die of pneumonia, and once the results of the
autopsy were in Pasqua, Marino, Kriesburg, Murphy, and Green were
all arrested and charged with murder. Dr Manzella, the one
(19:47):
who had written the false death certificate, was charged as
an accessory after the fact. According to Folly's case against
the murder Trust, not only did the men commit this
horrible crime, but in the period between when they ran
Malloy over the time when he reappeared in a desperate
bid to produce some deceased person. So they could collect
on their policies. They also tried to murder another homeless person,
(20:10):
but they abandoned that effort when they were spotted by
a witness. All of the accused men were found guilty
when the jury reached their verdict in October of nineteen
thirty three. On June eighth, four, Frankie Pasqual, Tony Marino,
and Daniel Creuzberg were all put to death by electrocution
at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. According
(20:31):
to an account of the electrocutions printed in The Reading Eagle,
Pascal was frightened as he marched to the chair, Marino
was smiling, and Creuzberg claimed he was all right when
asked how he felt, but he was obviously trembling. The
day that Pascua, Marino, and Creesburg were put to death,
Joseph Red Murphy, the bartender at Marino's, was given a
two weeks stay of execution. His lawyers claimed that they
(20:54):
had new evidence proving that Murphy's mental state was such
that he could not be held accountable for his part
in the murder plot. He had, according to their statement,
been in a home for quote defectives prior to the
events that led to Mike Malloy's murder, and he could
not have comprehended what he was taking part in. But
despite all of this work on the part of his
legal team, Joseph Murphy was put to death the following month. Green,
(21:18):
the taxi driver who ran Mike Malloy over, and Manzella,
the doctor who falsified the death certificate, we're both sent
to prison for their parts in the crime. So that
is the unfortunate and ghastly story. I know we're past
Halloween story. I know I have that sort of weird
taste for them a cob, but it's also just so
(21:40):
it really does kind of boggle your mind when you
think about. For me, it's the two pronged angle of like,
just how incredibly horrifyingly callous can people be, Like, this
is a human being, but to then they just treated
it like a problem to be solved in whatever grizzly
way they could come up with. And too, just from
(22:01):
a scientific standpoint, I wish we knew more about like
why this one human seemed able to withstand an incredible
amount of things that should have done him in. Yeah,
So it's fascinating in both of those lights for me.
I actually do know a person who who died of
(22:24):
of alcoholism, and it was definitely not like the long
drawn out story of Mike Malloy. It was a he
was otherwise relatively young and healthy and had an alcohol
problem and went way too far one night and died.
So like it also speaks to you how critically dangerous
alcoholism can be. Yeah, and it's one of those things.
(22:48):
I mean, like I said, it's just there's such callousness
at play, and I think it's easy for people to
write off somebody who has maybe been a little bit
kicked around by life and it is maybe not in
the best state. But it completely weirds me out and
unsettles me that that people and I know this is
not exclusive to this case, that people that are in
(23:09):
those situations are often written off as almost non people
at that point, and so it's something that I wanted
to talk about for that reason as well. Do you
possibly have some more cheery listener mail? My listener mail
is show cheery because I knew this was a rough one. Uh,
it's actually a series of listener mails. It's postcards. First
(23:30):
of all, um, I know I posted one of these
on Instagram. I don't think we've actually talked about it
on the show though, but our listener Jennifer has been
traveling around Europe and she has been sending us the
best postcards from her many travels. She is uh has
been traveling with her dad. She sent us one from
Rome which features the cats of Rome. Like I said,
(23:52):
that one is on our Instagram. She sent us a
beautiful one of the Bio Tapestry. She sent us a
beautiful picture from Paris UH the Eiffel Tower, and she
sent us a lovely one of the Lamo Sa Michev,
which is cold but worth a visit. According to her, Jennifer,
this has been so delightful. I feel like we've been
going on this trip with you and it's super fun
for us. I know I took I snapped a picture
(24:14):
of these other three that I mentioned, and I will
put that on our Instagram as well. Uh. And also
we have another one from our listener Lane and it
is a postcard of the Book of Kells and I
will actually read hers because she notes how much we
like postcards. She says, thanks for your hard work on
the podcast. I want to especially thank you for the
posts on marginalized groups such as queer history. Lane share
(24:35):
some personal stuff that I'm not going to share because
that's I didn't check with her first, but loves hearing
about this and says, every time you too get a postcard,
you sound so happy. So when my boyfriend and I
visited Ireland in the UK, I had to get you
on the book of Kells. I'm sure needs no intro.
The exhibit was excellent and apart from the lack of
an elaborate heist to take the book home forever, it
(24:56):
was everything I could have asked for. Thanks again, I
love it. It's a beautiful postcard. Thank you so much
for thinking of us. I'm always so touched that people
would be having these grand life adventures and they would
pause for a moment, go you know who I should
share this with. That's um. That's quite sobering and quite
an honor to me. So I think you think I
have a hard time. Remember I like to send my
parents postcards whenever I travel, and I will get home
(25:19):
and be like, what so the fact that remind or
remember to send little less? Yeah, I'm a selfish jerk.
I don't even think to do it half the time.
I'm busy having my adventure and being a selfish jerk,
so thank you for not being selfish jerks. You guys
are awesome and we love when we get mail from you.
(25:39):
I always love it because our office manager, Tamika, who
I adore, will often come over and she'll be holding
things and like looking at them and be like, you
guys get the best mail, and I'm like, I know,
So thank you for making our office of cheerier place
as well. If you would like to write to us,
you can email us at History Podcast at how stoffworks
dot com. We're on Facebook at facebook dot com slash
(26:00):
mist in History, on Twitter at Misston History, at pintry
dot com slash mist in History, and at Miston History
dot tumbler dot com. We're also on Instagram, as I
mentioned at mist in History. If you would like to
go to our website and do a little bit of
research sort of related to this episode. If you go
to how stuff works dot com and just type in
the word murder in the search bar, you will get
(26:22):
so much content to keep you busy for hours, including
one about who the first murderer in the United States was.
And you can also visit us at Miston History dot
com or we have an entire archive of all the
shows we've ever worked on and all of the previous
hosts have worked on, so it's all there for you,
just free for the taking. And we also have show
(26:42):
notes there for the ones that Tracy and I have
worked on, as well as occasionally other goodies. So do
come and visit us at Misston history dot com and
how Stuff Works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics works dot com. Do do Do
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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