In loving memory of Michael Malloy, the man who wouldn't die.

Hello, my love.

I’m writing to you on St. Patrick’s Day, the third one we’ve spent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditionally, this has been a holiday I spend dressed up in family regalia, celebrating in a packed pub with many drinks and rolling my eyes at the green beer/plastic leprechaun hat set. These days, I’m more likely to spend today curled up in my home, making Guinness beef stew and sipping whiskey as early as my work schedule allows in my finest pair of green swoveralls (sweatpant overalls - a life-changing purchase I recommend to everyone).

To celebrate the holiday, I want to share with you one of my favorite stories about an Irish American. It’s not a happy story, of course. It’s not a particularly inspiring one, either. It’s weird and deeply sad and a little spooky, which tells you why I love it so much. It’s a story about predators and prey, about boundless cruelty and greed, and about the miraculous hardships an Irish body will endure when there is free drink to be had.

Our story begins during a cold winter in 1932 in a nameless, shady speakeasy on Third Avenue in New York City. Tony Marino, the owner of the joint, was struggling to make ends meet. Business was bad, and he didn’t know how to dig his way out. Michael Malloy, a homeless Irish immigrant and career drinker, was a regular sight in the neighborhood and Tony sometimes hired him to sweep the floors in exchange for booze, but even with this arrangement, Malloy always drank more than he had earned and carried a debt he could never pay off.

An important thing to know about Tony Marino is that he was a homicidal piece of shit who had recently gotten away with killing a girlfriend and collecting the life insurance money. An important thing to know about Michael Malloy is that he was practically nobody. Very little is known about his life before his death, they think he was born in County Donegal and immigrated to New York sometime in the 1920s. He held a number of odd jobs and was a firefighter for a bit, but to all appearances, Malloy had no family, no friends, and was drunk or looking for drink whenever he was conscious.

One night at the bar, Marino and four of his friends were discussing the dire financial situation the speakeasy was in, trying to figure out how they could get their hands on a large chunk of cash to keep the place afloat. I imagine they were huddled around the bar, their heads bent and their voices low, when the door opened and Michael Malloy stumbled in, begging for booze. Looking at him, Marino got an idea.

In the days that followed, Marino and the others cozied up to Malloy, asking him to come with them to several insurance agents, signing on to life insurance policies under a fake name, with one of the men claiming to be Malloy’s younger brother. In exchange, Malloy’s debt at the bar was forgiven, and he was allowed to drink as much as he wanted, free of charge.

Every morning, Malloy would come into the bar and begin drinking, and the five men (later dubbed “The Murder Trust” by the press) waited around for him to drink himself to death. Malloy would drink from morning until night, and walk out of the bar on steady legs. After a few days of this, Marino couldn’t afford to keep this up, so his bartender went down to the paint shop and picked up some wood alcohol (pure methanol), and mixed it with the gin and whiskey they served Malloy. Nothing changed, Malloy would cheerfully drink all day, toasting his generous friends with every round.

They began serving Malloy pure wood alcohol without mixing it, and finally, Malloy fell off his barstool and lay crumpled on the floor. The Trust heaved a sigh of relief and waited. Seconds later, Malloy’s loud snores told them that their ordeal was far from over.

This is where the Trust grew desperate and became willing to try anything. The speakeasy had a self-serve oyster and sandwich bar, but the staff began to treat their favorite customer to dishes prepared specially for him. Malloy enjoyed a plate of methanol-soaked oysters, sardine sandwiches with tin shavings, broken glass, and carpet tacks mixed in. According to the testimony of the Trust, Malloy showed no sign of discomfort or distress when eating these sandwiches or drinking poison, and would instead declare that everything was delicious and ask for more.

One night, Malloy drank until he passed out, slumped over the bar. The men removed his clothes, drove him out to a park, and laid him in the snow. For good measure, they dumped a bucket of cold water over his unconscious form and drove away. The next morning, they found Malloy fully dressed and sleeping on the floor of the speakeasy. A police officer had found Malloy and dropped him off at a shelter, who dressed him and gave him a place to sleep for the night. When he woke up, he made his way to the speakeasy, eager to tell his friends about the weird night he had.

A couple of days later, Marino paid a taxi driver $150 to meet them in the middle of nowhere and hit a drunk and compliant Malloy with his car. The taxi driver hit him, and he fell into a ditch, but before they could check his body, a car drove by and the group had to scatter. The next day, they searched the newspaper for reports of a hit and run, finding nothing. Before the taxi driver hit Malloy, they had put fake identification in his pocket so he could be identified for their life insurance scam. They called every hospital asking after the fake name, and could not find him. Days passed, and Malloy did not turn up.

Beginning to panic that they now had lost Malloy’s body and were going to lose out on their $3500 payday (equivalent to about $70,000 in today’s money), the Trust asked around to find another man who resembled Malloy. When they quickly found another aging Irishman with Malloy’s height and build in New York, the trust invited him to the bar, got him drunk, and had the taxi driver run him over with a fake ID in his pocket. Again, the man fell in the ditch, a car drove by, and the group had to scatter before checking the body. Just like his lookalike, the man’s death or survival could not be determined by the Trust.

A few agonizing days later, Michael Malloy stumbled into the bar, with a story about waking up in a ditch with a headache, police officers picking him up and dropping him off at a hospital, where he received treatment for several days for a concussion and dislocated shoulder. Michael was lucid enough to tell the hospital his real name, so when Marino called the hospitals asking after the name on his fake ID, they didn’t have him on the list.

Marino had finally had enough. He let Malloy sit at the bar, serving him more than usual to celebrate his return. When Malloy passed out for the night, bartender Red Murphy offered up his room. They took Malloy to Murphy’s room, laid him on the floor, placed the hose connected to a coal gas heater in Malloy’s mouth, and turned it on, watching him finally take his last breaths. The Trust paid off a doctor to pronounce Malloy’s cause of death as accidental alcohol poisoning, and an undertaker buried him in a graveyard the next day.

The insurance companies were immediately suspicious, and the Trust was arrested less than a week after Malloy’s death and, beaten down by the grueling drudgery and stress of trying to kill the same man every day for months, told the police everything.

When this story got out, it made national news. Malloy was heralded “Iron Mike Malloy”, “The Irish Rasputin”, “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die”. My personal favorite piece of reporting in The New Yorker called Malloy “a person who made Achilles look like a waterlily”.

I think about this story a lot — not just because it’s weird and kind of funny and I don’t understand why there isn’t a Coen Brothers film adaptation of it yet, but also because I think it’s a quintessential American immigrant tale. We live in a country where lives are sacrificed for money every single day, and those of us who are most vulnerable are prime targets — underestimated and disposable. Marino and his cronies thought they had Malloy’s number, that they could use him because he was an ocean away from home, alone, penniless, and an alcoholic. They got more than they bargained for.

Irish Americans are no longer persecuted, but there are plenty of immigrant populations who still are, plenty of versions of Michael Malloy we’ll never hear about. Survival and grit are American values, but the more I think about this story, I’m less struck by Malloy’s ability to bounce back cheerfully, oblivious to or unconcerned by the danger he was in, and more angered by the cruelty of the men who devoted so much time and energy to ending his life.

I love toughness, I love grit, I love persistence, but I dream of a future where less of it is asked of immigrants who are searching for safety. I would prefer a world that didn’t know Michael Malloy’s name because he died peacefully. As I live in this world, I’ll be drinking a toast to Malloy tonight, and to the things that try to kill us but don’t succeed.

I’m rambling on a bit and will sign off before this becomes a sermon. To you, beloved, I give this blessing:

May those that love us, love us. And for those that don’t love us, may God turn their hearts. And if He cannot turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles, so we may know them by their limping.

I hope that whatever you’re wrestling lasts fewer rounds than you do.

Sláinte,

Sammi

The source for most of this was this excellent episode of the excellent podcast, Criminal. Listen here.