The Many Murders of Michael Malloy E-Book

Simon Read

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 409

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A devious speakeasy owner. A crooked undertaker. A cunning bartender. A psychotic cabbie. A hapless greengrocer. A notorious thug. And one Irishman who came to be known as 'Iron Mike'. Set around New York's Prohibition-era speakeasy scene in the 1930s in what became known as 'the most grotesque chain of events in New York criminal history', The Many Murders of Michael Malloy is the tragic true story of six low-rent, desperate and extraordinarily incompetent murderers and one lonely Irish emigrant of exceptional fortitude and resilience. Poisoned, frozen, knocked down twice – Malloy survived it all, until he didn't. This is the utterly compelling, stranger-than-fiction story of the most infamous Irish murder you've never heard of.

Leseprobe

The ManyMurders ofMichael Malloy

The unbelievable true story of theIrishman who refused to die

Simon Read

Gill Books

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue: Digging in the Dirt

1.The Murder Trust

2.Rejected

3.Double Indemnity

4.On the House

5.‘He Didn’t Die’

6.The Drunk Who Came In from the Cold

7.Ticket to Ride

8.The Mean Streets

9.Have a Drink

10.His Final Stand

11.The Morning After

12.Frank’s Story

13.Payday

14.Don’t Call the Man ‘Yellow’

15.The Unravelling

16.The Third Degree

17.The Trial

Epilogue: The Final Toast

Afterword

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

To my parents, Bill and Susan,who always encouraged and believed.

‘Everybody should believe in something.I believe I’ll have another drink.’– Unknown

PROLOGUE: DIGGING IN THE DIRT

THIS STORY IS TRUE. Names have not been changed to protect the innocent, for nearly all the participants were perpetrators of nefarious schemes and bodily harm. They were low-rent thugs and booze-addled crooks surprisingly incompetent in their criminal undertakings. This is not a tale of smooth operators in silk suits. It is, instead, a story of bungling ineptitude, of a crime so convoluted, authorities were ‘admittedly sceptical’ as to its veracity when it first came to light. Once the facts were established, Bronx District Attorney Samuel J. Foley declared the scheme to be ‘the most grotesque chain of events in New York criminal history.’

On Saturday, 13 May 1933, a headline in The New York Times declared:

INSURANCE MURDER CHARGED TO FIVE TALE OF HORROR IS TOLD

Five men were charged with murder and two others were detained as material witnesses yesterday after an inquiry into charges that a derelict man had been murdered to collect $1,788 for which the defendants had him insured. A story of horror was unfolded by the police and District Attorney Samuel J. Foley of the Bronx. It concerned a man who proved so hardy of life that another man, with a false identification card, almost was done to death as a substitute. The authorities were admittedly sceptical two weeks ago when they were informed of the plot, but their first search for proof not only uncovered the murder of Michael Malloy, a former stationary fireman, but led them on to clues that indicated a woman also may have been a victim . . .

It was a Thursday when Detective Edward Leonard of the New York City Police Department’s Homicide Squad dropped by Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County, New York. Accompanying him was Assistant District Attorney Arthur Carney and Dr Charles E. Hochman, assistant medical examiner for the Bronx. The date was 11 May 1933. With a flash of his badge, Leonard introduced himself and his entourage to Alex Medovich, the grave superintendent on duty that afternoon. Motioning to Carney, Leonard explained they had a court order authorising the exhumation of grave No. 2070. Medovich nodded and led the way, taking the men on a brief tour past grand mausoleums and ornate angels carved in stone.

Buried in grave No. 2070 was a man who – up until his violent end – had distinguished himself as a marvel of resilience. He was a tragic figure and extraordinary fellow if only because the circumstances of his death had been so outrageous. Those who pursued his demise had invested much sweat and toil in realising their ambition. In life, he was a worthy adversary – though it seemed he was unaware of the forces plotting against him.

Leonard pulled his notebook from an inside jacket pocket. He flipped through its pages and briefly reviewed the case’s particulars. There were five suspects: a swarthy speakeasy owner, a paralytic drunk of a bartender, a psychotic cabbie, a crooked undertaker and a greengrocer. Three of them were already in the Bronx County Jail for unrelated crimes. Suspect number six was a well-known – and now dead – Bronx thug named Anthony ‘Tough Tony’ Bastone, a gentleman cut down in a hail of gunfire only two months prior. No sooner had Tough Tony claimed a cold slab in the Bronx morgue than police began hearing rumours of a sinister conspiracy. It was a story of shocking degradation. The information investigators received paved a twisted path to Ferncliff Cemetery. It was here, after two weeks of wading through the dregs of humanity, that Leonard was sent by Inspector Henry Bruckman – head of the Homicide Squad – to dig for answers.

‘This is it.’

Medovich’s words derailed Leonard’s train of thought. They were in the St Francis section of the cemetery, an area set aside for charity graves. In front of them was a single stone. The name on it was Nicholas Mellory. He’d been laid to rest on 24 February, just two days following his death on George Washington’s Birthday. The grave was devoid of flowers or any other offering to indicate he was missed. Nope, he was dead; gone and – until now – forgotten.

‘Dig it up,’ Leonard said.

The lawmen and the medical examiner watched as two labourers, supervised by Medovich, began their arduous task. Eight feet down, their shovels hit wood. Leonard ordered them to bring the coffin up. It was a cheap pine box. The lid had caved in under the weight of the earth. The lining was soaked through. Inside was a corpse covered in filth and wearing an undershirt, pants, drawers, shoes and stockings. Blood, still moist, was visible on the deceased’s face. Dr Hochman bent down to get a closer look and noticed that the face and neck were ‘pinkish red or cherry red in colour.’

The body was loaded into the city’s mortuary wagon and taken to the morgue at Fordham Hospital. There it was stripped and cleaned, then photographed for the record. The time was 6.30 p.m. Hochman noted that the body was ‘in a fairly good state of preservation.’ The pinkish discolouration he had first noted at the cemetery was in greater evidence now on the face, neck and back, as well as on the back of the arms and legs. Notes were made and additional photographs were taken for evidence. At 7.45 p.m., Detective Leonard brought a man named John McNally into the morgue.

‘Do you know the man on the table?’ Leonard asked. McNally nodded.

‘Is that the man you knew to be insured and buried under the name Nicholas Mellory?’

‘That’s him,’ McNally replied.

‘Did you know him by any other name?’

‘I knew him by his real name.’

‘Which is?’

‘Michael Malloy,’ McNally said.

McNally, twenty-six, a petty crook with multiple convictions behind him, was being held as a material witness in the case. Not long after police picked up on the rumours of Malloy’s death, McNally was busted on an unrelated charge of carrying a concealed weapon. Little did authorities know at the time that they had nabbed a small cog in a vast machine. While he sat in the Bronx County Jail, word reached McNally through the ‘inmate grapevine’ that police were investigating the possible demise of one Michael Malloy, a man with whom McNally had been acquainted through violent circumstance.

Realising that his prior record made him eligible for a lengthy sentence, McNally approached the district attorney and said he’d been offered $200 to do something quite nasty to Malloy. Larceny and burglary were his things, not murder. Thus, he ultimately passed on the unscrupulous offer. The information he provided was now helping investigators assemble the jumbled pieces of a complex puzzle. Having identified the body, McNally was hauled back to his cell.

By 9 p.m., Hochman was ready to start the autopsy. ‘The body is that of a male white adult, six foot high or tall,’ Hochman noted. ‘His approximate weight is 180 pounds. The hair was brown. Brown eyelids. The iris was brown. No rigor mortis present.’ Early signs of decomposition were evident by the skin slip, or the ease with which the skin slipped off when touched. There was green discolouration to the abdomen and the front of both thighs. Both the upper and lower right eyelids were tinged blue, as was the lower left eyelid. There was no hint of embalming.

Having concluded his external examination, Hochman applied scalpel to skin and opened the body with incisions stretching down from the shoulders. Peeling back flesh and muscle, he saw that the insides were ‘cherry red in colour; intensely so.’ After sawing through the rib cage, he removed the sternum and lungs. The heart was of natural size, though Hochman noted that there ‘was a moderate amount of epicardial fat.’ Again, the cherry red discolouration was evident on the inner lining of the heart cavity and the bronchial membrane of the lungs.

Malloy’s exhumed corpse.

The stomach was empty. The intestines and bladder had collapsed. Hochman dissected the neck and removed the larynx and trachea. Neither showed signs of trauma. Replacing scalpel with bone saw, Hochman got to work on the cranium. The musculature covering the scalp was discoloured cherry red. Removing the skullcap, Hochman saw the same discolouration on the top part of the skull.

With an eyedropper, he took blood samples from the heart, specifically the aorta. He placed the samples in a test tube, adding an equal amount of sodium hydroxide. The death certificate filed at the time of the body’s interment listed the cause of death as ‘lobar pneumonia.’ The certificate was signed by Dr Frank A. Manzella, former Republican alderman from the Twentieth District in Harlem. Hochman knew lobar pneumonia had nothing to do with this death. Several days earlier, detectives had paid Hochman a visit. Was it possible, they asked him, to detect carbon monoxide poisoning in a body buried for three months? Hochman answered in the affirmative.

He eyed the contents of the test tube. If carbon monoxide was not present, the blood – mixed with sodium hydroxide – would turn a greenish brown, or black. Traces of carbon monoxide would result in the blood staying red. ‘The result of that test,’ Hochman noted, ‘was strongly positive. The cause of death was asphyxiation by carbon monoxide.’

It was a crude manner of extermination, but one that had been broached only after every alternative had been exhausted.

Chapter 1

TheMurder Trust

TONY MARINO’S JOINT at 3775 Third Avenue in the Bronx was not an establishment one would call classy. It was, in fact, a rather squalid affair, containing four round tables, several chairs, a mangy three-cushioned sofa propped against one wall and a makeshift bar measuring about twelve feet in length. There was a cramped lavatory in the back. All this was kept from view by a partition. Observing the building, the casual passerby would notice nothing more than an empty storefront.

The few regulars Marino’s establishment boasted were of unsavoury character, perpetrators of mischief and violence. Most were unemployed, more interested in a sip of drink than looking for a day’s work. Granted, there was little of the latter. The glitz and glamour of the 1920s had succumbed to the desperation of the 1930s. Shoulders were slumped under the heavy burden of economic depression.

At twenty-seven, Marino was a mess of a man, being not only a shabby dresser, but also syphilitic. By his own account, he was harangued by frequent bouts of the ‘clap and blue balls’. He was not a man who sensed any urgency in receiving treatment for such nagging conditions. He allowed the syphilis to reach ‘a pretty well-advanced’ stage before he sought medical attention and had ‘the marks to prove it’. After coming down with the clap in his teens, he paid a visit to the Board of Health on Pearl Street. A doctor there ‘wanted to ship me over to the Island’ for treatment at Metropolitan Hospital. Having no desire to be shipped anywhere, he simply ‘ran away’ and failed to follow up on any treatment.

The storefront concealing Marino’s speakeasy.

This did not bode well for his young wife, who claimed Marino passed on to her his ‘venereal issues.’ She was unaware of her afflictions until she became pregnant with their child. ‘I went to see a doctor, and a blood test was taken,’ she said. They lived in less than harmonious matrimony at 1918 Pilgrim Avenue in the Bronx. Marino described himself as having quite a nasty temper and was prone to violent tantrums, during which he smashed furniture. According to his wife, Elinor, whom he married on 13 August 1928, Marino ‘once put the stove into the hall and proceeded to smash the furniture with an axe and then ran into the street with the axe in his hand. On numerous occasions, he became so violent that it was with difficulty that we were able to restrain him. On several occasions, he threatened to turn the gas on in our room and kill the baby and myself.’

He attributed such behaviour to a childhood accident. As a boy, Marino lived with his family at 186 Lincoln Avenue. When he was twelve, he fell down four flights of stairs at the residence. The fall left him concussed and with a permanent scar on his left temple. It was not long after he recovered from his wounds that his family alleged he began acting ‘queer’. He made weird noises and stayed out all night. He cut classes and randomly slugged people. He would coerce his younger brother, John, into shoplifting for him, beating him up when he refused. ‘We’d walk past a bakery or something,’ his brother said, ‘and he’d see a cake and say something like, “Gee, that cake sure looks nice.” If I didn’t grab it for him, he’d deck me.’ When he wasn’t punching people, he was pulling odd faces at them. ‘He’d do funny things with his eyes, or stick his tongue out at people,’ his sister, Rose, said.

He was, according to his brother, a constant smart-ass. ‘He was troublesome and gave the most peculiar and queer answers to simple questions. On one occasion, I recollect a teacher asked him if he had a piano at home. He said that he did, and the teacher asked him whether he played it. He answered that he did, with his “feets”.’ Other family members thought there was something ‘radically wrong’ with young Tony. Some relatives he visited in Philadelphia ‘felt from his conduct, behaviour and talk, that he was crazy’.

His behaviour and penchant for ditching classes eventually got him kicked out of school in the sixth grade. Things only seemed to deteriorate from there. Following the death of his mother when Marino was nine, he tried to kill himself on at least two occasions. ‘When my mother died, he became very violent and tried to throw himself out of a five-story window,’ his brother said. ‘It was with considerable difficulty and trouble that we prevented him from committing suicide.’

His second attempt was an unsuccessful go at hanging.

When Marino turned sixteen, ‘he came in contact with women of ill repute and, by reason of his friendships, he contracted syphilis and also suffered from “blue balls”, which necessitated an operation.’ This did nothing to enhance his temperament. He took great pleasure in putting ‘money in front of a person and when one attempted to pick it up, he would violently push them away, causing them to fall, or he would step on their hands.’ He staggered through life with minimal direction, staying away from home night after night and ‘never followed any steady employment.’ Throughout his adolescence and most of his twenties, he lurched from one dead-end job to another.

Tony Marino.

Then, sometime in the late 1920s, he ventured into the speakeasy trade. He went into business with an unnamed associate and opened a no-name establishment in Harlem, on Park Avenue at 128th Street. It was not, however, an amicable partnership, and eventually – for reasons unknown – the partner ‘got disgusted with him and left the place’. It was this partner who had fronted the operation’s money. After the business was left in Marino’s sole charge, it promptly went under. But he was soon at it again and somehow managed to open a dive at 3775 Third Avenue in the Bronx. Unlike some flashier joints, there was no pink champagne bubbling into chilled glasses at Marino’s. Nor did the sound of hot jazz pervade the premises. There was, however, the occasional game of pinochle accompanied by the sound of someone hitting the floor in a drunken stupor.

And still his ‘venereal issues’ festered, inflicting an increasingly heavy toll on his marriage. Elinor was convinced her husband was suffering from a number of mental maladies brought on by his afflictions. She noticed things other family members had pointed out. ‘He made funny faces while I was talking to people,’ she said. He would stand ‘behind them making faces. Of course, the people wouldn’t see him, but I would see him doing it.’ In 1931, she left him, moved in with her father and took a three-month sabbatical from the combative marriage. ‘I told him to go to the hospital and get treatments,’ she said. ‘That is why I left him and that is why I kept arguing with him, telling him to go. He would tell me he was his own doctor. That was what the arguments were about.’

A rather nasty medical development involving his nether regions finally persuaded him to do what his wife’s constant pleading had failed to. He sought treatment with Dr Alphonse Ziviello, a licensed physician and surgeon with an office at 2583 Marion Avenue. Between the end of August and the end of September 1932, Marino sought treatment with Dr Ziviello half a dozen times for syphilis, during which the doctor formed his own opinion of Marino. ‘He is not the type that the average layman is,’ he noted. ‘Very peculiar in his mode of action, in his mode of speech. His speech was not that of a man of his age. More or less simple. That of a child.’

Thus it was the doctor’s opinion that Marino belonged penned up in a sanatorium for ‘observation and treatment’. Instead, Marino returned to his speakeasy. It was an operation he basically ran on his own, though he did employ ‘bartender’ Joseph Murphy – known as ‘Red’ to the few patrons who frequented the joint. He was hired to pour drinks for a dollar-a-day wage that Marino paid sporadically. But as a bartender, Murphy spent more time sampling the inventory than pouring it into customers’ glasses. He consumed vast quantities of whiskey, often drinking from the moment he woke up to the time he went to bed. The bottle took priority over all aspects of his life.

He drank more than he ate and he rarely bathed. Being homeless, Murphy spent all his time at the speakeasy, sleeping on its mangy sofa at night with a single blanket to keep himself warm. It was luxurious compared to the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. He had spent many nights sleeping on subway platforms, or on a grungy mattress in one of the quarter-a-night motels he frequented in Harlem.

Life had never been easy for Murphy. He was born Archie Mott on 24 May 1906, in New York City. He was an unruly youngster, a runaway who spent his childhood being bounced from one foster home to another. At the age of ten, he was taken off the streets by the Children’s Aid Society of America and placed in the care of a Reverend Greene, an ‘elderly and retired’ clergyman who lived by himself on a farm in rural Delaware. According to a report on Mott’s history put together by the Children’s Aid Society, ‘This was a most excellent home and Mr Greene took a deep interest in the boy, apparently greatly disliking the idea of having to admit his failures of making something of him.’ But Mott’s penchant for general misbehaviour proved too taxing for the reverend, who – after one year as Mott’s legal guardian – was forced to place the boy in another home. He was left in the care of a Mr William J. Bryan, of Barrington, Delaware.

Mott remained immune to the calming qualities of his stable environment. ‘In this home,’ states the report, ‘the complaints were that he frequently ran away, was always making plans to get tobacco and cigarettes, was constantly doing things he was told over and over not to do both in school and at home, and “the truth was not him.”’ At one point, he received ‘a good spanking’ for his ‘outrageous behaviour and disobedience’. So it was that Mott was placed in a new home after no more than a month.

On 4 August 1917, he took up residence with Mr and Mrs Harry Lane, of Federalsburg, Maryland. The Lanes had two young daughters – described as ‘nice and refined’ – aged eleven and thirteen. It was hoped that the young female presence would have a somewhat soothing effect on the bristling young man. It apparently had ‘none whatever.’ In fact, having the girls around only seemed to exacerbate matters. He cared not for the delicate sensitivities of the female gender and would use language of the most vile kind in their presence. He was dragged to Sunday school every week, much to his chagrin. He let his lack of enthusiasm for the theological ramblings of others be known by stamping through mud ‘like a child of five’ on the way to and from classes.

The end of his association with the Lane family came when Mrs Lane’s gold watch mysteriously disappeared one evening. It was no mystery where the timepiece had gone. Young Archie found himself besieged by accusations from both Mrs Lane and her husband. Although he denied any knowledge of the watch’s whereabouts, his claims of innocence fell on deaf ears. The watch’s disappearance, coupled with his habitual refusal to obey Mrs Lane or ‘do anything for her’ wore out his welcome with yet another family. This time it had taken a mere six weeks.

His knack for exhausting the patience of others led to severe beatings in his next foster home. Arthur Rosser was a young farmer with a spread just outside Federalsburg. Mrs Rosser was a former schoolteacher, and it was hoped that her guidance and enthusiasm for education would turn Mott around. When he was placed in the Rossers’ care, the Children’s Aid Society cautioned ‘one or two “good” whippings’ might be necessary to keep the boy in line. However, ‘if these did not suffice to bring him to an understanding, it would be useless to continue.’ During his eight-month stay with the Rossers, he ran away no fewer than four times, lied repeatedly and was a general nuisance. He was removed from their care after an anonymous letter was sent to the society alleging that Mott was being ‘cruelly treated’. A subsequent investigation proved the allegations to be true, and the Rossers were relieved of their foster duties.

With little hope left, the society placed Mott with another family in a last feeble effort to give the boy a proper home. On 18 May 1918, Mott took up residence with Mr George Seymour and his family in Breston, Maryland. Things progressed in a manner similar to Mott’s past experiences. There were the usual reports of lying, foul language and unruliness. But to this list of misdeeds, he now added bed-wetting. On 26 October, he ran away from the home after receiving ‘a good whipping for having dirtied … and wet his bed’. This was Mott’s third such offence despite there being a chamber pot in his room. He was found two days later in the woods, where he had made the acquaintance of a homeless man.

Realising it was quite impossible to straighten the young boy out, the Children’s Aid Society shipped him off for ‘incorrigibility’ to the Connecticut School for Boys in Meridan on 15 February 1919. It was not the sort of place where someone of Mott’s temperament was destined to excel. He couldn’t read or write, and played truant with grating regularity. Not long after Archie’s arrival, the school’s superintendent began to suspect the boy’s problems were symptoms of a more complex issue. He called the boy to his office one afternoon for a heart-to-heart and concluded: ‘The boy is non compos mentis. Knows nothing about his parents … Doesn’t know where he went to school, nor how long he was there. The committing judge had full knowledge of this boy’s mental condition.’

Exactly one month after entering the boys’ school, he was shipped off to the Mansfield State Training School and Hospital, and remained a patient there for the next ten years. There he began to display a moderate interest in his studies and took to practising the trombone and violin. His musical abilities were described as ‘fairly good’. He often lent a hand in the dining room and bakery. ‘His conduct,’ according to hospital records, ‘was usually very good but occasionally he became moody and sulky.’ He once stole money from a hospital worker, was often untruthful and ‘could not be relied upon’. Still, there was a noticeable improvement in his behaviour. This did not prevent doctors, though, from classifying him as ‘feeble-minded … a subnormal individual unable to get along without supervision and usually unable to make a living on their own without supervision, and who may or may not be a menace to society.’

An evaluation by a hospital psychiatrist in 1924 determined eighteen-year-old Mott’s mental age to be ‘9 years, 6 months’ with an IQ of 56. He took a liking to sports and often partook in various games and physical activities. Movies enthralled him, and he enjoyed dancing. Then, on 31 July 1929, he somehow slipped away from his ward, sneaked off the grounds and made his way into the real world. A hospital report noted: ‘Information was received that in all probability he was in New York.’

On the streets, he cared for himself. He would ‘sleep in hallways, eat from garbage cans and the like and would occasionally be given a meal by some friendly or good-hearted housewife.’ He floundered his way from one odd job to another, making just enough to support his ongoing relationship with the bottle. Some reports indicate he found work at one point as a chemist. By the time he stumbled into Marino’s one evening in mid-1932, he had a job cleaning and repairing awnings. His sole possessions were the overcoat and worn workman’s clothes he had on his back. While it seemed he could afford to down considerable amounts of whiskey, he would later say that owning underwear was beyond his financial means.

Marino took pity on Murphy and offered him a chance to work behind the bar. It was a great opportunity for a man who later confessed to drinking heavily ‘morning, day and night’. If Murphy’s constant thirst worried Marino, he did little about it – a dangerous attitude for one whose business constantly teetered on the precipice of financial disaster. In 1930s New York, speakeasies were as common as illicit martinis. Marino’s drab hutch – one of the more lower-class establishments around – had little chance of competing with the big boys in Harlem and Greenwich Village. But for the man blessed with a conniving entrepreneurial spirit, there was always a way to generate easy cash. In early 1932, Marino’s was twenty-seven-year-old Mabelle Carlson.

A blonde hairdresser originally from Washington, D.C., Mabelle – described as the ‘black sheep’ of a once wealthy family – moved to New York in December 1931. Distraught over the death of her mother and a failed marriage to a D.C. businessman, she arrived in the Big Apple intent on starting a new life. She unfortunately picked the wrong city. No one knows what cosmic alignment brought her into contact with Anthony Marino – but of all the crummy gin joints, she had to walk into his. The story Marino would later tell was one of kind-heartedness and pity. She was, he said, a habitué of his drinking establishment. As she appeared destitute and had no place to lay her head, he extended to her the comforts of his home. By this time, Marino’s wife had moved back in with her husband, only to discover that he was bringing another woman home ‘sometimes every night’. At this point, they were living at 3806 Third Avenue, just several doors from Marino’s place of business.

Elinor did not take kindly to the intrusion into her marriage but was ‘chased all over the house’ by a raving Marino whenever she voiced her concerns. Again she moved out with their one-year-old son, this time taking up residence with her sister-in-law and Marino’s father, Angelo. Thus, Marino was left alone to pursue his own insidious designs. At 10.30 a.m. on 17 March 1932, police responded to a call at the Third Avenue address and found poor Mabelle dead in bed.

Dr David H. Smith, assistant medical examiner for the County of the Bronx, performed the autopsy at Fordham Morgue. His verdict: ‘Bronchial pneumonia, terminal. Acute and chronic alcoholism.’ His report included a note based on information provided by Marino: ‘History of drinking for the past three weeks. Refused to stop, go to hospital or see a doctor.’

Marino told the authorities he had arrived home the night before and found the girl lying on her bed. He said he thought she was sleeping. Although Dr Smith concluded that Mabelle’s death was free of ‘suspicious circumstances’, he did note an ‘old hematoma of the left lower [eye]lid, somewhat masked by the application of some flesh powder.’ He found other contusions on her body.

For Marino, this ‘tragedy’ was offset by the fact that Mabelle had made him beneficiary of a $2,000 life insurance policy she had secured from Prudential. Less than a week after she died, Marino showed up at Dr Smith’s East 94th Street office with insurance papers completed and signed. ‘There was nothing concerned with the death to arouse suspicion,’ Dr Smith said. ‘The autopsy confirmed a great deal of Marino’s story and it appeared to be just another one of those natural deaths brought on by alcoholism.’

For at least five days before her death, Mabelle had fought a losing battle with pneumonia, Dr Smith said. Not until the following year – and the ordeal of Michael Malloy – would the morbid truth behind Mabelle’s demise come to light. The night she died had been particularly brisk for spring. A hard edge to the air brought with it the promise of a morning frost – but there was warmth to be found in a bottle. Marino plied Mabelle with whiskey until she was babbling incoherently. Then he gave her some more. Dr Smith later theorised that Mabelle was probably force-fed the alcohol, as she would have been too weak from illness to serve herself. Marino, satisfied that Mabelle was severely sauced, helped her to bed. But before doing so, he moved the bed under an open window and poured ice water over the sheets and mattress. He stripped her naked and wrapped her in the sodden bedclothes. It did the trick.

The body, at the request of Mabelle’s elderly aunt, was shipped back to Washington, D.C. for burial. On Mabelle’s death certificate, her occupation was listed as Marino’s housekeeper. With Mabelle gone, Marino continued his shabby existence. Whatever he spent the insurance money on, it’s clear he didn’t splurge on classing up his business. He was again strapped for cash by the end of 1932. The authorities, meanwhile, remained clueless. As far as Marino was concerned, Mabelle’s murder remained a masterstroke of cunning. In the meantime, he moved in with his wife, sister and father. The paternal presence did nothing to ease his demeanour. According to his wife, ‘he beat me and his sister every morning.’

He would soon exercise his violent impulses on a new target.

‘I cannot prove much to you about Michael Malloy, who he was or where he came from,’ District Attorney Samuel J. Foley would later say in court. ‘Malloy is to me an unknown. The proof will develop that during the time through which we trace his movements, he was a derelict hanging out in speakeasies, working, doing odd jobs for a bit of food or shelter, probably never on salary, and always working for drinks when he could get them.’

Newspaper articles of the day simply referred to Malloy as a ‘speakeasy derelict.’

It seems he hailed from County Donegal, Ireland, and was probably swept across the Atlantic in one of the many tides of European immigration that came ashore in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He arrived in obscurity and lived in anonymity, but through death he would achieve cult immortality. By all accounts – including his own – he was a loner, a man bereft of friends or family. A staggering drunk, his only acquaintances were those he nudged elbows with at the bar. Newspapers put his age at sixty years old. Malloy, wrote the Daily Mirror, was just one of many pieces of ‘flotsam and jetsam in the swift current of underworld speakeasy life; those no-longer responsible derelicts who stumble through the last days of their lives in a continual haze of “Bowery Smoke”.’ He worked numerous slum jobs, sweeping alleyways and collecting garbage. During a certain high point, he worked as a stationary fireman. But when that job fell through – sometime in mid-1932 – he returned to street cleaning.

Occasionally, he did work for Pasqua’s Burial Service at 246 East 116th Street, in Harlem. On days when he wasn’t stupefied with drink, he swept the place out and polished the coffins. Sometimes he would help make a corpse look dapper for its open-casket send-off. In exchange for his sporadic labour, Malloy received a few scant dollars and was sometimes allowed to sleep in the mortuary at night – such was the beneficent nature of Malloy’s boss, Frank Pasqua. At twenty-four, Pasqua was married with a newborn son to care for. He had never graduated high school, opting at the age of seventeen to go to work for his father, Ralph, in the family business. But working around dead people rarely provided Pasqua the chance to engage in meaningful conversation. So it was that he often grabbed a drink after work – with Malloy in tow – stopping by the little watering hole at 3775 Third Avenue.

Pasqua was on friendly terms with the establishment’s owner. Both being married with young kids, they found camaraderie in their tales of husbandly hardship. Often, the two men conversed in their families’ native Italian, as if concealing a dark secret. In fact, they were. In his duties as undertaker, Pasqua was frequently in contact with insurance agents. On many occasions, he accompanied beneficiaries to the offices of insurance companies to collect the amount of the policy. This ensured he received payment for his undertaking duties. Pasqua’s contacts proved useful when Mabelle Carlson sought life insurance at Marino’s urging. Grateful for his assistance, Marino had paid Pasqua a small fee following Mabelle’s untimely departure.

Unless he was passed out somewhere, Malloy could be found most nights hunched over Marino’s bar with his hands lovingly cupped around a glass of precious liquid amber. The salty lure of sardines on the free lunch tray would occasionally pry him away from the bar, for nothing complemented a glass of whiskey better than a sardine sandwich – or another glass of whiskey.

He was, to begin with, a good-paying customer, welcomed by Marino whenever he sidled up to the bar. Such open-armed hospitality only encouraged Malloy to partake of the bottle with increasing regularity. Soon, he was spending more time in Marino’s than he was at the occasional odd job that paid his way. His tab began to mount. The charming anecdotes he imparted between swigs of drink were not as charming as hard cash. When Marino made this clear, Malloy hit the streets with his broom. His tab, however, continued to stretch beyond his meagre financial means and soon led to a grim inevitability. One evening in November 1931 Marino broke the bad news to Malloy: his line of credit had been cancelled. Malloy was shattered. His pleading eyes and promise of future payments carried no weight. Denied his panacea and feeling dejected, he staggered out into the cold night of a Depression winter. But he returned the following evening and began his nightly ritual of appealing to the charitable nature of Marino’s few other customers. Malloy deemed it a humanitarian effort. Marino simply considered it begging.

Malloy spent most of his time in an alcohol-induced daze and lived what many considered to be a wasted existence. Little did anyone know he stood on the brink of securing his legacy. Sixty years of anonymity were about to give way to a tale of a hardy soul, a man who would prove a marvel of near-indestructibility. Oblivious to the schemes swirling around him, he would simply stumble from one episode to another and defy the treacherous path journeyed by Mabelle Carlson before him.

And it all began with a simple complaint.

‘Business,’ Marino said, twirling the drink in his glass, ‘is bad.’

He was sitting at a table with Pasqua in the cramped proprietor’s room in the back of the speakeasy. Also with them was Marino regular Daniel Kriesberg, a twenty-nine-year-old wholesale greengrocer and father of three. It was July 1932, and all three men felt light in the wallet. Marino stared through the beaded curtain that separated the small room from the rest of the speakeasy. A few shabby denizens were leaning on the bar, sipping drinks. Another guy was standing at the lunch tray, eating off it with his fingers. Barflies and derelicts, Marino thought. ‘What? They don’t think none of this stuff costs anything?’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Half of them don’t pay nothing when they leave here.’

Murphy and Malloy stood behind the bar, stealing swigs from a bottle. Malloy, taking advantage of Marino’s loose criteria for employment, now occasionally worked as a ‘bartender’ to cover his drinking expenses. Sometimes, he slept in the speakeasy overnight, taking a spot on the floor near Murphy’s sofa. Pasqua eyed Malloy’s teetering figure, the head back, a bottle jutting upward from the mouth. Surely, the man was no more than a few sips from the grave. Death was never far removed from Pasqua’s thinking. It was part of his job. But at that moment, something in the undertaker clicked. Spurred by this random – and seemingly innocent – thought, an old idea resurfaced, aglow with new vitality.

‘Why don’t you take out insurance on Malloy?’ Pasqua asked. ‘I can take care of the rest.’

There followed a moment of contemplative silence. It occurred to Marino that Malloy did indeed present an ideal opportunity for financial betterment. He was a raging drunk. He had no friends and no family. Should some unfortunate mishap relieve Malloy of his mortal obligation, there would be no one to miss him. His physical condition – or so it seemed – left much to be desired. Marino assumed that years of hard living had left Malloy battered and feeble. It would take little to put him in the ground, and the money would certainly be nice. He looked at Kriesberg, who stared back at him with hopeful expectation. Apparently, the grocery business wasn’t making ends meet.

Like his drinking partners, Kriesberg was a family man. He had a wife and three kids waiting for him at home at 653 Cauldwell Avenue, near Westchester Avenue, in the Bronx. Unlike Marino, however, his marriage appears to have been a cordial affair. Kriesberg often professed his love for his family and wanted nothing more than to provide for them. That eagerness led him down a dark path.

Now, under Kriesberg’s expectant stare, it took Marino little time to convince himself that the plan was a good one. Looking at Pasqua, Marino said, ‘Sure.’

The three men chuckled and raised their glasses. On the face of it, the moment was a lacklustre microcosm in the grand sweep of time, missing the weight of those historic moments that signify the commencement of some great struggle. At that moment – though Marino, Pasqua and Kriesberg failed to realise it – life was very simple. They were nothing more than three guys looking to make a quick-and-ungodly buck. But the clinking of glasses and the consecration of their deal forever cast simplicity aside.

Later, the tabloids would dub the conspirators ‘The Murder Trust’. The name implied slick precision and deadly skill. Such an implication could not have been further from the truth.

Chapter 2

Rejected

MICHAEL MALLOY emerged uneasily from the comfortable oblivion of unconsciousness. Behind heavy lids, his eyeballs throbbed in haphazard time to the arrhythmic beat in his skull. His brain pounded out an uneasy cadence between aching temples. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt as though it were garbed in a fur coat. His lips felt thick and slimy, like two Polish sausages slapped together. He lay motionless, his eyes still closed, mustering the determination to face yet another day. He moaned softly and slowly opened one eye to the swirling blur of his surroundings. It was as if the room had a kaleidoscopic quality to it. Nothing at first was clearly defined. There were no straight angles or sharp edges. Everything was wavy as if he were viewing it from underwater. Floating dots – the kind you see after staring directly at the sun – drifted before him in the harsh light of this unkind morning. God almighty, he had yet to open the other eye!

His stomach churned and rumbled in protest, bringing to the back of his throat the bitter taste of something he may have eaten the night before. He pushed his tongue between his lips and felt his top lip unglue itself from the bottom one. He took a deep breath. Opening the other eye was just as traumatic. Instead of everything coalescing into one cohesive image, he saw blurry twin visions of everything. This was not as bad as some mornings, when the world would appear to him in triplicate. It was this realisation that suddenly spawned in him a mild curiosity. Where the hell was he? He stared nauseously at the ceiling and tried to think back to the night before. As on most mornings, the memory was fragmented and disjointed, like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sleeping in different places on most nights, it was often hard for him to keep track of his surroundings. A lot of these ceilings looked the same – as did the toilets (and gutters) he spent many a morning bent over.

Through the fog he remembered the melodious trickle of liquor being poured from bottles the night before. There had been light conversation and the occasional toast. Perhaps there’d even been a drinking song:

Of all the money that e’er I spent

I’ve spent it in good company

And all the harm that ever I did

Alas it was to none but me

And all I’ve done for want of wit

To memory now I can’t recall

So fill to me the parting glass

Good night and joy be with you all

In the dreary early hours of countless mornings after, recollections of nights before never reached a graceful conclusion with him, say, climbing into a nice, soft bed and sleeping the sleep of the clean and righteous. Instead, they concluded in an abrupt manner with an impenetrable wall of darkness that descended on his memory like a jackhammer. Perhaps this was because on most evenings he drank himself unconscious. He would assault his body with the hardest of liquors until it could take no more. On more than one occasion, he’d been left to sleep where he fell. To those who witnessed such episodes, it was a form of entertainment – a source of much-needed merriment during that dismal Depression winter.

Wincing, he felt the cold, hard floor beneath him. There was no pillow under his head, just the rough grain of wood. He achingly cast his gaze down the length of his body, which made its discontent known with even the slightest movement. There was a thin, unlaundered sheet draped over him. He now remembered where he was: on the floor in the middle of Tony Marino’s speakeasy. Joe Murphy lay sprawled unconscious across the sofa against the wall.

Malloy took another deep breath and sat himself upright, his neck and spine cracking like a symphony of broken walnuts. His brain shrieked and his stomach went into overdrive, dancing a pirouette around his ass. Satisfied that everything he’d consumed the night before was going to stay put, he steeled himself for his next great effort. Pushing the blanket aside, he slowly got to his feet. He stood still momentarily, glancing around him to confirm his whereabouts. Right. Now that the hard part was over, he could tackle the day. There was just one thing he needed before he got the morning off to a running start: a drink.

Michael Malloy was an alcoholic’s alcoholic. By all accounts, he would drink whatever was put in front of him. When it came to gin, whiskey, bourbon – anything distilled or brewed – he was an equal-opportunity consumer. Moderation meant nothing to him. During those days of Prohibition, he took it where he could get it. It was not uncommon for him to wake up on the floor of Marino’s and, as it was testified to in court, help himself to whatever was behind the bar before shuffling off to find whatever odd job he could get for himself that day. Murphy would later admit on the stand that he joined Malloy at the bar on those mornings for a little hair of the dog. With these two leeches clinging to his establishment, relieving it of its inventory with such frustrating regularity, perhaps it’s no surprise Marino complained his business was sinking faster than an olive in a dry martini.

Prohibition was a bummer – a fact startlingly evident in the flagrant contempt and disregard of the law exercised by countless enthusiasts for the devil’s milk. At midnight on 16 January 1920, the National Prohibition Act was ratified as the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution and made it illegal to ‘manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor’. Thus, the ill-conceived effort to legislate American morality got under way. Whiskey, gin, brandy, rum, beer, wine, ale, porter, all spiritous, vinous, malt and fermented liquors – the staples of Michael Malloy’s diet – sold containing half of 1 per cent or more of alcohol by volume and fit for getting drunk on were outlawed.

Beer taps ran dry, wine bottles were smashed and barrels of whiskey went to the axe. Its doors padlocked and its windows boarded up, the New York saloon quickly found itself banished to the realm of fond memories. This social experiment, said President Herbert Hoover, was ‘noble in motive and far-reaching in consequence’. That consequence, though probably not one envisioned by Hoover, was a quasi-underground revolution. According to a 1929 New York Times article, it was a struggle waged in ‘office buildings, restaurants, downstairs and upstairs, around the corner, everywhere’. When New York was wrung dry, the speakeasy was born.

Within a decade, noted the Times, such establishments were ‘familiar institutions of metropolitan life. And it ranges from the waterside back room or the cellar gathering place, to the deluxe speakeasy where smart New York meets.’ Unlike Marino’s, the establishments frequented by the roving Times reporter boasted ‘handsomely appointed dining rooms, soft lights, well-trained waiters, a French menu and the clink of ice in wine buckets.’ Gaining access meant learning the secret ritual, whether it be a special knock or the drop of a name. For those who knew the secret password, a delicious world of prohibited pink lady cocktails and illicit gin fizzes awaited.

The basic formula for any speakeasy was a room and a couple of bottles, according to New York Police Commissioner Grover Whalen. Many adhered to this formula, much to the chagrin of the authorities. In 1929, Whalen estimated there were more than thirty thousand speakeasies in the city. To tackle these dens of inebriation, the Prohibition Bureau assigned to New York a meagre force of two hundred agents – not all of whom were untouchable. In terms of the police, the city’s population of six million was watched over by eighteen thousand policemen – less than four thousand of whom were available for patrol during any twenty-four-hour period, according to the Times.

‘These men must patrol 5,000 miles of city streets and 175 square miles of the port,’ the paper reported, more than implying that the odds were stacked in favour of the speakeasy owner. And why not? Proprietors