Read The Many Murders of Michael Malloy

The unbelievable true story of the Irishman who refused to die
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80458-301-2
Verlag: Gill Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

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.

A former newspaper reporter, Simon Read is the author of ten works of narrative nonfiction published on both sides of the Atlantic. His most recent book is Scotland Yard: A Bloody History. Born in London, he currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona. You can reach him through his website at simonreadwriting.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Read, Simon

Leseproben

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...