Five men spent two months trying to murder the same drunk. No matter what they did, he would not die.

His name was Michael Malloy, a broken-down old Irish barfly in the Bronx during Prohibition. In 1932, a speakeasy owner named Tony Marino had an idea. He and four friends, later known as the Murder Trust, secretly took out life insurance on Malloy, then offered the old man free drinks on credit, as much as he could hold. The plan was simple. Let him drink himself to death, and collect the payout. The only flaw in the plan was Malloy himself. He drank everything they poured, passed out on the floor, and came back the next morning, thirsty for more.

So they got creative. They replaced his whiskey with antifreeze. Malloy drank a tall glass of it, smacked his lips, and asked for another. They switched to raw wood alcohol. Then turpentine. Then horse liniment spiked with rat poison. He kept drinking, and kept waking up. They fed him a sandwich of rotten sardines packed with carpet tacks and sharp metal shavings. He ate the whole thing. On a night that dropped to fourteen below zero, they carried him to a park, dumped him in the snow, and poured five gallons of water over his bare chest. He turned up two days later, complaining of a slight chill. So they paid a taxi driver to run him down at forty-five miles an hour. Malloy vanished for three weeks, then strolled back into the bar with a few cracked bones, and ordered a drink.

By now the whole neighborhood was toasting Mike the Durable. In the end, it took a rubber hose, a coal-gas jet, and a night when he finally passed out cold, to actually kill him. A crooked doctor signed it off as pneumonia, and the gang collected their money. But the story was too good to stay quiet. The police heard the whispers, dug Malloy back up, and found the gas in his blood. A little over a year later, four of the men who could not manage to kill him were dead themselves, in the electric chair.

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