True Crime Conversations · Mamamia Podcasts

The Man Who Wouldn’t Die: Inside The Nine Lives Of Untouchable Iron Mike

·40 min·2 clips

The Murder Trust moves to oysters, rotten sardines, carpet tacks, and a freezer-like park dumping.

1. True Crime Conversations focuses on Mike Malloy, the Irish immigrant whose repeated survival made his death a New York crime story. 2. Claire Murphy hosts Riley Knight, author of History's Strangest Deaths, because Knight brings the historical details behind Malloy and Harold Holt. 3. The episode asks what happens when a life-insurance scam, a Depression-era bar, and a man nicknamed Iron Mike collide. 4. Knight explains that Tony Marino owned a New York bar and had already profited from a separate life-insurance death involving freezing. 5. Marino and the bartender Joseph Murphy lure Malloy with free drinks and a policy that later lets the “Murder Trust” collect. 6. The first plan is simple alcohol poisoning, but Malloy keeps returning to the bar and drinking himself insensible. 7. When booze alone fails, the conspirators add antifreeze or engine coolant, turpentine, equine liniment, rat poison, and wood alcohol. 8. Knight notes that alcohol can counteract some of the poison, which helps explain why the drinks do not work as planned. 9. The scheme then moves into what Knight calls the “no bad ideas stage,” with oysters and whiskey, rotten sardines, carpet tacks, and more rat poison. 10. Malloy also survives being soaked with water and dumped in a frozen New York park, where police find him and take him to the station. 11. The episode stresses how the bar owner keeps losing money because Malloy drinks on credit while the insurance premiums keep being paid. 12. Knight describes the cab driver joining the conspiracy and a staged hit-and-run that runs over Malloy twice. 13. Even after that, the conspirators search newspapers for an obituary and do not realize he has survived and reached hospital. 14. The eventual killing method involves a hose from a gas faucet taped into Malloy’s mouth while he is unconscious upstairs. 15. Knight says the group then pays a shonky doctor to certify pneumonia on the death certificate. 16. Police hear the rumors, order a coronial investigation, and the coroner concludes that Malloy died from being gassed. 17. Knight’s delivery is conversational and detailed, with jokes about antifreeze, brown snakes, and the absurdity of the plans. 18. Murphy keeps the pace moving by steering from one failed attempt to the next and by asking for the practical mechanics of each death. 19. Listeners who like historical true crime, insurance scams, and unusual deaths will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners who want a tidy case summary without long historical detours may skip it.

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