And by the way, he sincerely hoped that they would be soon finished with Prohibition and the murderous supply of alcohol that it had engendered. This year, if possible.
LATER IN February the frustrated Malloy conspirators came up with yet another murder scheme. This one would be so successful that it would mock all their earlier efforts. They would use one of the most reliable of all poisons—carbon monoxide at an unbearably high dose.
Posing as factory workers, Red Murphy and Daniel Kriesberg rented a room in a nearby boardinghouse. True, it had only a bed and no other furniture, but the room was lit by gaslight; the nozzle for the illuminating gas was right on the wall above the bed.
On the night of February 22, Murphy kept Malloy’s glass full until the old man again slid unconscious to the floor. Marino, speaking loudly enough that all could hear, suggested to Murphy that he take the unconscious man home, to sleep it off. Murphy and Kriesberg then carried Malloy out the back and half-dragged, half-hauled him to the boardinghouse. The landlady, watching the trio stagger up the stairs, asked if their friend was sick. No, just drunk, they answered cheerfully.
Once they had him in bed, with the door shut, Murphy and Kriesberg worked fast. They attached a rubber hose to the gas valve and put the other end of the hose into Malloy’s mouth, packing a towel over his face to close off his nostrils. Then they turned on the gas.
MALLOY HAD withstood ethyl alcohol, methyl alcohol, rotten fish, fermented oysters, broken glass, metal slivers, an ice-water soaking, and an automobile ambush. But carbon monoxide was something else again. Later Murphy would estimate that it took less than five minutes before Malloy was dead.
Kriesberg, once he confessed, would add a little color, emulating the sound of the gas hissing like a snake as it flowed through the little rubber tube. He’d listened to it until he suddenly realized that Malloy was no longer breathing, that he could hear only the snakelike hiss of illuminating gas going into a dead man’s lungs.
TOXICOLOGISTS HAD longknown that carbon monoxide killed by saturating the blood, muscling oxygen out of the way, replacing the transporter protein oxyhemoglobin with suffocating amounts of carboxyhemoglobin.
They were less sure of what made a lethal amount. The medical texts set the fatal number at somewhere between 65 and 80 percent saturation, at a minimum. But Gettler had begun to suspect that carbon monoxide might be fatal at even lower levels. The gas was such a consistent killer that it might be deadly at lower levels. Once again he decided to use his connection to the New York City morgue to test out that idea.
He tackled the job with the help of one of his favorite students, Henry Freimuth, an admired cardsharp and a first-class chemist. They started tallying illuminating gas deaths that had come into the morgue over previous months, listing for each the carbon monoxide content of the blood at time of death:
CASE 2: Male, age 38, found dead with rubber hose leading from open gas jet to mouth. Saturation 53.6 percent.
CASE 9: Male, age 35, found dead, one gas stove jet open and not lighted; a coffee pot had boiled over and extinguished the flame. Saturation 75 percent.
CASE 50: Male, age 20, found dead in a nonventilated one-car garage.
Deceased had been repairing the auto motor. Saturation 49.3 percent.
CASE 57: Female, age 40, found dead after a residence fire (fire consumed oxygen, burning material released carbon monoxide). Saturation 51.9 percent.
CASE 65: Male, age 76, found dead in bed. Coal gas had leaked from a defective flue. Saturation 61.9 percent.
Using sixty-five cases, the two scientists found that almost 10 percent of the people in their sample had died with less than 50 percent saturation by carbon monoxide. Some had been killed by as little as 30 percent. Another 14.5 percent died with carboxyhemoglobin in the 50-to-60 percent range. More than 70 percent, as the textbooks predicted, had died after carbon monoxide reached saturation level, between 60 and 80 percent.
But it was the lower numbers that interested Gettler. They reinforced his suspicion that carbon monoxide was one of nature’s most efficient killers. More than that, they illustrated one of the ongoing problems in toxicology—the difficulty of establishing a lethal dose. Some people were exceptionally vulnerable to certain poisons, while others were extraordinarily resistant.
Mike Malloy could have been, if anyone had paid attention, a case study in methyl alcohol resistance. But he would eventually come to fascinate Gettler for other reasons. How much carbon monoxide had it taken to kill such a natural survivor? And could they actually figure that out? How long did carbon monoxide saturation remain measurable in a buried corpse?
MALLOY’S BODY went into a pauper’s grave within a few days of his death.
The murder conspiracy had located a physician—a former alderman, in fact, who was willing, for another cut of the money, to sign a death certificate saying that the old drunk had died of methyl alcohol poisoning.
The funeral home director, Frank Pasqua, barely waited for the certificate to be signed before he got the body in the ground. When Metropolitan Life paid its $800 share of the insurance money, Pasqua demanded extra for the burial expenses, ignoring the obvious fact that he’d let the city bury their poison victim.
It was an unnecessary bit of cheating, a sign that things were not going to finish particularly well.
IN APRIL 1933 legal beer (3.2 percent alcohol by weight) made its triumphant, celebrated, long-awaited return.
The nation’s breweries started working round the clock. One plant alone sent 350,000 cases and 18,000 kegs of beer to New York. The entire supply was consumed within two days. People bought nickel bottles by the dozen in grocery stores and from street stands. When those ran out, they bought dime bottles. Restaurants were packed with diners lingering over their gold-filled steins.
Some of the speakeasies cheerfully converted to legitimacy. They removed their concealing screens and created little beer gardens with bright-colored tablecloths and baskets of pretzels. Exuberant politicians, watching the beer flow like water, predicted that the Eighteenth Amendment would be repealed by the end of the year, buoyed by “the wet majority of a thirsty nation.”
At Marino’s dark little bar, though, the screen of dirty boxes stayed in place, the booze remained of the bootlegged variety, and the mood was not joyful. Not at all.
IN MAY the Malloy murder conspiracy went to pieces.
One of Tony Marino’s shady associates had been shot to death in a quarrel at the speakeasy. Bartender Red Murphy was jailed as a material witness to the murder. And Prudential Insurance had proved unexpectedly suspicious, refusing to pay its share of the death benefits. The Prudential agent was especially put off by how quickly Malloy had been buried.
Even worse, stories were starting to circulate, over card games and drinks in other Bronx bars, of the man who refused to die. The regulars at Marino’s had picked up fragments of the story and passed them on. An ever-wilder legend of the unkillable Mike floated around the shabby neighborhoods along Third Avenue. The members of the conspiracy who hadn’t received their money—the cab man who’d gotten only $20 of his promised $150—complained to their friends. The story of Mike the Durable was repeated so many times that even the beat cops heard it. One of them mentioned it to a homicide detective. After a little asking around, the detective recounted the tale to the Bronx district attorney. The prosecutor was curious enough to order an investigation.
Too many were willing to share their part of the story; too much evidence was waiting to be found. The fortunes of the murder syndicate members, such as they were, changed with the speed of a runaway elevated. On May 12 the district attorney announced that he was bringing Marino, Pasqua, Murphy, Kriesberg, and Hershy Green (the cab driver) before the Bronx grand jury. Five days and twenty witnesses later, the jury returned first-degree murder indictments against all the conspirators.
The doctor who signed the death certificate was indicted as an accessory. He pleaded guilty to failing to report a suspiciou
s death and agreed to testify. The appalled Green accepted an assault charge—after all, he hadn’t succeeded in killing Malloy—and agreed to testify in exchange for a ten-year sentence.
The others proved tougher, though. Murphy wouldn’t say a word. Kriesberg suddenly decided that he wasn’t sure whether or not gas had killed Mike Malloy. Marino claimed to have memory problems. The district attorney decided to delay the trial until autumn, giving himself more time to gather proof of the murder charges.
IN MID-JUNE, Bellevue Hospital and New York University announced the formation of a new department: forensic medicine. It would be the first of its kind in the country, as the dean of the university medical college put it, bringing the United States closer to the level of medical detective work done in Europe.
In fact, the term “forensic medicine” was borrowed from European institutions. The common term in the United States was “medical jurisprudence.” New York University had chosen the new term both for its elite history and for its emphasis on science over law. Medical schools mostly offered a few lectures on the subject and little more. A dedicated department meant the specialty could become a credible profession. Harvard University was also starting a forensic medicine department, although that endeavor was more academic in nature. The NYU program was entirely pragmatic, focused on putting talented scientists to work in the criminal justice system.
One had only to read the list of prospective faculty to appreciate the academic expertise behind the new major—and its practical approach. Charles Norris would head the new department; Harrison Martland would be associate director. Alexander Gettler would head the toxicology section. Thomas Gonzales would teach pathology, as would most of New York City’s other assistant medical examiners.
Norris had laid out an ambitious program, with training in everything from how to properly sign a death certificate to how to testify in court. An optional laboratory course, consisting of a month’s work in the medical examiner’s office, would give fourth-year students a chance to assist at autopsies. For newly graduated doctors who wished to do their residency in forensic medicine, the department offered a three-year practicum in the medical examiner’s office, and additional postgraduate courses in toxicology.
The students would, of course, gain experiences just being on the job. The proposed curriculum didn’t explain what that might entail, but in 1933 it definitely included arguing with the city’s undertakers. A few enterprising funeral home directors were building business by removing bodies from crime scenes by claiming verbal permission from Norris’s office. Norris had responded with a brisk memo to the police, insisting on written authorization from a medical examiner. The undertakers returned a hail of complaints about his department’s unfriendly bureaucracy. One Chelsea funeral home director wrote that it had taken thirty-six hours for one family to retrieve a body from the morgue. “The clerks seem to think an undertaker is nothing and act accordingly,” he wrote. “Tell those wise guys to snap out of it.”
Norris apologized for any rudeness and promised to deal with it. But he didn’t apologize for the new procedures. He’d discovered that some undertakers were visiting the morgue and lying about having family permission to acquire bodies. He’d ordered his clerks to release a body only after the family had verified an undertaker’s claims. As Norris made clear to another irate funeral home director, he had no intention of catering to his critics:
“A great deal of the trouble really originates from the undertakers themselves. Do not imagine, however, that I am criticizing you or the Funeral Directors Association. This is merely an instance of the contrariness of the human animal.”
PROHIBITION MIGHT still be technically the law of the land, but the country was leaving it behind.
In the month of July, according to the U.S. Brewers Association, Americans drank 1,332,790,408 glasses of freshly brewed beer. Hotel bars reopened, offering light wine as well as beer. Churches were once again permitted to use sacramental wine in services. Doctors had new flexibility in prescribing medicinal alcohol.
Repeal, once begun, gained an almost unnerving momentum. In April the first two votes, from Michigan and Wisconsin, approved the Twenty-first Amendment. In May, Rhode Island and Wyoming. In June, New Jersey, Indiana, Delaware, Massachusetts, and New York. By the end of September, twenty-five states had voted to bring back legal alcohol, meaning that ratification was two-thirds complete.
Already distributors were applying for import licenses to bring back Italian vermouth, French champagne, and Scotch whiskey. The Treasury Department felt compelled to issue public assurances that the good liquor would indeed flow when Prohibition died. “Enough Whiskey Promised Nation” read one upbeat newspaper headline, undoubtedly written by one of those alcoholic journalists who so annoyed the government’s Prohibition enforcers.
Still, the illicit alcohol years had changed American culture. Gin, a new cocktail recipe, and a smoky aura had become the necessary atmosphere of any good party or hot speakeasy. The Prohibition look—drink in one hand, cigarette in the other—spoke of the new sophistication and was achieved at precious little cost.
In 1933 a pack of cigarettes cost 13 cents (two for a quarter). Carton costs averaged $1.19. Some bars set cigarettes out for free, along with sardines or, in the better speakeasies, sandwiches, cheeses, little sausages, spicy pickles, and trays of salty snacks. The cigarettes themselves came in dazzling and enticing variety, offering endless possibilities for experimentation.
Smokers could choose from among almost three hundred brands. Cigarettes containing Turkish and Egyptian tobacco included Abdullah, Benson & Hedges, Cincinnati Club, Egyptian Straights, Hassam, Mogul, Omar, Pall Mall, Phillip Morris, Ramses, and Turkish Trophies. Blends of Turkish and American tobacco included Barking Dog, Camel, Chesterfield, Dunhill, Fatima, Lucky Strike, Marlboro, Pep, Picayune, Strollers, and Three Castles. For purists, Players and Richmond used only tobacco from Virginia and North Carolina; El Toro and Havana cigarettes were packed with leaves from the West Indies.
Cigarette smoking was so pervasive that, as Alexander Gettler discovered, the habit interfered with his research into carbon monoxide saturation of the blood.
SCIENTISTS HAD KNOWN since the late nineteenth century that tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide. Victorian scientists had even been able to calculate the amount of gas in the smoke: up to 4 percent in cigarette smoke, and in Gettler’s own choice of tobacco, the cigar, between 6 and 8 percent.
Gettler’s latest work theorized that chain smokers might suffer from low-level carbon monoxide poisoning. He speculated in a 1933 report that “headaches experienced by heavy smokers are due in part to the inhalation of carbon monoxide.” But his real interest lay less in their symptoms than in how much of the poison had accumulated in their blood, and how that might affect his calculations on cause of death.
He approached that problem in his usual, single-minded way. To get a better sense of carbon monoxide contamination from smoking tobacco, Gettler selected three groups of people to compare: persons confined to a state institution in the relatively clean air of the country; street cleaners who worked in a daily, dusty cloud of car exhaust; and heavy smokers.
As expected, carboxyhemoglobin blood levels for country dwellers averaged less than 1 percent saturation. The levels for Manhattan street cleaners were triple that amount, a solid 3 percent. But smokers came in the highest, higher than he’d expected, well above the nineteenth-century calculations. Americans were inhaling a lot more tobacco smoke than they had once done, and their saturation levels ranged from 8 to 19 percent. (The latter was from a Bronx cab driver who admitted to smoking six cigarettes on his way to Gettler’s laboratory, lighting one with the stub of another as he went.)
It was safe to assume, Gettler wrote with his usual careful precision, that “tobacco smoking appreciably increases the carbon monoxide in the blood and cannot be ignored in the interpretation of laboratory results.”
THE OTHER NOTABLE poison in tobacco smoke was
nicotine.
Nicotine is a naturally occurring alkaloid found in tobacco plants, a tightly woven skein of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen (C10H14N2). The tobacco plant, in fact, belongs to the rather notorious nightshade family, a group overpopulated with toxic vegetation, including mandrake, jimson weed, and deadly nightshade, from which the poison belladonna is produced. Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult.
The poison is famed among toxicologists because it was the first plant alkaloid that scientists had been able to detect in a corpse. That breakthrough occurred in France in 1851, when a remarkably determined young chemist named Jean Servais Stas extracted nicotine from stomach tissues. The stomach belonged to a wealthy aristocrat who had been murdered by his financially strapped sister and her husband. Driven by evidence of the victim’s suffering as he had died, the reclusive and fanatical Stas closeted himself in a laboratory until he found a way to isolate nicotine from the corpse.
In high doses, nicotine is a terrible poison—it blisters its way through tissues, burns a path from mouth to stomach, and induces intense vomiting, rapidly followed by convulsions and then a complete shutdown of the nervous system. Even in the nineteenth century, its reputation was grim. “The course of the poisoning in fatal cases is a very rapid one, measured by minutes rather than by hours,” one medical textbook stated, citing one case of nicotine suicide in which the unhappy man died before he could even put the poison vial back on the table. “Death is due to respiratory paralysis,” another author noted, adding that it sometimes happened so rapidly that the heart would beat on, at least briefly, after the lungs stopped working.