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The Man Who Wouldn’t Die – The Bizarre Depression Era Crime That Shaped How Our Insurance Works

Khalid Elhassan June 2, 2025 17 min

A young Michael Malloy, left, and his killers. I09

21. A Desperate Barkeep

Unemployed men stand in line outside a soup kitchen during the Great Depression. K-Pics

Malloy became legendary after he survived repeated murder attempts by “friends” who sought to kill him to collect on life insurance policies they had taken out on him. That endurance earned him the nicknames “Iron Mike” and “Mike the Durable”. An alcoholic, Malloy was a longtime client of Marino’s, a rundown Bronx speakeasy. There, he often drank on credit until he passed out.

He paid when he could whenever he drifted into temporary employment such as street cleaner or coffin polisher, and let the tab run for months when he drifted out of employment and was broke. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, Marino’s proprietor and namesake, Anthony “Tony” Marino, was in a financial bind and desperate to get his hands on some money. He saw in the decrepit Malloy the answer to his problems.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.