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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

16. Nor Did Running Malloy Over With a Taxi Do Him In

Harry Green had a taxi, so his coconspirators set Malloy up for the cabbie to run him over. They bundled a drunk Malloy into Green’s cab, and drove him to a secluded spot. There, they hauled him out and held him as Green gunned the engine. Somehow, even in his extremely inebriated state, Malloy’s survival instincts kicked in, and he managed to get out of the way twice, before Green finally managed to run him over on the third attempt.

To make absolutely sure that his victim was definitely done and dusted dead, Green reversed his taxi over Malloy. The plotters then fled, leaving behind a mangled corpse. Mangled Malloy might have been, but he was not a corpse. After three days of reading the obituaries but not finding anything about Malloy, Joseph “Red” Murphy began to call and check hospitals and morgues, searching for his missing “brother”.

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.