The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  Byers had lived a life of privilege, even as the economy foundered. He was in no danger of losing his racing stables in New York, his house in Pittsburgh (where the foundry was located), or his vacation cottages in Rhode Island and South Carolina. He was a graduate of Yale, a national tennis champion, a trap shooter, and a famously fun, elegantly dressed party lover.

  Five years earlier, while returning home on a chartered train from the Harvard-Yale game, Byers had stayed up late drinking with friends. Eventually he took a drunken tumble from his sleeping berth and injured his left arm. The injury refused to completely heal. He developed an endless ache in the arm, painful enough to disrupt his sleep. He went to doctor after doctor. At length one Pittsburgh physician recommended Radithor, the radium-based health drink, sold out of Orange, New Jersey.

  By the end of 1931, by his own estimate, Byers had swigged more than a thousand bottles of Radithor, never connecting the contents of the health drink with the unfortunate deaths of a few factory girls. But by that time he was also ill: his bones were mysteriously splintering, and his skin was yellowing as his kidneys failed. When he died in March 1932 in Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, he’d shrunk to a weight of ninety-two pounds. He was also exhaling radon gas.

  Byers had been so secretive about his illness, so humiliated by the loss of his athletic good looks, that news of his death came as a complete shock to other businessmen. Rumors circulated that he’d lost his money, that the foundry was about to fail, that he’d poisoned himself following financial losses. Partly to stem the panicky speculation, the city ordered an immediate autopsy from the medical examiner’s office.

  In fact, Mayor Walker—who was also drinking radium water to relieve his achy joints—asked Charles Norris to do the job himself. Norris sought two assistants in the work: Martland to help with the autopsy itself, and Gettler to analyze the bones.

  THEIR REPORT could have been taken directly from the Radium Girl case files: necrosis in both jaws, anemia, brain abscess (in the right cerebral cortex), damaged kidneys, and ravaged bone marrow, “all symptomatic of radium poisoning,” Norris reported to the mayor. Byers’s bones were so radioactive that when Gettler sealed them in black photographer’s paper and film, he could achieve a perfect image of the dead man’s vertebrae, each knobby point outlined in the rapid-fire emission of gamma and beta rays from the bone.

  Only days after Norris reported the cause of Byers’s death, the industrialist’s influential friends were calling up their allies in Washington, D.C. The Federal Trade Commission promptly announced public hearings into the safety of drugs like Radithor, and the FDA issued a warning regarding their safety. As the Journal of the American Medical Association noted: “Many of the radioactive substances sold to the public for the cure of diseases are dangerous to health. Dr. Martland found that if taken as directed the amount of radioactive substance in them would be equal to that taken by dial painters in New Jersey.”

  At a quickly called press conference, Gettler put it more simply: “At first you feel fine. It bucks you up. Then we get ready to put parts of you in a frame.” In the fall of 1932 the trade commission issued a cease-and-desist order against Bailey Radium Laboratories, which manufactured Radithor, banning transport of the material. The FDA, which had been given extremely limited authority when created in 1906 (it could do little more than warn consumers), added the Radithor case to its newly vigorous campaign for expanded legal powers. Both the United States and Europe were discussing new rules restricting all uses of radioactive materials.

  And Charles Norris, caught in yet another budget fight with the mayor’s office, quit his job.

  THE NEW CRISIS resulted from an administration change, caused by the fact that Mayor Jimmy Walker was enmeshed in a personal scandal. His wife had divorced him over an affair with one of those pretty Ziegfeld girls, and he was under investigation for taking payoffs to help fix criminal cases. Under pressure from New York’s new governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took a reform-minded approach to government, Walker had resigned in September.

  An acting mayor was appointed to replace him: Joseph McKee, nicknamed Holy Joe for his purist approach. He was immediately struck by the godawful mess that Walker had made of the city budget, some of which had gone to support the silk-shirt and showgirl life the mayor had so enjoyed.

  McKee found himself looking at a near $100 million deficit. The state’s banks, battered by the credit crisis, refused to lend money to cover the debt. If, however, McKee could get the budget in balance, the banks were prepared to work out long-term bond financing. With everyone strapped—unemployment approaching 25 percent in the city—McKee wasn’t going to consider raising taxes. So he ordered every department in the city, without exception, to cut its budget by 20 percent. That included all funding for the cars used by the medical examiner’s office: the doctors would just have to catch a cab, take a train, or walk to a crime scene instead.

  For Norris, who was still paying the salary of Gettler’s assistant and spending his own money on equipment for autopsy rooms, it was too much. He wrote a one-sentence letter on September 19: “I herewith present my resignation as Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York.” And then he complained to everyone who would listen, which happened to include some fascinated national publications.

  In his interview with Time magazine, Norris dwelled on his pet transportation peeve. The examiners had to be at a death scene within half an hour. They couldn’t afford to spend that time on a street corner competing for cabs. “The whole thing is picayune,” Norris growled to the magazine reporter. “It is easier for large departments to get a million dollars than it is for my small department to get $10. In pursuit of its penny-wise & pound-foolish policy, the city threatens to handicap seriously the work the medical examiner’s office is supposed to perform.”

  McKee had accepted Norris’s resignation “regretfully” and was shocked by the resulting furor. Thomas Gonzales was appointed acting chief for the department, but Gonzales urged the mayor to bring Norris back. So did hospitals, private physicians, university presidents, and police officers. At a ballgame between the police and fire departments, McKee took his growing dismay to the police commissioner, begging him to talk Norris into coming back. Tell him, said the mayor, that “the doctor was too valuable a public servant to lose.”

  As Time pointed out, Norris could afford to quit. He was sixty-four years old, a decent retirement age. True, he would lose his $7,500-a-year salary, but he had never done the job for the money. After all, the magazine noted, “he is one of the Pennsylvania Norrises,” founders of Norristown, bankers, merchants, and landowners. He could have easily chosen comfortable relaxation.

  But full-time leisure didn’t suit Norris. He was happiest with a cause to fight for, a challenge to overcome. At his elegant home on West 72nd Street, he found himself missing his shabby office, the smell of blood and disinfectant in the autopsy room (he’d performed an estimated four thousand autopsies while on the job), and all his unfinished work. He grew daily more irritable and restless. When the police commissioner invited him back, Norris’s wife encouraged him to return.

  He moved back into the medical examiner’s office in October, but only after McKee had restored car service for his department.

  IN NOVEMBER, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States. The crippled economy had made Hoover and his pinched Republican policies enormously unpopular. And Roosevelt’s campaign promised to alter more than financial strategies. Among his other targets was what Hoover had called “a noble experiment” and what the new president considered a failed one, the twelve-year-old constitutional amendment that had put Prohibition in place.

  Many Americans believed that the alcohol restrictions had contributed to the economy’s collapse, closing breweries, costing jobs, increasing crime, and—as all now admitted—increasing drunkenness. The Democratic Party had firmly backed its candidate on this issue, announcing that ending Prohibition would be one of t
he major aims of a new president and Congress. Roosevelt’s campaign theme, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” was embraced with enthusiasm; he won forty-two of the forty-eight states in the general election.

  AT THE END of 1932, Norris once again issued his holiday report on poisoned liquor deaths. The news was, for a change, unusually good. Only two people had died from methyl alcohol poisoning during the celebrations.

  Norris himself had toured two neighborhoods famed for serving the city’s most disreputable alcohol. One was Hoover City, along the Brooklyn waterfront, where the seamen were “known for their willingness to consume alcohol in any form.” The sailors had looked encouragingly healthy. The other was the Bowery, where as usual he found grubby hallways occupied by men apparently stupefied by drinking Smoke. But “after a short nap they seemed fit enough to amble back to their favorite resorts. I guess even the Bowery speakeasies are serving a less lethal beverage.” People were still poisoning themselves with ethyl alcohol; by year’s end, the office had clocked in more than seven hundred deaths due to alcoholism—yet another reminder of Gettler’s conclusion that ethyl alcohol might be the most important poison on their list.

  But when hadn’t that been true? Norris left the Bowery in his city-financed car—driven by his chauffeur, of course—and returned to his office to write up his report. It was a masterpiece of details and descriptive phrases, of falling dusk and men sleeping it off against brick walls. There was nothing in the report that resembled the anger with which he addressed methyl alcohol poisonings. This was an ethyl alcohol landscape, one that had existed long before Norris took office and one, he suspected, that would exist long after. He left for home with mist gathering on the river behind him and the cobalt sky of evening deepening to black.

  TEN

  CARBON MONOXIDE (CO), PART II 1933—1934

  ON THIRD AVENUE IN the Bronx, tucked between a small awning shop and a wedge of brick wall plastered with movie posters advertising the nearby Fenway Theater (Buster Crabbe in Tarzan the Fearless, Constance Bennett in Bed of Roses) was a dusty little store that never seemed to open for business.

  But if you lived in the neighborhood, you knew that the door was unlocked at night and that behind a screen of dirty stacked boxes was a bare-bones little speakeasy, a sofa, four tables, a plywood bar along the back wall, a fair supply of whiskey, and a bartender who slept on the sofa after the bar closed.

  The speakeasy, such as it was, kept its owner out of the breadlines. Barely. Sometimes his patrons paid, sometimes they didn’t. They’d empty the ragtag of coins out of their pockets and put the rest on a tab. Sometimes they paid that tab, sometimes not. The worst of the bunch was an old Irishman named Michael Malloy who drifted in and out of employment—street cleaner, coffin polisher—according to whether he was able to stay upright. Some nights the owner could have sworn that he was pouring most of his profits down Mike Malloy’s skinny neck.

  Malloy and money were the topics of discussion one winter night after the Irishman had passed out again atop the plywood bar. The speakeasy boss, Tony Marino, and his friends were playing an idle game of pinochle, drinking some half-decent whiskey, and worrying over the hard times. Marino’s finances were borderline. The fruit vendor down the street was barely getting by, and even the local funeral home operator had a backlog of families who couldn’t pay their bills. They drank some more and traded fantasies about a windfall that might save them all.

  If only one of them had a wealthy relative or, barring that, a sick one with a good insurance policy. The right kind of dead family member would really have come in handy right about then. As the cards fell and the tumblers passed, the men around the table considered the idea, first as a joke, then more seriously. None of them had an expendable relative. But perhaps, Marino suggested, they could create one—someone no one would miss, someone hardly worth keeping alive.

  As the story was later told, to a man, they turned to look at Mike Malloy, snoring off another bender in the backroom bar. And at that moment, in a shabby speakeasy in the Bronx, was chosen the worst possible victim for a murder scheme—a man the newspapers would later dub “Mike the Durable.”

  THE WINTER of 1933 carried an icy chill, a sweep of snow across the city—and a hint that the days of speakeasies like Marino’s scruffy bar were coming to an end. On February 20, Congress voted to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. But to legally end Prohibition required that the Constitution be formally altered once again. So the legislators wrote a new amendment—the Twenty-first—which began “The Eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.”

  Although both the House and the Senate approved the change, it could not become law until the new amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the forty-eight states. Because the decision remained so controversial, the federal government required that every state call a special convention to vote on ratification. Prohibition would continue as the law of the land until the Twenty-first Amendment was approved at thirty-six state convention meetings.

  In the interim, the federal government had decided to loosen some of the restrictions under the Volstead Act. The first such softening was a decision permitting beer, considered a lighter alcoholic beverage, to be legally sold again. The amendment, as drafted, allowed seven years for ratification. But no one expected approval of the new amendment to take very long, not even those—the dry advocates and the bootleggers—who hoped, sincerely, that it would fail.

  THE MIKE Malloy murder conspirators numbered four: Tony Marino; his bartender, Red Murphy; the local funeral home director, Francis Pasqua; and the fruit vendor from down the street, Daniel Kriesberg. The well-connected Pasqua set up meetings with insurance agents. By the time February 1933 came around, the conspirators had wangled three life insurance policies taken on Malloy, one with Metropolitan Life for $400 and two smaller policies with Prudential. It wasn’t much money—say, by the standard set by the Snyder-Gray case—but with double indemnity for accidental death, the policies would bring in almost $1,500.

  Malloy would do anything for his friends at the speakeasy—and for the unlimited drinks that Marino promised him. With no apparent suspicion, the old man signed the insurance policies, agreeing to let Pasqua pay the premium and Murphy to be named his brother and beneficiary.

  Malloy was an aging wreck, maybe sixty, and homeless except when Pasqua let him sleep in the funeral home. He had the yellowed-scarecrow look of a longtime boozer. The members of the murder club figured that a mere week of unlimited alcohol would finish him off. But two weeks later, offered nightly meals of whiskey along with the sardines and crackers served as bar food, Malloy was instead thriving. He seemed to have gained a little weight and hadn’t missed a personal happy hour yet.

  Maybe, Marino reasoned, the problem was the liquor. Malloy was obviously well accustomed to large quantities of regular alcohol—too well, maybe. Undoubtedly he needed something stronger. Everyone knew—hadn’t the medical examiner’s office been preaching it for years?—that methyl alcohol made a potent drink. So Marino hurried off to acquire a supply of industrial alcohol from a gasoline station.

  Red Murphy served the straight stuff to Malloy—a tumbler full on the rocks. The insurance syndicate watched the old drunk expectantly. But he didn’t fall unconscious to the ground; his breathing continued with rasping regularity. He drained the tumbler and held it out for a refill. The next night he was back again. Still sucking down Marino’s good liquor.

  BY MID-FEBRUARY, the conspirators gave up on alcohol poisoning.

  Marino decided to kill Malloy with food instead—one of his more inventive attempts was a sandwich of rotting sardines, ground glass, and metal shavings. It failed. So did oysters marinated in wood alcohol. On an exceptionally cold night they waited until Malloy passed out, put him outside, and poured water over him. But that didn’t work either: the icy water had awakened him and he’d returned to Marino’s speakeasy to sleep it off on the floor.

  By this time Mari
no had achieved a state of homicidal desperation. He brought another bar patron into the conspiracy, a cab driver named Hershy Green. He hired Green to drive over Malloy, promising that the chosen victim would be passed out and lying in the street. The payment would be $150, as soon as the insurance checks came through. The next night the conspirators lugged Malloy’s unconscious body to a dark side street. Green revved the cab and the impact sent Malloy flying onto the sidewalk. They left his body for strangers to find, but in the next few days they puzzled over the lack of any newspaper story about the derelict’s death.

  A week later Mike Malloy limped back into the bar.

  He’d been in the hospital, he told them, recovering from being hit by a car. He didn’t remember it, wasn’t sure how it happened. But he learned that a policeman had found him crumpled on a sidewalk and gotten him off to a hospital. He’d had a fractured skull and some broken bones, but they’d patched him back together.

  Man, it still hurt though. He really could use a drink—any old bootleg variety would do.

  ELSEWHERE, at other speakeasies, patrons were dropping dead with no problem at all.

  By the end of February, nearly one hundred residents of New York were dead, killed by redistilled industrial alcohols. Brooklyn district attorney John Ruston said that the poisoned alcohol came from steamers, from rum runners in smaller boats, and as always from Brooklyn, that well-known home of creative alcohol reengineering.

  “Human life must be cheap to the one who can place the dollar above it,” Ruston declared. “Even if prohibition were not a law, still the distribution of such a poisonous concoction would be a crime that every law-abiding citizen should cry out to have avenged.”