Years ago, I read a story about a bar in Brooklyn, NY. The story was set in the 1920’s I believe. It concerned the barowner and his frineds who were trying to raise some cash. They hit on the idea of buying a life insurance policy on one of the drunks that patronized the bar. The idea was to pay the preiums, then kill the guy with booze-then the bar owner would collect on the policy. Unfortunately, the drunk would not die-they finally resorted to mixing antifreeze into his drinks. I think they also put him out in a snowbank while drunk, hoping that the guy would catch pneumonia. Unfortunately (for them) nothing seemed to kill the victim.
I have no idea if this is a true story…it sounds a bit fictional. Anyoe ever heard the story? 
did Rasputin live in Brooklyn?
There was an episode of The Twilight Zone about this. The conspirators were all trying to get this old (Irish, of course) man to drink himself to death. I don’t know whether the episode was based on the old legend of which you speak, or if it was an original story and it’s the one you’re thinking of.
A sample gem from the episode, after seeming gallons of whisky had failed to kill the would-be victim:
Yes, it sounds suspiciously like the Rasputin story transferred to another location.
The problem is with life insurance you must have an insurable interest in the person that is being insured. Everyone has an insurable interest in themselves. I have an insurable interest in my wife as I would suffer a financial loss if she died. I have no insurable interest in your wife. I would suffer no loss if she dies. Therefore I cannot buy a policy on your wife’s life, but I could buy a policy on my wife’s life.
Any underwriter worth his or her pay would catch this and not issue a policy.
Now could you maybe buy a small policy and have it slip through the cracks, by naming the insured drunk the owner and somehow naming the one of the conspirators as beneficiary? Probably. But I sure as hell would not want to get caught.
Wasn’t that an episode of Amazing Stories?
That’s not how you kill a drunk! You kill a drunk by withholding alcohol.
Say, was you ever stung by a dead bee?
I can definitely tell you that I heard this on one of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” radio spots. Now, his writers did have a habit of accepting urban legends as fact. But I don’t know one way or another whether this is is fact or UL.
It was an episode of something, and I’m pretty sure the one I saw wasn’t Twilight Zone. If memory serves, it ended with the conspirators dead and the old man alive. He sat on his chair in a corner of the bar, and the last shot was him leaning forward, out of the shadows, with a really creepy smile, and asking for a drink.
I have no recollection of ever having been bitten by any kind of bee.
It’s a true story, and his name was Michael Malloy. And yes, that link says it was also used in Amazing Stories.
You are thinking of the Murder of Michael Malloy by The Murder Trust in 1933. It’s a true story, although I don’t know how much the details may have been embellished.
It sounds like a Damon Runyan-type story. I seem to recall that at least part of the story was true - perhaps it was one of those stories that got blown up with each telling. The part about the antifreeze strikes me as fictional-NOBODY survives drinking ethylene glycol-it has killed many a dog!
I guess Colibri heard this story the same way I did - via Primus?
I read it in The People’s Almanac back in the '70’s. I think it was the first book.
No, like postcards, I read it in The People’s Almanac.
No, Volume 2 (1978), pp 41-44, “The Killing of Michael Malloy.”
One emergency way to treat anti-freeze poisoning is by giving the patient ethanol…drinking alcohol. I think both ethylene glycol and methanol are metabolised by alcohol dehydrogenase, and so drinking large amounts of ethanol occupies the enzyme preferentially, giving the body the chance to expel the antifreeze without making the bad metabolites.
I doubt this is the prefered emergency room procedure, but it was a part of my enzymology course back in university…
Explains why the drunk never died, though
Slight hijack:
Weren’t those about the best books in the world until Cecil’s came along?
That’s probably a more reliable source.
I really enjoyed all three of the People’s Almanacs*, but the Straight Dope is a good deal more reliable. Wallechinsky and Wallace do have some dicey info in there. Cecil precedes the first volume (1975) by two years.
*Source of the infamous question “What happens on May the 33rd, but only in leap years?”