Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (64 page)

“Digs” is most commonly used today in the expression “Nice digs!”

“In 2009 five people were arrested in Maine and charged with arson after police viewed a YouTube video they made describing their crime, complete with theme music and cast credits.”

—
News of the Weird

In summer 2008, Bob Dylan’s neighbors in Malibu, California, started complaining about the stench emanating from a porta potty located on the singer’s property. “It’s a scandal!” said David Emminger, whose house sits downwind of Dylan’s. “‘Mr. Civil Rights’ is killing our civil rights!” Emminger claims the fumes have sickened his family, forcing them to install high-powered fans in their yard in the hopes of blowing the stench back toward Dylan’s. Malibu officials are looking into the matter, and each side has hired lawyers. But as of summer 2009, the outhouse is still standing, and its aromas are still blowin’ in the wind.

When presidential candidate Barack Obama appeared at a rally in Portland, Oregon, in May 2008, he unknowingly angered the entire police force. How? An Obama staffer set up a row of porta potties on top of a concrete memorial that honored fallen officers. “There was plenty of room elsewhere, so space wasn’t an issue,” said officer Thomas Brennan. “So someone used some really poor judgement. I mean, it’s hallowed ground!” (Flags were still being flown at half-mast from a service that had taken place earlier that week.) All that the police wanted, they said, was an apology to the families of the fallen officers, and perhaps an explanation. Both eventually came from Obama’s staff. The explanation: The spot was chosen because of a “safety issue for wheelchair access.”

In 2008, in a shopping mall parking lot in Tampa, Florida, a man witnessed someone breaking into his pickup truck. So he and a friend chased the burglar, Lorenzo Earl Knight, into a nearby construction site. Knight ducked into a porta potty, hoping that his pursuers hadn’t seen him. They had. And they tipped over the toilet, causing the unit’s “holding tank” to empty all over Knight. Police arrived and took him into custody.

During the waning days of Prohibition, Tony Marino’s speakeasy served illegal liquor in the Bronx, New York. Marino and his bartender, Joe “Red” Murphy, did some additional business on the side: They’d take out insurance policies in the names of vagrants and then feed them so much booze that they’d die. By December 1932, after having pulled off the scheme successfully a couple of times, Marino and Murphy set their sights on one of their regular customers, a 60-year-old Irish immigrant named Michael Malloy. A firefighter in his younger days, Malloy was now just another old drunk with no money, no home, and no family.

With three insurance policies secretly taken out in Malloy’s name, the two conspirators offered him an open tab and a cot in the back in exchange for sweeping out the bar each morning. The men stood to collect $3,500 (nearly $60,000 in today’s money), but only if Malloy’s death was accidental. But no matter how much hooch he put down (reportedly more than enough to kill any other man), he’d just sleep it off and then ask for more. Not only that, but Malloy’s health was actually
improving
—forcing Marino and Murphy to take their plan to the next level.

• Murphy, a former chemist, mixed antifreeze with whiskey and told Malloy it was “new stuff.” After drinking it down, Malloy said, “That was smooth!” Then he fell unconscious to the floor. The men dragged him into the back room and left him to die. But he didn’t.

• The next morning, they found Malloy cheerfully sweeping the bar. So over the next few days, Malloy’s drinks were spiked with
more antifreeze—as well as turpentine, horse liniment, and rat poison. He didn’t die.

• Murphy gave Malloy a potentially lethal sandwich. The ingredients: sardines that had been left to spoil in an open tin for a week, along with some metal shavings and carpet tacks. Malloy happily ate the sandwich. He didn’t die.

• Then they gave Malloy another rotten sandwich, this one containing oysters that had been soaked in a batch of whiskey and wood alcohol—a poison that‚ if it didn’t kill you, would blind you. Malloy didn’t go blind. And he didn’t die.

• January brought a cold snap. One night, when the temperature was–14°F, the men fed Malloy so much hooch that he passed out. They then took him to a park, stripped off his shirt, and threw him onto a snowbank. Then they poured a few gallons of cold water over him for good measure. He didn’t die.

• Then the men paid a cab driver named Hershey Green $50 to run over Malloy. Another accomplice, “Tough Tony” Bastone, held up Malloy’s unconscious body in the road. Just before the cab hit Malloy at 45 mph, Bastone jumped out of the way. They left Malloy’s mangled body in the road, believing he was finally dead.

Over the next few days, the gang scanned the obituaries and police reports for news of Malloy’s death. It didn’t come. And then, three weeks later, Malloy walked back into Marino’s speakeasy, ordered a shot of rotgut, and explained to the astonished men, “I must have really tied one on, because I woke up in the hospital with a cracked skull and a busted shoulder!”

The men were at their wits’ end. Bastone, a part-time hit man, offered to “fill the bum full of lead” for $500. Marino refused. He had another plan: He hired a fruit dealer named Daniel Kriesberg to rent a room, take Malloy there, and give him all the gin (mixed with wood alcohol) that he could drink. After Malloy passed out, Murphy brought in a length of rubber hose. He put one end in Malloy’s mouth and the other into a gas jet, and then he turned it on. On February 22, 1933, Michael Malloy was finally dead.

That night, Marino paid a crooked doctor $50 to sign a death certificate listing Malloy’s cause of death as “lobar pneumonia, with alcoholism as a contributing cause.” Then another member
of the gang, an undertaker named Frank Pasqua, buried Malloy in a $12 coffin without even embalming him. The next day, Murphy, posing as the deceased’s brother, collected $800 from Metropolitan Life. One policy down, two to go.

But then the scheme began to unravel as the conspirators squabbled over who should get a bigger cut. Bastone even threatened to go public. The next day, two Prudential agents came to the speakeasy looking for Murphy but were told he was down at the police station being questioned about Bastone…who had mysteriously turned up dead the night before. The agents became suspicious and told the cops that it looked like a case of insurance fraud. Police exhumed Malloy’s body and concluded that he was indeed gassed to death.

In a headline-grabbing trial, the Bronx’s “Murder Trust” captured the attention of the public. In his opening statement, Bronx District Attorney Samuel J. Foley referred to the scheme as “the most grotesque chain of events in New York criminal history.” While on the witness stand, each gang member tried to pin the whole thing on Bastone, testifying that he had forced them to kill Malloy. The jury didn’t buy it. The verdict: Guilty. Green, the cab driver, turned state’s evidence and was given a lesser sentence—life in prison. Marino, Murphy, Pasqua, and Kriesberg were each put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in the summer of 1934.

And to this day, doctors still have no idea how Malloy could have possibly survived all of those murder attempts.

Ralph Teetor (1890–1982) was a prolific inventor who developed many car improvements. Ironically, he was sight-impaired and unable to drive, so his lawyer frequently offered to chauffeur him. The lawyer was a bad driver, though, prone to jerky starts and stops, which annoyed Teetor…and inspired him to invent a way to regulate the car’s speed at a consistent level: cruise control. (It was invented in 1945, but first offered as an option on 1958 Chryslers.)

While jogging to work one morning in early 2009, 23-year-old James Coleman of Bristol, England, decided to post an update on his Twitter account. So he took out his BlackBerry (while jogging) and started typing. Bad idea: He ran headfirst into a low-hanging tree branch, which sent him tumbling down to the pavement. The resulting bruise on Coleman’s face forced his left eye to stay closed for several days. “I feel a twit,” said the tweeter.

In June 2009, 22-year-old Eugene Scott Duncan, an amateur mountaineer from West Virginia, decided, for some reason, to try rappelling down a power line tower near his house. (This was one of those very high towers with a metal frame and three sets of high-voltage power lines.) Duncan made it the first part of the way down without incident, but when his foot hit one of the live power lines, the shock caused him to let go of his rope and plunge the rest of the way down, all the way to the ground. He was treated for severe injuries, but survived. Police charged him with trespassing.

Late one night in November 2008, police in Hackney, England, saw some suspicious activity through the window of a building: men wearing white lab coats, flashing colored lights, and strange fluids gurgling in glass bottles and tubes. The police raided the room and arrested the leader, 29-year-old Richard Watson, on charges of terrorism. The cops then evacuated the entire area and called in the bomb squad. “There were a ridiculous amount of police there,” Watson later said. Why ridiculous? As he’d tried to explain (while he was being arrested and for the hour he was handcuffed to a van), he was simply having a “Mad Scientist” theme party. The equipment was fake and the chemicals were just food coloring, bicarbonate of soda, and vinegar. Watson was freed without charges.

In April 1974, the
British Medical Journal
published a letter from a physician in southern England:

Clearly, Dr. Curtis believed that the pressure of the guitar against the children’s chests caused an irritation that cleared up as soon as they stopped playing the guitar. As was common practice at the time, the
British Medical Journal
printed the letter as a courtesy to see if any other doctors had seen such an ailment. The letter did attract responses from a number of physicians, but none had ever seen a case of “guitar nipple,” as it came to be called.