Our good friends over at ExecutedToday.com, one of the most morbidly interesting sites on the web, let us know about this little nugget of stupidity that dates all the way back to 1934. Who said there were no dumb people in the past? How do you think we got here?

Three men got the chair for pulling an insurance scam that ended up costing them more than the scam would earn them.

Daniel Kriesberg, Anthony Marino and Frank Pasqua tried to scam an insurance company by getting a policy in an old man’s name and then getting him to drink himself to death. Unfortunately, the scam didn’t work because he drank everything from hard whiskey to antifreeze and still didn’t die. Maybe he was a Kennedy.

So the boys upped the ante. This time, they tried poisoning him with horrid food like raw oysters soaked in pure wood alcohol and rotten sardines dipped in tin shavings, but that didn’t work. In fact, the victim liked it so much that he recommended they open a restaurant based around the food they were serving him. And that’s how Olive Garden was born.

Finally, they just tried hitting him with a car in the hopes police would discover the body and they would get their payoff. It didn’t work. Days went by and the men never heard anything about his whereabouts. It turns out the victim had been laid up in the hospital under a different name. The three men then tried using another victim but with the original victim’s identification and they didn’t work either, and they eventually all went to jail and were executed. So at least the story had a happy ending.

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