A Mickey Finn

This phrase is not often heard nowadays, which is quite surprising in some ways, given how often you hear reports of people being afflicted by the effects of what it means, which is a sedative (or sometimes in the US a purgative) drug surreptitiously slipped into someone’s drink. It has very likely been supplanted by the more modern words ‘spiked’ or ‘roofied’, but it is a shame that the practice continues, even if the original phrase does not.

It has the same kind of feeling that goes along with rhyming slang, but it’s roots are nowhere near that particular method of communication; instead it has it’s somewhat unsavoury origin in an actual person, as follows; Mickey Finn was, apparently, an Irish pickpocket who in 1896 opened the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden on Chicago’s Whiskey Row. About 1898 he started making a white powder, which was said to contain chloral hydrate, and would slip it into the drinks of patrons. People who imbibed it would pass out and be dragged into a back room. They would be stripped of all valuables, sometimes including their clothing, and be dumped into an alley. When they awakened they would remember nothing.

In 1903 the city shut the saloon down but Finn continued to sell the recipe for the “Mickey Finn”. There are a couple of US newspaper references from December 1903 that allude to this: Chicago Daily News – “The complete defense advanced by ‘Mickey’ Finn, proprietor of the Lone Star saloon … described … as the scene of blood-curdling crimes through the agency of drugged liquor.”, and Inter-Ocean (Chicago) – “Lone Star Saloon loses its license. ‘Mickey’ Finn’s alleged ‘knock-out drops’ … put him out of business.”

Mickey Finn would have been a common enough name in Ireland and amongst Irish emigres to the USA. Ernest Jarrold was an author in late 19th century USA who wrote a popular series of newspaper stories called the Mickey Finn stories, from the early 1880s onward. The main character was a small boy and the stories are in the same vein as Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (pub. 1884). It has been suggested that Twain, who knew Jarrold, plagiarized the idea from the ‘Mickey Finn’ series. Jarrold later wrote under the pseudonym ‘Mickey Finn’ and the name became a generic term for any Irishman – much like ‘Paddy’ today.

So, by 1903 there could well have been many people called or known as ‘Mickey Finn’. Although Jarrold’s, a.k.a. Mickey Finn’s, story is interesting and pre-dates the Chicago Mickey Finn’s activities, there isn’t anything to explicitly link him to the phrase. The only version of the story with any real supporting evidence is that of the Chicago saloon-keeper.

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