In 1918, there was a scandal around Chicago’s classy hotels: employees were accused of using “Mickey Finn” powders to knock their wealthy customers out, so that they could be robbed. In the 1920s and 30s you heard the term used for knock-out drops given to boxers by people trying to fix fights. Around the same time, there were stories of bartenders using them to get rid of unruly customers.
A widely-circulated 1930 newspaper article said that they were named for a Bowery bartender in New York. A 1939 article said it was a barkeep in Baltimore. No one at the time, as far as I can tell, connected the term Mickey Finn, the Chicago bartender who is invariably said to be the origin of the term today.
It may have been Herbert Asbury who first connected the phrase to Mickey Finn of Chicago in his 1940 book Gem of the Prairie (now published as Gangs of Chicago). In his version of events, Finn bought the recipe for a knockout powder from a voodoo priest, and later sold the recipe to other bartenders around the city after a woman named “Gold Tooth Mary” got him shut down.
Ah, Herbert Asbury. How much folklore that is now often presented as fact has that guy been responsible for? His treatment of the HH Holmes story was the basis for most of retellings that followed, and he pretty much invented a great deal of New York folklore, as well (For instance, lots of books and movies that place in the 19th century New York underworld include a woman named Gallus Mag who keeps a jar of ears she’s ripped off of people. There are a couple of contemporary references to a woman who went by Gallus Mag, and one account of her marrying sailors, then turning them in as deserters for the reward money, but the bit about the ears seems to be pure Asbury).
Today, the tale of the Chicago bartender behind the phrase “Slip ’em a Mickey” has been repeated as fact in book after book and article after article, particularly in the last couple of decades. But nearly every article or book section written about Mickey Finn of Chicago has just been rehashing Asbury’s section on him, including the details he almost certainly invented.
But, though he made free use of bad sources and wasn’t shy about adding details from his own imagination, there’s often at least a kernal of truth in Asbury’s work. There really was a Chicago bartender named Mickey Finn who was accused of “doping” his customers in order to rob them, and Asbury included quite a few real names and dates. From contemporary sources, it seems that Finn opened The Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden on State Street, near what is now Harrison (so, you know, right about where the library is now) around 1896. It was by no account a fancy place, situated in what would have been “Whiskey Row” at the time. There, he sold nickel glasses of beer, and ten cent bottles of whiskey, and enticed customers with offers of free clams. He attracted very little notice; when police and reporters told stories of wild times in the vice districts, as they often did, the Lone Star Saloon never came up.
But in late 1903, a woman named “Gold Tooth Mary” told the graft commission that Finn was using knock-out powders to rob his customers, and that he was paying alderman “Hinky Dink” Kenna off to stay out of trouble for it. (That police and aldermen took cash to look the other way was well established at the time – hence the need for a graft commission).
Unlike most Chicago history characters like Mickey, we have quite a number of actual quotes from him, and first-hand accounts of what his place was like. When Gold Tooth Mary made her claim, a few reporters visited Finn – a Daily News reporter sought him out for their evening edition on Dec 16, 1903. The reporter found a dingy little place in which three “hangers on” were fighting over a broom, since whoever swept the floor would get a free drink. A man nearby fed oysters to his great dane.
“Say,” said Finn to the reporter. “Do you see any one around here worth robbing? Do you think any sane man would run a place like this if he was in the business of handing out knockout drops? Do I look like ready money to walk in and shall out to Hinky Dink?”
These were all pretty fair questions. He said that Gold Tooth Mary had been trying to get him to sell her the Palm Garden, which she said she could run as a house of ill repute as long as she paid Hinky Dink twenty bucks a week. “Say, friend,” Finn added. “Have you sized up my trade? Teamsters from the freighthouses, sailors from the river, and the bunch from the rooming and lodging houses keep this get-rich-quick scheme going… in winter a real sport blows in sometimes and spends as much as 20 cents at once. Then he gets busy and eats 35 cents worth of clams. A man with as much as three dollars in his jeans all at once is a rare sight here – real sports like that go further up the street – they don’t stop to bother with me.”
To a Tribune reporter the same day, for an edition out the next morning, he said “I’d lose money feeding ‘dope’ along with the big ‘tubs’ and the clams I dish out to the ‘guys” that blow in here. I wouldn’t get enough money out of their clothes in a year to pay for the dope… I had dreams all night of swell guys with big rolls blowing in here to be fed knockout drops. It was hard lines, soon enough, to wake up this morning see the same old bums, paying their nickels for big glasses of beer and making a ‘roar’ because they don’t get more clams.”
The police had raided the place and taken what Finn said was some cough medicine and “mustang liniment,” a Victorian cure-all that was mostly petroleum. The cops did shut him down, but more on reports that drunken men had been taken into the place by street highwaymen to be robbed – the sort of thing that happened in all of these places now and then. The graft commission was out for blood that week.
These late 1903 articles are just about the only time the press ever took any notice of the Lone Star Saloon. It was never considered one of the “highlights” of the vice districts, the sort of place that inspired legends among reporters and cops. If Asbury hadn’t made a connection between the 1903 stories and the term “Slip ’em a Mickey,” it’s likely he would be totally forgotten (until someone else found those 1903 articles and made sufficient noise about it, at least).
It’s hard to tell nowadays whether Finn was really in the “dope” business at; he was probably correct that it wouldn’t be a cost effective business model at a place like the Lone Star Saloon. Whether he was really even the inspiration for the term is tough to say – the name “Mickey Finn” was a fairly common one, and the name of a popular fictional character at the time, so it’s hard to find accurate biographical data. There are plenty of Mickey Finns in the records and newspaper archives, but it’s impossible to reliably connect them to the man from those 1903 articles.
It’s also hard to tell if he was truly the origin of the term “Mickey Finn” and “Slip ’em a mickey.” It’s certainly possible, given that his story was in more than one major Chicago newspaper, but I certainly haven’t seen an article about “Mickey Finns” from the first 35+ years after his story broke that mentions him or the “Lone Star Saloon.” It seems to start with Asbury.
He’s been the topic of the week on my Patreon page – a summary of the story on Monday, and all of the original articles I have about him in the “Deep Research” tier on Thursday!