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Led by Abe Bernstein, the Purple Gang was a mob of bootleggers and
hijackers who operated out of Detroit, Michigan in the 1920s. This group of
mostly young Jewish immigrants got its start in the Hasting Street
neighborhood known as Paradise Valley in Detroit's Lower East Side. Many
of the core members went to school together and as boys, became thieves
and pickpockets in an area called the Eastern Market close to their
school. As they got older, their crimes got bigger and they soon
began to commit armed robbery, loan sharking, and extortion under the
mentorship of older neighborhood gangsters.
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By the 1920's
Detroit had become a major port for running and distributing alcohol
products from Canada during Prohibition.
They operated
between Detroit and Chicago, and would meet behind the Bohm Theatre or in
secret places in houses of Albion, a small town halfway between the two
points. The gang supposedly received their name during a conversation
between two Detroit market owners, each of them gang victims. One owner
made the comment: "They're rotten, purple like the color of bad meat."
Perhaps the most ruthless
bootleggers of their time, they may have killed over 500 members of rival
bootlegging gangs during Detroit's bootleg wars.
Bootlegging netted the Purple gang millions of dollars, but the mob was
also involved in extortion, hijacking, and jewelry thefts. After the
repeal of Prohibition in the 1930's, the Purple Gang members joined the
growing national crime syndicate that was replacing the old school mafia
leadership, fondly known as the Mustache Petes.
The Purple Gang also attempted to run gambling rings in Detroit,
especially among the African American population. Run by Julius Horowitz,
the son of the sugar supplier to the breweries, and a one-legged black
gangster wanted in the South for murder, the operation was successful
until the gamblers learned that the Purple Gang had been using loaded dice
and other tricks to keep it profitable. A small riot followed from which
Horowitz escaped but the black gangster was believed killed.
The Purple Gang was exceptionally violent, constantly at war with other
gangs and with each other. Newspapers would often carry stories of gang
murders on both sides of their conflicts, which were constant during the
gang's existence. Too many openly violent crimes caused a string of
convictions of Purple Gang members, while the intra-gang violence between
different gang members damaged the gang's organization and its abilities
to control its turf.
"The Purples ruled the Detroit underworld for approximately five years
from 1927 to 1932...jealousies, egos, and inter-gang quarrels would
eventually cause the Purple Gang to self-destruct. In 1931 an inter-gang
dispute ended in the murder of three Purples by members of their own gang.
The three men had violated underworld code by operating outside the
territory allotted to them by the Purple Gang leadership. Three members of
the "Little Jewish Navy," a group of Purples who owned several boats and
participated in rumrunning as well as hijacking, decided they would break
away from the gang and become an underworld power themselves... The
predecessors of Detroit's modern day Mafia family simply stepped in and
filled the void once the Purple Gang self-destructed."
The Purple Gang were considered suspects in the case of the Lindbergh
baby. The Purple Gang also used big grass lots all over Michigan for
planting drugs which they planned on selling in Detroit. One of these
grass lots is in Bay City right behind what used to be East Side School,
which is now the Wenona Center.
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