Purple Gang, the
The Purple Gang was a loosely-bound Jewish criminal gang in prohibition-era Detroit, MI. It began as a group of children of Eastern European immigrants from Detroit’s lower east side who were taken under the wing by mobsters. As the children grew up, they progressed from petty crimes to armed robbery and extortion. After The Damon Act of 1916 prohibited the sale of alcohol in Michigan, the burgeoning Purple Gang focused on hijacking shipments of bootlegged Canadian whisky; when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect in 1920, the pre-established smuggling route from Canada to Eastern Michigan was the primary source of alcohol for much of the Northeast United States. By 1930, the Purple Gang effectively controlled Detroit’s …show more content…
Five of the Bernstein children attended the Bishop School, a school for those who had been expelled from other institutions for truancy, fighting, or delinquent behavior, and after school they watched local criminals who ran craps games in the school yard. The Bernstein children and some of their friends began running errands for a group of mobsters who owned the Oakland Sugar House, as well as venturing into petty crime, and became known as the Sugar House Gang. As they got older, they moved on from picking pockets in the Eastern Market and into armed robbery, loan sharking, and extortion under the guidance of the older mobsters.
While the origin of the name “the Purple Gang” is disputed, the most often cited story is that two shopkeepers who had been subject to the group’s vandalism and shoplifting had commented “they’re rotten, purple like the color of bad meat” (Kavieff 9); an alternative theory is that a local journalist came up with the name during a union dispute when purple dye was sometimes thrown on laundry by the gang as a warning. The Purples, led by Abe, Joe, Raymond and Izzy Bernstein, never became a structured criminal organization, but remained a group of friends and associates joined by their criminal
The Purple Gang was a loosely-bound Jewish criminal gang in prohibition-era Detroit, MI. It began as a group of children of Eastern European immigrants from Detroit’s lower east side who were taken under the wing by mobsters. As the children grew up, they progressed from petty crimes to armed robbery and extortion. After The Damon Act of 1916 prohibited the sale of alcohol in Michigan, the burgeoning Purple Gang focused on hijacking shipments of bootlegged Canadian whisky; when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect in 1920, the pre-established smuggling route from Canada to Eastern Michigan was the primary source of alcohol for much of the Northeast United States. By 1930, the Purple Gang effectively controlled Detroit’s …show more content…
Five of the Bernstein children attended the Bishop School, a school for those who had been expelled from other institutions for truancy, fighting, or delinquent behavior, and after school they watched local criminals who ran craps games in the school yard. The Bernstein children and some of their friends began running errands for a group of mobsters who owned the Oakland Sugar House, as well as venturing into petty crime, and became known as the Sugar House Gang. As they got older, they moved on from picking pockets in the Eastern Market and into armed robbery, loan sharking, and extortion under the guidance of the older mobsters.
While the origin of the name “the Purple Gang” is disputed, the most often cited story is that two shopkeepers who had been subject to the group’s vandalism and shoplifting had commented “they’re rotten, purple like the color of bad meat” (Kavieff 9); an alternative theory is that a local journalist came up with the name during a union dispute when purple dye was sometimes thrown on laundry by the gang as a warning. The Purples, led by Abe, Joe, Raymond and Izzy Bernstein, never became a structured criminal organization, but remained a group of friends and associates joined by their criminal