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The Purple Gang: Bootlegging, Racketeering, and Murder in Prohibition Detroit
Paperback
Series: Blood and Money: Lives and Empires of Organized Crime, Book 6
20th Century United States History
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 6 2026
Pages: 244
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Detroit during Prohibition was one of the most lucrative smuggling corridors in America-and one of its most violent.
Across the Detroit River, legal Canadian liquor sat only a short boat ride from a thirsty American city. Into that opportunity stepped a loose confederation of young criminals from Detroit's east side who would become known as the Purple Gang.
Built around the Bernstein brothers and interconnected families and associates, the Purples expanded from neighborhood crime into bootlegging, hijacking, labor racketeering, gambling, extortion, and organized violence. Their operations reached across the river to Canada and into the wider criminal networks of Chicago and New York. For a time, their reputation for intimidation made them seem nearly untouchable.
But the same loose structure that helped protect the organization from prosecution eventually became one of its greatest weaknesses.
Drawing on court decisions, FBI records, contemporary reporting, archival collections, and modern historical scholarship, The Purple Gang reconstructs the organization's rise and collapse while separating documented history from decades of gangster folklore.
The account examines the Oakland Sugar House, Detroit's rum-running economy, the Cleaners and Dyers War, the 1927 Milaflores killings, the gang's peak years, and the growing internal violence that began tearing the organization apart.
At the center is the 1931 Collingwood Manor Massacre, where three men were lured to Apartment 211 and murdered. The resulting prosecution-and the testimony, disappearance, and disputed later story of witness Sol Levine-helped break the power of one of Detroit's most feared criminal organizations.
The story continues beyond Prohibition through Harry Millman, the surviving Purples, and the 1945 Warren Hooper murder conspiracy, showing how individual gangsters survived long after the organization itself had fragmented.
More than a catalogue of gangland killings, The Purple Gang is a history of Prohibition economics, organized crime, institutional corruption, criminal reputation, and the internal violence that ultimately destroyed Detroit's most notorious underworld organizat
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