The Purple Gang: Organized Crime in Detroit, 1910-1945 (14 page)

Nicknamed
"Black Leo" because of his dark complexion, Leonard Cellura
was born in Italy in 1892, and immigrated to the U.S. with his family
in 1908. Cellura was charged with the July 3rd murders of George
Collins and William Cannon and stood mute while a plea of not guilty
was entered on his behalf.

The
State was not ready to proceed with a trial because of difficulties
finding witnesses. His first courtroom appearance ended in a
mistrial. Eventually he was convicted of first degree murder and
sentenced to life. But it was the next murder that would make Detroit
shrink in astonishment and fear. Cellura's LaSalle roommate committed
the most public slaying yet.

It
was during the early summer of 1930 that the nightly tirades of
Gerald E. Buckley against the Bowles administration and the local
underworld created problems for both institutions. Buckley was an
outspoken WMBC radio commentator who'd been born into money in a
predominantly Irish section of Detroit nicknamed Corktown.

He
had been educated in local parochial schools and eventually earned a
law degree from the Detroit
College
of Law. He was also known as a womanizer and a nightclub patron. He
once told several close friends that he decided to crusade against
the local underworld as an investigator for the Ford Motor
Company.

There
he saw firsthand what the temptations of gambling and vice could do
to poor working class families of industrial workers. Buckley broke
into radio as a singer and eventually became a news commentator for
WMBC. He used his radio show as a forum for attacks on corruption and
organized crime.

From
a radio studio in the LaSalle Hotel, Buckley had been speaking out
against gambling and other rackets. As organized crime grew
shamelessly public in the spring and summer 1930, the popular
commentator targeted Mayor Bowles. On air, he accused the Detroit
underworld and high ranking officials in the Bowles administration of
collusion, of placing mobsters above the law.

Public
clamor for the recall of Mayor Bowles had already begun with the
dismissal of his Police Commissioner, Harold Emmons. The mayor had
left town to see the Kentucky Derby and in his absence the
Commissioner (egged on by the media) conducted police raids on
handbook operations. Newspapers declared the raids a major blow
against the underworld, although in reality they'd had little effect
on local crime.

Before
his trip, Bowles had asked Emmons for his resignation because he'd
been unsuccessful in disciplining the police department and in coping
with organized crime. Emmons had already been replaced with
a
former
F.B.I, agent named Thomas Wilcox.

The
newspapers claimed that Emmons's raids proved him to be
incorruptible. They pointed to what a police commissioner could do
when his hands were not tied by a corrupt mayor. To the public it
appeared that Emmons was fired because he attacked the Mayor's
gambling interests in his absence.

Gerald
Buckley hammered away at the Bowles administration during broadcasts
but, curiously, did not support the recall movement, claiming it was
undemocratic. The night before the vote, Buckley prepared a speech
urging that the recall be defeated, and gave Bowles a copy before he
went on the air. But on air Buckley reversed his position.

For
weeks Buckley had been receiving daily death threats. His attacks on
the Bowles administration had embarrassed the police and they in turn
cracked down on the gangsters. Raids on underworld gambling resorts
and the shutting down of rackets enraged local racketeers.

Like
a stubborn virus gangsters kept growing stronger. Now they were so
fearless that they planned the murder of a man who appeared on the
radio every night, and expected no consequences. He was promised that
if the recall election succeeded he would die. On the night of the
election, Buckley took a cab from the City Hall to the LaSalle Hotel.
He went into the studio where, at 12:15 A.M. He received a personal
phone call from an unidentified woman. Buckley agreed to meet the
woman in the hotel lobby.

At
1:30 am he sat next to Jack Klein, a hotel resident, in LaSalle's
lobby. That night, Buckley's wife received the final threat. The
caller said simply, "Your husband won't be coming home tonight",
and hung up.

At
1:45 am three men strode into the hotel. They walked quickly and
silently to where Buckley sat reading the newspaper and opened fire
on the radio commentator right in the lobby. Klein had caught the
gleam of a pistol and dove to the floor, but the gunfire was all
directed at Buckley.

The
three gunmen rushed out to a getaway car while a second car slid
sideways and screeched to a stop blocking the Woodward Ave. entrance
to Adelaide St., giving the gunmen a protected escape route. The
driver—a woman—then abandoned the car and ran into the
theatre across from the Hotel.

The
woman, later identified as Lucille Love, was a girlfriend of local
mobster Angelo Livecchi. She told police that she had panicked when
she heard the shots and slammed on the brakes of the car, then ran
into the theater for cover. Love was never implicated in the murder.

At
first the police believed Buckley was murdered as a result of the
successful recall of Mayor Bowles. Then word was passed along that
Buckley was a racketeer in his own right. One rumor had it that
Buckley was blackmailing gangsters by threatening exposure on the
radio show if he wasn't paid to keep silent.

It
was even said that Buckley offered to cease his attacks on the Bowles
administration for a price. But the most prevalent theory was that he
had double crossed the Eastside Mob. Buckley had been given $4,000 to
go to Ontario and arrange for a Canadian attorney to defend Eastside
Mob leaders as a personal
favor.

The
mob leaders had been arrested on a concealed weapons charge and were
facing serious prison time in Canada. The politically influential
Buckley supposedly retained the attorney but Canadian exporters paid
the lawyer to lose the case and Buckley was blamed. Police believed
that the same gangsters used the Bowles recall election as
a
smoke
screen to take revenge on Buckley for the Canadian convictions.

Two
suspects were arrested immediately. Jack Klein, a known Purple drug
dealer, and another resident of the LaSalle Hotel named Angelo
Livecchi. Klein was arrested because he was seated in the lobby when
Buckley was shot to death, and had fled to his room. He was released
when he said it happened so quickly that he "didn't see a
thing."

Angelo
Livecchi, however, was another story. He was an Eastside Mob gunman
who shared a room at the LaSalle Hotel with Leonard "Black Leo"
Cellura and Theodore Pizzino. He had been seen in the lobby of the
LaSalle Hotel shortly before the first murders. Later he was found in
bed, partially dressed, in his room at the hotel.

Collins
and Cannon, victims of the first LaSalle murder, had tried to muscle
in on Livecchi's roomate Theodore Pizzino and Leonard Cellura's club.
Buckley had crossed Theodore Pizzino in the Canadian deal. It seemed
that Livecchi had some extremely suspicious roomates.

Revelation
followed revelation about the once-revered Buckley. A small-time
Detroit bootlegger named Frank Chock signed an affidavit swearing
that Buckley had set him up in the bootlegging business. Chock told
Wayne County Prosecutor James Chenot that Buckley used his position
in radio to muscle in on rackets.

He
said the underworld regularly paid off Buckley to keep him from
exposing their activities over his radio show. Chock later denied the
story in an affidavit stating that he could not read English, and had
put his signature on the first affidavit without knowing what he
signed.

Wayne
County Prosecutor James Chenot called for a 23-man grand jury to
investigate the Buckley murder and the rampant crime conditions in
the city. This body quickly became popularly known as the "Buckley
Grand Jury." They returned a blanket indictment charging among
others Ted Pizzino and Angelo Livecchi.

The
Buckley murder trial was scheduled to begin in 1931 with the most
competent legal talent in the city representing the defendants. In
the opening statement, prosecution claimed that the murder of Gerald
Buckley was the result of his radio campaign against the Bowles
administration and the underworld.

It
was suggested that the defendants had financed Mayor Bowles's
campaign. Prosecution also claimed the gangsters were protected by
Bowles. The trial lasted six weeks in a standing room only courtroom.

When
one witness' picture was taken by a courtroom photographer he refused
to testify, telling the court that he feared for his life. His
refusal to take the stand went a long way towards destroying the
State's case as all other testimony was hearsay. After 35 hours, the
jury acquitted all three defendants.

§
§ §

The
Purple Gang was also responding to the chaos and tension of
intensified violence during the Great Depression. Earl Passman,
identified by Detroit police as a bookkeeper for the Purple mob, was
shot to death by another Purple gangster in an Owen Avenue apartment
in a senseless shooting.

The
apartment was being used as the headquarters for a whiskey delivery
business. While several Purples were in the kitchen taking telephone
orders, Harry Altman, Harry Pont, and Passman sat in the living room
drinking. Around 8:30 P.M., Altman got up to leave.

He
noticed an open door and walked into the closet by mistake. Passman,
a practical joker, seized the moment to play a prank on Altman. He
jumped up and slammed the closet door shut, holding it tight. Pont
ran up and helped Passman hold the door.

According
to testimony by Pont, Altman yelled that if they didn't open the door
he was going to shoot his way out. They thought Altman was joking.
Suddenly a bullet splintered the closet door, striking Passman in the
chest.

Not
knowing what to do with the body, the men took it out to the alley
behind the apartment building to make it look like Passman had been
the victim of a drive-by shooting. At first, detectives thought that
Passman was the victim of another underworld feud. Two days later,
Harry Pont told detectives how Passman had really been killed.

In
court Harry Pont refused to admit that he made a statement to police.
The charges against Altman were dropped. Pont was held for contempt
of court and given thirty days.

The
gangsters were so tightly wound that they had simply become foolish.
Purple gangsters were also encountering a new, serious problem.
Witnesses were finally testifying against reputed Purple gangsters in
open court.

It
was the beginning of the end.

Chapter
9

The
Collingwood Manor Massacre

"These
men checked their books with bullets and marked off their accounts
with blood."

—
Harry
Toy
Wayne
County Prosecutor November 9, 1931

"/
sat
there
in a daze while they killed those boys. It was awful. I lived a
thousand lives. I walked out of there in a daze."

Solly
Levine, November 11, 1931

The
Collingwood Manor Massacre was the culmination of incidents that
began in 1926, when three Chicago gunmen arrived in Detroit. Isadore
Sutker, Joseph Lebovitz, and Herman Paul were minor thugs engaged in
bootlegging and extortion during the mid-twenties, when Chicago mobs
had begun to organize and the Capone organization vied for control of
them.

At
the time Sutker, Lebovitz, and Paul were racketeers engaged in
bootlegging and small-scale extortion rackets. In 1925, the men had
found their niche, shaking down Chicago speakeasy operators for
protection money. Some speakeasy victims had gotten their beer from
Capone suppliers and so were protected by the Capone syndicate.