The Violent Years (9 page)

The Purples really established their reputation in the Detroit underworld as hijackers, and their methods were brutal. Typically, hijacking involved taking a load of liquor and killing everybody with the load. The Purples would then take good-quality Canadian whiskey and cut it. In this manner, one bottle of good whiskey could be made into at least three bottles of cut product. Purple Gang cutting plants were operating all over the city by 1925. These operations went on seven days a week, around the clock, to provide for the growing demands for illegal liquor. In 1925, there were an estimated 25,000 blind pigs operating in Detroit.

By 1925, the Purples were being led by the four Bernstein brothers—Abe, Joe, Ray, and Isadore. Abe Bernstein was always considered to be the leader of the Purple Gang, probably due more to his diplomatic ability in his dealings with city officials and other underworld operators. Joey Bernstein was really the brains behind the Purples during their glory years in the later ‘20s. It was Joe Bernstein who organized the estimated 700 handbooks (horsebetting parlors) in the city and who controlled the first successful wire service. The wire service provided information to the city handbooks on horse races at tracks across the country and was a necessary service to the handbooks. Subscription to the Bernstein wire service was not an option for handbook operators. They either subscribed or were permanently put out of business.

The Purples were always a very loose confederation of predominantly Jewish gangsters. There were several factions of the Purple Gang. One of the more powerful groups was known as the Little Jewish Navy. This group of Purples was known by this moniker because one of the group, a man named Martin Berg, owned several high-powered speedboats used to haul liquor from Canada. The Little Jewish Navy was led by Sam Solomon, a major Detroit area bookmaker, and “One Armed” Mike Gelfond, a blind pig operator and racketeer. Other members of this group were often used as gunmen by the Bernstein brothers.

After national Prohibition went into effect on January 16, 1920, there was a large influx of gangsters who came to Detroit to cash in on the booming Detroit area liquor trade. This was estimated to be a $250 million a year business in Detroit by 1925. Many of these newly arrived gangsters became associated with the Purples, swelling the numbers of the gang to at least 200 by 1925.

The Purples established a national reputation for ferocity during the so-called Cleaners and Dyers War from 1925 to 1928. A corrupt Federation of Labor president named Francis X. Martel and several Chicago labor racketeers decided to regulate the cleaning and dyeing industry in Detroit by establishing a gangster-controlled wholesalers association. Abe Bernstein and his brother-in-law. Charles Jacoby, were cut in on the deal. Jacoby owned one of the larger cleaning plants in the Detroit area. The Purple Gang was then used to persuade reluctant cleaners and tailors to join the association. Anyone who did not join suffered a visit from the Purples, who would begin by breaking windows, throwing dye on clothing, stench bombing, and general vandalism of a plant. The next step would be fires and dynamite, the beating of pickup drivers, and the theft of truckloads of laundry, which were then sold back to a tailor for a high price. During this three-year period, hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage was committed against cleaners and tailors who refused to join the association. Several business agents were also murdered. One rumor had it that the Purples got their colorful name during this period because they sometimes threw purple dye on clothing. After a falling out over division of spoils, Martel broke with Jacoby and Bernstein and persuaded several cleaning plant operators to go to the prosecutor. This culminated in the Purple Gang trial of 1928, in which 13 members were tried and acquitted for extortion. The Purple Gang emerged unscathed and created an illusion of invincibility in the minds of the general public.

By 1929, the Purples ruled the Detroit underworld due as much to solid official protection as to their high-profile, strong-arm methods. No underworld operations went on in the Detroit area without kicking back protection money to the Purple Gang. This included gambling, drug peddling, prostitution, rum-running, and alley brewing. As many as 500 murders have been attributed to the Purples. By 1929, they were selling liquor to both the New York Mob and the Capone organization in Chicago.

The Purple Gang is best known for two massacres. The first, known as the Milaflores Massacre, in March of 1927 involved the machine-gun murder of a freelance Chicago gunman and two of his friends at the Milaflores Apartments in Detroit. The three were lured to the apartment after the Purples discovered that one of the men had killed a primary Purple Gang liquor distributor named Johnny Reid. This was Detroit’s first machine-gun slaying, and no one was ever tried for the murders. The second massacre was known as the Collingwood Manor Massacre. In this instance, three members of the Little Jewish Navy faction were lured to an apartment on Collingwood Avenue in Detroit in September 1931 and shot to death by their fellow Purples. This was basically the beginning of the self-destruction of the Purple Gang. The Collingwood Manor Massacre resulted in the first significant convictions against three Purple Gang leaders.

It is interesting to note that all of the 18 Purple Gangsters who met violent deaths between the years 1927 to 1935 were killed by other members of their own gang. This was due as much to greed as it was to lack of organization within the Mob.

The self-destruction process began in 1929 and continued until 1935, when the Purples essentially lost control of the wire service. By 1935, the gang’s manpower had all but disappeared due to inter-gang sniping and lengthy prison sentences.

From approximately 1927 to 1932, the Purples operated with impunity in Detroit. Citizens who viewed high-profile street crimes and gave police depositions often perjured themselves on the witness stand, when facing a defendant whom the papers described as a Purple Gangster. Significant convictions to crimes perpetrated by various Purples could not be obtained by local courts until 1930. That year a Purple Gangster was convicted for the first time on a murder charge and sentenced to life in prison. This arrest was a sign of the times. As the effects of the Great Depression set in, the public grew less tolerant of high-profile criminal acts, preferring instead the more low-key vice rackets such as gambling and narcotics. Of course, by this time Detroit’s Italian Mafia family had already begun to corner that market. It was the beginning of the end for the Purple Gang.

Although individual Purples continued to operate after 1935, the Purple Gang as an organized entity in the Detroit underworld no longer existed. The rudiments of the modern Detroit La Cosa Nostra organization essentially walked into the void left by the implosion of the Purple Gang.

“A kidnapper is worse than a murderer and is so recognized in this country today. No more vicious characters exist in this land of ours than those who would kidnap a human being and hold him for ransom.”

—Judge Edgar S. Vaught,
U.S. Judge for the Western
District of Oklahoma, 1933

“I know the kidnap racket is bad. But life’s a racket anyway. It’s dog eat dog.”

—Joseph “Legs” Laman

O
n September 15, 1933, a tall, thin, unassuming-looking man with black hair was picked up by police during a public-enemy sweep in Los Angeles, California. The man gave his name as George Richards and told police that he was employed as a life insurance salesman. Richards was taken to L.A. police headquarters, where he was mugged and fingerprinted. He was officially charged with vagrancy, and his fingerprints were sent out nationally over the teletype. Then came a frantic long-distance telephone call from Detroit, Michigan, police headquarters. Mr. Richards in reality was Joseph “Red” O’Riordan, one of the leaders of the old “Legs” Laman Gang of kidnappers that terrorized Detroit during the waning days of the ‘20s. The Detroit police had been searching for O’Riordan for more than three years. O’Riordan was the last important member of the “Legs” Laman Gang not dead or in jail. His arrest and extradition to Detroit to stand trial on abduction charges closed the book on the worst gang of kidnappers in Detroit underworld history.

“Red” and his wife Doris had been living quietly in the Los Angeles area for more than three years. O’Riordan’s wife told police that they had moved to California for her health. L.A. police had been tipped off about O’Riordan’s whereabouts by a 16-year-old L.A. County Jail inmate named Roy Farlow, who just happened to be O’Riordan’s stepson.

Although the Purple Gang has often been credited with being the founding fathers of the so-called “snatch racket” (kidnapping for ransom), Detroit during the mid- to late ‘20s was plagued by a number of other gangs who specialized in this form of terrorism for profit. The “Legs” Laman Gang was one of the most notorious of the Detroit kidnapping Mobs. This group was active for approximately four years, from 1926 to 1930. It was finally crushed by the combined efforts of the Michigan State Police and the Detroit Police Department. A special task force led by Captain Fred G. Armstrong of the Michigan State Police and Lt. Frank Holland of the Detroit Police Department brought about the eventual demise of the gang.

The “Legs” Laman outfit had been known by several different names during its reign of terror: the Burke, Newberry, Reid Mob; the Laman, Andrews, DeLong Gang; and the Hallisey/DeLong Gang. The name changes were a reflection of the names of the various leaders of the group during the different stages of the gang’s evolution.

The original kidnapping gang was believed by Detroit Police Department officials to have been organized by Johnny Reid during the mid-’20s. Reid was a transplanted St. Louis gangster and Detroit blind pig operator. He had been associated with the “Egan’s Rats” Mob of St. Louis, Missouri, and maintained a close relationship with the gang after moving to Detroit. The original Mob was thought to have included among its members Fred “Killer” Burke, Ezra Milford Jones, Bob Newberry, and Newberry’s brother-in-law Joseph “Red” O’Riordan. Burke, Newberry, and Jones were all well-known St. Louis gunmen affiliated with the Egan’s Rats Gang. They frequently worked in the Detroit area during the ‘20s.

It was Johnny Reid who was credited by the Detroit underworld with having originated the idea of kidnapping “wiseguys” (racketeers and gamblers) and holding them for ransom. Reid had reasoned that these underworld characters could be easily abducted, would pay any reasonable amount of money for their release, and would not go to the police.

In December of 1926, Johnny Reid was murdered. This was shortly after he had organized the original Detroit kidnapping Mob. He did not live long enough to reap the rewards of the gang’s successful kidnapping spree in the Detroit area during the summer months of 1927. Under the leadership of Burke, Newberry, and O’Riordan, the gang prospered during its first year of operation. They were said to have taken more than $334,200 from their victims during 1927 alone. Among some of the Mob’s better known prey were the gambling elite of the Detroit underworld during the Prohibition era. These men included:

Eventually, Burke, Newberry, and Jones moved on to other rackets, occasionally assisting the Laman Gang in Detroit area kidnappings.

Joseph “Red” O’Riordan was considered by State Police and Detroit police officials to be the “brains” behind what was later known as The “Legs” Laman Gang. O’Riordan was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 9, 1890, the son of a recently immigrated Irish couple. He picked up the nickname “Red” as a youngster because of his shock of red hair and ruddy complexion. O’Riordan, according to his own admission, attended parochial schools and a pharmacy college in St. Louis. He came to Detroit in 1916, where he married. He enlisted in the U.S. Army during the First World War, despite poor vision that might have kept him exempt from the draft. After the war, O’Riordan worked as a pharmacist at various drugstores around Detroit.

According to underworld accounts, O’Riordan struck it rich when he invented a formula for taking the cloudiness out of bathtub gin. When bootleggers first began making gin during prohibition, they used tap water and alcohol, which produced a cloudy product. It was easy for customers to spot the phony gin from the real thing. O’Riordan concocted a formula of distilled water and juniper berries that took the cloudiness out of the bootleg gin, producing a clear product that could be more easily passed off as the genuine article. In later years, O’Riordan also operated several blind pigs in Detroit.

O’Riordan’s connections to the Egan’s Rats Mob and the underworld went back to his childhood in St. Louis. He had grown up with Egan’s Rat gunman August (Gus) Winkler. As children, they passed the time engaging in childhood mischief, including throwing stones through the windows of East St. Louis Chinese laundries and other forms of vandalism. Despite O’Riordan’s misspent youth, he seemed to follow more conventional patterns of social mobility by staying in school and later attending college, while his childhood friends grew to be safecrackers, thugs, and gunmen.