Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation

Chapter 3. Smaller Cities

61 $ New York and Chicago were the biggest cities and the biggest crime centers in America during the Prohibition era, but the wave of crime extended to smaller cities as well. The underworld conducted business and adapted the roles of different ethnic groups in three urban centers: Detroit, where one tough Jewish mob gained dominance; Kansas City, where an Irish political boss allied himself with an Italian consigliore; and Cleveland, where a governing Jewish syndicate brought a measure of order while a war was fought in the Italian neighborhoods. Detroit, Michigan Starting in the late nineteenth century Detroit witnessed an influx of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Between 1910 and 1920 alone, the Jewish population of the city increased by an astonishing 247 percent— faster than the overall population growth. A 1903 article in the Detroit Free Press praised the Jewish newcomers as “intelligent, sensible, hard-working people, sober and religious, of good moral character and determined to get ahead in the world. They are men with characteristics that make any nation strong.”1 One of those hard-working immigrants was Henry Bernstein, a Russian Jew who arrived in Detroit in 1902 and established a shoe repair c h a p t e r 3 Smaller Cities 62 The Rise shop. Although Henry might well have been of good moral character, his four sons—Abe, Joseph, Ray, and Isadore—were decidedly not. The local Bishop School had two tracks—an academic one for the brightest, and a vocational, reform school track for those not so promising. Except for Abe, who did not attend the school, the Bernstein brothers took the lower track.2 The trade they really learned was not taught in the classrooms, but rather outside, where they shot dice in the school yard and joined with other disaffected boys to roam the rundown, crowded streets of Detroit’s grittiest sections, stealing from pushcarts, robbing drunks, and beating up other kids. As they grew older their crime became more sophisticated— extorting money, stealing cargo from railroad freight yards, and working with established criminals. The four Bernstein brothers and their friends came to be known as the Purple Gang. Several stories circulate about the origin of the name. According to one, a Jewish fruit peddler who had been robbed by the gang complained, “They’re tainted, those boys. Their characters are discolored, they’re purple. They’ll come to a bad end.” But this story is dubious—the Purple Gang name did not appear in the newspapers until late in the decade, long after the boys had moved into the big time.3 The four brothers came to maturity just at the right time to take advantage of a new line of business that eventually rivaled Detroit’s mainstay automobile industry—bootlegging. Had it not been for Prohibition with its promise of vast criminal wealth, the streetwise Bishop School kids might have grown up to lead normal lives. For several reasons, Detroit was uniquely positioned to violate the Volstead Act. The state of Michigan had gone dry two years before national Prohibition went into effect, and enterprising scofflaws had already established a smuggling network along U.S. Highway 25, dubbed the Avenue de Booze, that brought liquor to Detroit from Toledo, Ohio, where it was still legal.4 Once Ohio and the rest of the states went dry, the thirsty residents of Detroit turned their attention to Canada, where the manufacture of liquor was legal. The southernmost city in Canada was Windsor, separated from Detroit by the narrow Detroit River, which in places was less than a Smaller Cities 63 mile wide. The American side of the river boundary also had remote areas where contraband could be unloaded without detection. Once Prohibition was enacted in the United States, shrewd Canadian businessmen built distilleries in Windsor; the whiskey they produced could be easily smuggled to Detroit, which in turn became the main liquor distribution center for the entire Midwest. Boats were the usual method for smuggling, but booze was also conveyed by railroad freight cars, ferries, and even airplanes. One especially ingenious technique was an underwater pipe that carried whiskey produced in a Windsor distillery directly to a bottling plant in Detroit. The Windsor-Detroit route provided the major share of the foreign whiskey smuggled into the United States from Canada.5 Looking back on the Prohibition era, a veteran Detroit newspaperman joked about how the city...