The Purple Gang

Introduction

One of the famous Purple Gang is also known as Sugar House Gang. This Purple Gang used to be a throng with predominantly Jewish fellows of hijackers and bootleggers in the year 1920, working outside of Michigan, Detroit that was a chief harbour for trading illegal alcohol products. This was during the Prohibition because of the Detroit's expedient juxtaposition towards Canada that, did not contribute in Proscription (assets1.mytrainsite.com).

Discussion

The Purple gang was led by the four Bernstein brothers, Abe, Joey, Ray, and Izzy. In Michigan, the sale, distribution, and consumption of alcohol were prohibited on May 1, 1918, over a year sooner than the rest of the country. Enter the young Purple Gang, a gang of Jewish juveniles disrupting Detroit's lower east-side neighborhoods. These juveniles quickly learned to profit from the nation going dry by hijacking and strong arming bootleggers and rum runners. Prohibition by definition is an act of prohibiting. The Purple Gang was notorious for being ruthless, vicious, feared, and was used by other gangs as gunners and protectors (Waugh, pp: 19).

The Purple Gang of Detroit, up until then more interested in robberies and murders, became one of the most important of the Prohibitiongangs, controlling much of the liquor supplies smuggled in from Canada. In Cleveland, the violent Mayfield Road Gang emerged as an extremely potent force, and of course, Chicago's Al Capone gained recognition as the nation's most prominent Prohibition gangster. It has been estimated that Capone himself made $60 million from bootlegging and rum running.

With the incredible profits from Prohibition rackets, the mobs found they could corrupt federal agents, police, politicians and judges to an extent never before considered possible. In fact, in the pre-Prohibition era it was the politicians who controlled the gangsters. With their newfound wealth the gangsters were able to reverse this ...