Detroit, 1920s: a city separated from a legal Canadian whiskey supply by half a mile of river. For thirteen years, that narrow crossing called the Windsor-Detroit Funnel carried an estimated 75% of all the illegal liquor smuggled into the United States. And running it wasn't the Italian-American families most people picture when they think of Prohibition. It was the Purple Gang: a loose, ferociously violent syndicate of Jewish-American sons of Russian immigrants, many still in their teens, who rose out of a Detroit neighborhood called Little Jerusalem to control liquor, gambling, and narcotics across the city; and whose reputation was fearsome enough that even Al Capone chose partnership over a turf war.
Tonight's episode tells the Purple Gang's full story, slowly and thoroughly, as a bedtime narration over gentle rain sounds: the Sugar House Boys and the five competing explanations for where the "Purple" name actually came from; the ice-bridge smugglers and doctored eggs of the Windsor-Detroit Funnel; the Cleaners and Dyers War and the acquittal that convinced Detroit the gang was untouchable; the Milaflores Massacre and Detroit's first recorded use of a Tommy gun in a gangland killing; the Collingwood Manor Massacre of 1931, where the gang's own internal betrayal finally brought it down; and the slow, decade-long unraveling that ended with Detroit's underworld absorbed into the rising Sicilian-American Detroit Partnership.
This is a long-form history episode, built to help you settle in and drift off. Factual, carefully researched, and read at a slow, calm pace, with the harder edges of the violence handled without dwelling on gore. If your mind wanders partway through, that's exactly what it's here for.
In tonight's story:
- The Burnstein brothers and the immigrant neighborhood that produced the gang
- How the Ontario Temperance Act's export loophole created the Windsor-Detroit Funnel
- Speedboats, ice bridges, and the "whiskey six" — how the smuggling actually worked
- The Purple Gang's uneasy alliance with Al Capone's Chicago organization
- The Cleaners and Dyers War and the Milaflores Massacre
- The Collingwood Manor Massacre of 1931 and the informant who broke the gang
- What happened to the Burnstein brothers, and how the gang's territory passed to Detroit's Sicilian-American organized crime family
- The Purple Gang's surprisingly thin pop-culture footprint, from Raymond Chandler to The Blues Brothers
Chapters / Timestamps
00:00:00 Introduction — Detroit's forgotten Prohibition secret
00:04:35 Chapter One — Little Jerusalem and the Sugar House Boys
00:21:49 Chapter Two — The Windsor-Detroit Funnel
00:44:28 Chapter Three — Blood on Hastings Street
01:05:49 Chapter Four — The Unraveling
01:18:55 Chapter Five — Echoes on the River
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Further reading: Paul R. Kavieff, The Purple Gang: Organized Crime in Detroit, 1910–1945; Gregory A. Fournier, The Elusive Purple Gang: Detroit's Kosher Nostra.
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