Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang (Images of America)

Good delivery, enjoyable.

This book was great! Not many authors, tv shows or movies pay attention to the purple gang and I don't understand why. They were Capone's major liquor supplier, quite possibly took part in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and were a Jewish/Polish/Eastern European immigrant gang who worked hand in hand with the Italian gangs in early 1900's Detroit (it was almost unheard of for rival ethnic gangs to cooperate). At that time Detroit was a boom town, one of the richest cities in all the United States. A huge percentage of the illegal booze and drugs (some estimate 80%) that came into the US came across the Detroit River from Canada. Nowhere did prohibition change the landscape more than Detroit.

The past few months I had become interested in the Purple Gang and did a lot of online searching on the subject. Found a lot of good info and it turns out much of that "good info" were excerpts from this book. The disappointment comes from assuming there would be more detailed writing on the Purples; though it's not the author's fault that so much of the book's text can be found online. Maybe in time, I'll have a little more appreciation of the book.

Another book ordered as a part of a series of learning more about the original bad boys of Detroit. Seems that the Motor city has had it's problems with crime for over a century. This book is a must have for historical truth seekers.

It's mostly pictures. Each picture is accompanied by a few sentences of text to explain what is in the picture. It's better than nothing but I was expecting more information than what it contains.

good

Fantastic history of Detroit's underworld, in many respects much more ruthless than those in Chicago or New York City. A must have for those fascinated with the heyday of mob controlled cities...

This is an excellent book and shows the purple gang members with lots of pictures. It did not however have in it what Iwas looking for and that was information on the area in Clare MI where the purple gang had their hideout and the tunnels that run through this area that they used for booze running