Purple Gang
criminal mob group of the 1920s
The Purple Gang, also known as the Sugar House Gang, was a criminal mob of bootleggers and hijackers composed predominantly of Jewish gangsters. They operated in Detroit, Michigan, during the 1920s of the Prohibition era and came to be Detroit's dominant criminal gang. Excessive violence and infighting caused the gang to destroy itself in the 1930s.
History
The Michigan Legislature prohibited the sale of liquor in 1917, three years before national Prohibition was established by a constitutional amendment. Along with temperance supporters, industrialist Henry Ford owned the River Rouge plant and desired a sober workforce, so he backed the Damon Act, a state law that, along with the Wiley Act, prohibited virtually all possession, manufacture, or sale of alcohol starting in 1918. Detroit is close to Ohio, so bootleggers and others would import liquor from Toledo where it was still legal. They also smuggled liquor in from Canada.
Judges took a lenient view of offenders. The Damon Act was declared unconstitutional in 1919 by the state supreme court.
In 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment was adopted and prohibition took effect throughout the United States.
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This entry incorporates text from “Purple Gang” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.