But He Was Good to His Mother - The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters

by Robert Rockaway

  A few defectors from the St. Louis gang then merged with the Detroiters. This combination was further strengthened by the addition of a dozen or so certified tough guys from New York.

  Two of the most ruthless of the New York hoods were Abe Axler and Eddie Fletcher. Both men grew up in New York and came to Detroit in 1923, while in their early twenties. In Detroit, they became inseparable pals and partners, and hitmen for the gang.

  One observer described them as “sawed-off Napoleons,” with “dark, furtive, beady eyes and abnormal ears, Axler’s protruding and overgrown by nature, and Fletcher’s flattened and hammered close to his head by the punches of too many pugilists during his early ring career.”33

  Axler was never a pug. His nose had not been knocked askew as Fletcher’s was, and his large ears had never been “cauliflowerized.” But his face was the more sinister of the two. He had an aquiline nose, high cheek bones, deep shadows under his small eyes, sunken cheeks and a thin, tight mouth. By repute, he was a more vicious killer and rougher fighter than Fletcher.

  Axler was dour, moody and quick on the trigger of a machine gun. Fletcher was a second-rate pug who became a fifth-rate fight manager and, ultimately, a first-rate gunman. Both men were “larceny-minded schemers and killers, with an abundance of what police and newspapermen call ‘crazy nerve’,” wrote one journalist.34

  By 1927 the Purple Gang had grown to between forty and fifty members and felt strong enough to move against their competitors and those who had betrayed them.

  In March 1927, Fletcher and Axler rented a suite in the Milaflores Apartments at 106 East Alexandrine Avenue and invited three St. Louis gangsters — Frank Wright, Reuben Cohen and Joseph Bloom — to a parley. When the trio entered the flat, Fletcher and Axler opened up with machine guns. The three callers were dead before they hit the floor.35

  Underworld gossip had it that the Purples had imported the three men from St. Louis as “rod men” (hired killers) to help protect the gang’s lucrative alcohol trade while it was waging a war with rival bootlegging gangs. The trio became greedy and double-crossed the Purples with the Bloomfield kidnapping. They had to be taught a lesson.

  Crime historians refer to this incident as Detroit’s first machine gun execution and the event which introduced machine guns into Detroit gangster warfare.36

  Axler and Fletcher, along with a colleague and former Egan Rat, Fred “Killer” Burke, were arrested as suspects in the killing. Police grilled them for hours without results, and, in the end, were forced to let them go.

  Despite their release, Axler and Fletcher’s activities earned them the odious distinction of being named Detroit’s Public Enemies No. 1 and 2, respectively.37

  By 1928, the Purple Gang was at its peak. It dominated the Motor City’s rackets and acquired a reputation for ruthlessness and violence that matched Chicago’s Capone outfit. The consensus was that the Purples were the toughest Jewish mob in the nation.

  Jazz musician Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, who played in Detroit and Chicago, knew many of the Purples. He claimed that they were “a hard lot of guys, so tough they made Capone’s playmates look like a kindergarten class.”38

  Mezzrow had first-hand experience of just how violent the Purples could be. On the evening of August 13, 1927, Mezz was working in a black cabaret at 1708 St. Antoine Street when Abe Axler and Irving Milberg came in with two women. The Purples and their dates sat at a table and ordered drinks. At another table across from them sat two local black hoodlums, Godfrey Quales and Hobart Harris. The men exchanged words and an argument ensued. In a flash, Axler and Milberg pulled out guns and began shooting. Quales and Harris were killed.

  Axler and Milberg were arrested. They admitted to the killings but maintained it was in self-defense. Witnesses supported their claim and they were released.39

  The major source of the gang’s income was bootlegging. The Purples controlled the liquor traffic from Canada, as well as a number of blind pigs and gambling houses. They operated them outright or forced them to pay “protection” money to stay in business.

  The gang also organized a phoney Detroit business, the Art Novelty Company, to facilitate the interstate shipment of their Canadian Whiskey. Liquor conveyed to Detroit from Canada was brought to the company’s building where it was packaged under false labels and then shipped by train or truck to other cities.40

  For several years, the Purples ran the lucrative business of supplying Canadian whiskey to the Capone organization in Chicago. The hijacking of a shipment of Purple Gang whiskey (Old Log Cabin) by the Bugs Moran Gang of Chicago led to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of seven Moran gangsters in 1929.41

  The massacre was part of a prolonged war between the Capone mob and Chicago’s North Side gang headed by George “Bugs” Moran. Although he got his nickname because of his often outlandish behavior, Moran was known, especially to Capone, as a brutal and efficient killer.

  A regular churchgoer, Bugs considered Capone to be a lowlife because he dealt in prostitution. “We don’t deal in flesh,” Moran

  Bugsy Siegel

  said. “Anyone who does is lower than a snake’s belly. Can’t Capone get that through his thick skull?”42

  In public Moran referred to Capone as “the Beast,” and “the Behemoth.” Just to aggravate Capone, Bugs would make peace with him and then break the agreement within a matter of hours.43

  Because Capone refused to sell him Old Log Cabin at what he felt was a fair price, Moran made the foolish decision to supply his customers with the whiskey by hijacking Purple Gang shipments to Capone. Soon nothing coming from Detroit was safe.

  Capone was enraged. He decided to set Moran up for a hit and eliminate his gang once and for all. Through freelance hijackers never identified, but rumored to be Purples, Capone’s people arranged for a load of Old Log Cabin to be sold to Moran, with a promise of more to come.

  Moran’s men went to the gang’s headquarters, a garage at 2122 North Clarke Street, to await delivery. Suddenly, several unknown men, dressed in police uniforms, rushed into the garage at the appointed time. They lined the Moran henchmen up against the wall. Thinking this was just a routine police bust, the gangsters offered no resistance. All at once, two of the “policemen” cut loose with Thompson submachine guns, mowing the seven victims down.44

  Purple gangsters Harry and Phil Keywell and Eddie Fletcher were identified from photographs as men who, a week earlier, had arrived with baggage and rented front rooms in the boardinghouses overlooking the garage. This was never proven and the culprits in the killings were never identified.45

  In order to earn additional money, the Purples branched out into other fields during the late 1920s. They hijacked prizefight films and forced movie theaters to show them for higher fees. Detroit theater owners, distrustful of the local authorities and fearing for their lives, sent a confidential letter to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI pleading for help. “We think that this is an outrage and you should investigate this matter right now and not let these gangsters make thousands every year at this racket and pay no income tax and get away with it,” they wrote. “Can’t we have some protection please?”

  The owners requested anonymity “because we don’t want no stink bombs put in our theaters or else the back blown up, or worse.”46

  The Purples also dealt in gambling and narcotics and defrauded insurance companies by staging fake accidents. They kidnapped people and accepted contracts for killing the enemies of various hoodlums who did not want to do the job themselves. Abe Axler was singularly proficient at this.47

  In the summer of 1927, Axler undertook a contract to eliminate a visiting St. Louis gunman named Milford Jones. On the evening of June 15, 1927, Axler followed Jones into the Stork Club at 47 Rowena Street. Jones made the mistake of sitting at the bar with his back to the door. Axler walked up quietly behind him and without saying a word pulled out a revolver and shot Jones in the head. He then walked out the door.

  Acting on a tip, the police arrested Axler o
n June 25. He was questioned and released. No one who was in the club could recall what the killer looked like and the Jones killing remained unsolved.48

  The Purples’ wide-ranging activities caused them to become overextended, forcing them to bring in “specialists” from the outside. One of these was Morris “Red” Rudensky, a premier safecracker who later wrote an autobiography entitled The Gonif (thief). Rudensky operated strictly on a contract basis and his “fees” ranged from $5,000 to $15,000, depending on the value of the goods to be stolen. Red pulled a series of jobs for the Purples and enjoyed working for them so much that he remembered them in his book.49

  Detroit police credit the Purple Gang with over 500 killings, more than the Capone mob. This caused Herbert Ausbury, a historian of American crime, to call the gang “the most efficiently organized gang of killers in the United States.”50

  During 1927, members of the gang extorted thousands of dollars in protection money from Detroit cleaners and dyers. The laundry business attracted many Detroit Jews because it seemed a logical adjunct to tailoring and because of the ease with which a family could maintain the business. By the 1920s Jews owned most of Detroit’s dry-cleaning establishments. They became the prime targets of the Jewish gang.51

  Most of the laundries paid their monthly or weekly “dues” without protest. “It was not worth getting beaten up or losing your life or your business,” one owner recalled. “So we paid the collector when he came.”52

  Recalcitrant owners were subjected to fires, dynamitings, stench bombings, thefts, beatings and kidnappings. This so-called “Cleaners and Dyers War” lasted for two years, and at least two cleaners, Sam Sigman and Sam Polakoff, were murdered in cold blood.53

  The police finally stopped the war and arrested twelve Purples, among them the Bernstein brothers, Abe Axler and Eddie Fletcher, Harry Keywell and Irving Milberg. They were charged with conspiring to extort money from wholesale cleaners and dyers. The trial lasted for weeks, but ended with all of them being acquitted.54

  The gang extorted money from other legitimate businesses as well. One terrified businessman wrote to J. Edgar Hoover describing his fear and predicament.

  “Several years ago this mob came to my office and announced that they would take charge and if I didn’t like it my body would be found floating in the Detroit River.” As a result, “I was compelled to let these parasites run my business and take the biggest cut of the profits or face death.”

  He explained that he “dare not give you my name,” and asked Hoover to “do everything in your power to rid Detroit of this menace and put these rats where they really belong.”55

  After the Cleaners and Dyers War, the Purple’s interest in extortion declined. They continued to operate, however, as bootleggers, rum-runners, hijackers, smugglers, betting parlor operators and dope peddlers.

  The Purple’s reign ended because the police moved against them when gang members got careless and left behind too much evidence of their crimes, and because the rival Sicilian mob, tired of competing with the Purples, decided to eliminate them. One by one, the Purples were murdered until most of them were either dead or afraid to remain in Detroit. The Sicilians moved so secretly that neither the Purples nor the public knew what was happening.56

  In July 1929, Prohibition agents brought liquor violation charges against four members of the gang and made the charges stick. Eddie Fletcher, Abe Axler, Harry Sutton and Irving Milberg were sentenced to twenty-two months in Leavenworth penitentiary and fined $5,000 each.57

  Two months later, Phil Keywell shot and killed a young boy he thought was spying on the gang. David Levitt was there at the time and remembers what happened.

  “My brother Nate Levitt owned a warehouse and liquor cutting headquarters in the rear of Jaslove’s butcher shop on Henry and Hastings. One of our employees, a man by the name of Eddie Keller, went up to the office to tell them he saw a black boy looking under the stable door. The boy lost his ball; it rolled under the door.

  “Phil Keywell and my brother Nate found the boy in front of a candy store between Henry and Medbury on Hastings Street. The kid was confused and couldn’t answer their questions. Phil shot the boy.

  “However, the police did not want Nate, as he would have been charged because he was with Phil. The police wanted to get Morris Raider, who was the sidekick of Philly Keywell.

  “Morris Raider had an alibi which he did not use. And both men were sentenced to life at Jackson.

  “The boy should not have died. The police let him bleed to death instead of calling for an ambulance. They were taking reports.”58

  In November 1929, Morris Raider was sentenced to twelve-to-fifteen years in Jackson State Prison for the shooting. In October 1930, Philip Keywell was sentenced to Jackson Prison for life for this same killing. He served 32 years and was paroled in 1962.59

  In 1931, Ray Bernstein, Irving Milberg and Harry Keywell were sentenced to life imprisonment in the Collingwood case.

  And in 1936, Harry Fleisher was tried in federal court for violation of the internal revenue law He was charged with part ownership of a $100,000 six thousand gallon still. Fleisher and his brother Sam were sentenced to serve eight years in the Federal Penitentiary at Leavenworth.60

  Harry was released in 1944. In December 1945, he was convicted for the armed robbery of an Oakland County gambling spot and received a sentence of 25 to 50 years. He was released again from prison in 1965 at the age of 62. He never went back to prison again.61

  Louis Fleisher, Harry’s other brother, was arrested in 1938. A longtime member of the Purples, Louis’s record of arrests included bootlegging, assault, carrying concealed weapons, arson, robbery and murder. Louis specialized in “muscle tactics” and intimidation in Detroit’s meat-cutting and packing industries, and during the Cleaners and Dyers War.62

  Some Detroiters remember Louis as an open-handed, big-hearted, boisterous, fun-loving, friendly guy. Others remember him as a nut.

  Detroiters recall how Louis enjoyed aiming his moving car at people he knew walking across Twelfth Street, where the Purples’ favorite restaurants were located. He thought it was great fun to chase them to the curb and then down the sidewalk.

  One acquaintance claimed he would “always get out of a joint when Lou walked in. You never knew what would happen.”

  Another friend felt differently. “I was always glad to see Lou walk in a place,” he said. “Things livened up every place he went.”63

  After searching for him for over a year in connection with robbery and arson, Federal agents located Louis in his car outside an apartment at Highland and Second Avenue. Louis’s wife Nellie fled, throwing away a pistol as she ran. Agents seized her before she got too far.

  Inside Fleisher’s apartment, agents found an arsenal consisting of submachine guns, revolvers with silencers, brass knuckles, a dozen teargas shells and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Fleisher was sentenced to 30 years at Alcatraz. His wife got ten years.

  Louis was paroled in 1957, after serving nineteen years, but was jailed again in 1958 for violating parole after Detroit police arrested him for attempted arson. Louis had been caught on the roof of the Dorsey Cleaners, at 1348 East Seven Mile Road. A hole had been bored in the roof and a can of gasoline was next to him.

  Fleisher pleaded guilty to arson and was sentenced to five years in prison. By playing with matches on the cleaning plant roof, Louis had violated his federal parole. He served the rest of his federal term, eleven years, in Leavenworth and the Milan, Michigan prison, with his Detroit sentence running concurrently. He died of a heart attack in the Michigan State Prison at Jackson in 1964.64

  Remaining leaders of the gang were systematically and mysteriously executed. In July 1929, Irving Shapiro, who had been a gorilla for the gang, was taken for a ride and slain, his head shattered by four bullets fired at close range from behind.

  In October 1929, Ziggy Selbin, a Purple Gang enforcer, was cornered in a doorway on Twelfth Street and shot to death. Few person
s mourned his death because Selbin was wild, unpredictable and totally unprincipled. Born in Detroit in 1910, his father was a deli owner who also dabbled in petty crime. By the time Ziggy was a teenager he had committed several murders and was doing considerable freelance work. Once Selbin got into an argument with a drinking companion who refused to surrender a ring Selbin admired. Ziggy solved the stalemate by cutting off the man’s finger.65

  Despite his good work for the gang, the hard-to-control Selbin had become an embarrassment. The Purples felt they had no choice but to eliminate him.66

  In November 1933, the bodies of Abe Axler and Eddie Fletcher were found, side-by-side and holding hands, in the back seat of Axler’s car on an isolated road in Oakland County. Each man had been shot in the face a dozen times.67

  Henry Shorr, for many years the gang’s brains, disappeared in December 1935 after meeting Harry Fleisher in a Twelfth Street delicatessen. Fleisher’s automobile was later found with bloodstains on the cushions and Shorr was never seen again. The police concluded that Shorr had been taken for a ride. His body was never found and Fleisher had an airtight alibi.68

  In November 1937, Harry Millman, the gang’s last surviving torpedo, was gunned down in the cocktail bar of Boesky’s delicatessen on Hazelwood and Twelfth Street where he had gone for dinner.69

  More hooligan than hoodlum, Millman had swaggered through the Detroit underworld with a chip on his shoulder, rye whiskey on his breath, and an eagerness to be a tough guy. Although considered the clown of the gang, Millman was serious enough to try and carry on the Purples’ extortion rackets. But his post-Prohibition career consisted mostly of shaking down whorehouses.

  An earlier attempt had been made on Millman’s life that summer when someone placed a bomb under the hood of his car, set to go off as soon as he stepped on the starter. Only Millman had sent Willie Holmes, the doorman at a local nighclub, to pick up his car for him. The hapless Willie started the engine and was blown to pieces.70