While the bootleggers and gamblers on the East Coast were grabbing all of the headlines, a little known but very deadly gang war was going on in Detroit that had nothing to do with booze or dice. It was a beef between union and non-union dry cleaners and clothes dyers which, because it involved huge sums of money and required muscle on both sides, attracted organized criminals like roaches to spilled sugar.
It began, curiously enough, much the way the Syndicate itself started. In the 1920s, there was a huge market in Detroit for wholesale clothes cleaning and dying. This was more than just the mom-and-pop laundries, these were large-scale cleaning operations that catered to clothing manufacturers as well as those store-front wash-and-drys. The pie was so big the firms began to chew each other up in their frenzy to get a piece. Like the New York City gangsters who were needlessly killing other racketeers for a huge slice when they all could live happily on a big piece, the cleaners and dyers were undercutting prices, stealing customers and generally practicing ruinous business methods.
Something had to be done. “Then came Ben Abrams, of Chicago, with a tale of a highly ’satisfactory’ combination among the wholesalers of that and other cities,” the Detroit News wrote in a contemporary story about the problems in Detroit. “The combination solved the problems, so he said, which beset the Detroiters.”
The Murder of Sam Sigman
That was in 1924. After two years of relative peace and harmony in the dry cleaners syndicate, some of the cleaners began to see problems with the way Abrams and the combination was handling the dissection of the cleaning pie. The first man to step forward with a beef was Sam Sigman, a wholesale cleaner. Sigman thought the union was getting too much of a cut and he wanted out.
Sigman was the secretary of Perfect Cleaners and Dyers on Caniff Avenue in Detroit. He was summoned to a meeting one Saturday evening after expressing his desire to drop out of the combination and was never seen alive again. His bullet-riddled corpse was found on West Chicago Boulevard.
Apparently Sigman was not the kind of man who scared easily. Two months prior to his final ride with gangsters, he was taken for another ride by a couple of hoods who got cold feet after they learned Sigman was married with a six-month-old baby. They warned him not to cause waves for the combination and let him out near his home.
That warning came after his shop was stink-bombed and some of his trucks were burned.
He either didn’t believe his life was in danger or didn’t care, because Sam continued to ignore the cartel rules and was on his way to a meeting with union officials when he was murdered. They had promised him the return of a clothes-filled truck that had been stolen and lured him to an out-of-the way spot where gunman shot him down.
The Cleaners and Dyers War
Sigman’s murder went unsolved — it’s still technically unsolved according to the Detroit Police Department — for another two years before the war between connected and indpendent dry cleaners heated up in Detroit again.
Publicly, police denied that there was any kind of war between cleaners in the city, despite numerous reports of stink bombings, fires and truck vandalism. Even after Louis Green, business agent of the Retail Cleaners and Dyers, was killed in a police chase after bombing a Kercheval Avenue dying establishment, authorities “after a day-long investigation seemed inclined to discount the theory advanced in some circles that a cleaners’ and dyers’ trader war was responsible,” the Detroit Free Press reported.
But by 1928, after Sam Polakoff of Union Cleaners and Dyers was gunned-down, four stores were dynamited, men on both sides robbed and kidnapped, and the monetary damages were estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the police were forced to act.
After a brief investigation by the Bomb and Murder squad of the Detroit police, the extent of the Detroit Cleaners and Dyers war and the underworld involvement was revealed.
The Purple Gang
At the heart of the war was the Purple Gang, lead by Abe and Ray Bernstein. They had burst on the scene a few years earlier with the murder of patrolman Vivian Welsh who was shaking down blind pigs operated by the gang.
The Purples were on the side of the non-union shops lead by Charles Jacoby, brother-in-law to the Bernsteins. In March 1928, the heart of the Purple Gang and Jacoby were charged with conspiracy to extort money from cleaners shops.
There was a bit of a stir when police announced they could not find Abe Bernstein, who was in New York meeting with friends Meyer Lansky and Charlie Luciano on other business. But within a few days, Bernstein returned to Michigan and surrendered, posting the $500 bail.
Raising bail for the 12 men under indictment wasn’t hard. The gang was collecting $1,000 per week from cleaners, police said. To put that in perspective, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, $1,000 in 1928 is equivalent to about $10,000 today.
“The Purples levied tribute, under threats of terrorism, not only on the wholesale cleaners and dyers, but on produce merchants and blind pig operators,” The News reported. “They have also, it is alleged, sold their services to opposing groups in industrial disputes.”
In 1925, the gang dynamited the Empire Cleaners and Dyers plant, causing $5,000 in damage. A month later, they bombed the Novelty Cleaning Company, causing an another $3,000 in damage. A retail cleaner on Sherman Avenue was attacked a few weeks later, then the Forest Cleaners and Dyers wholesale plant was bombed.
When the Purple Gang was indicted, the charges included breaking 50 retail establishment windows, stealing $50,000 worth of clothing from trucks, taking an addition $15,000 worth of clothes from retail establishments and damaging 97 retail stores with stink bombs.
The Trial
Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees were in town the week the Purple Gang went on trial but the game at Tiger Stadium was not the hottest ticket in town. The trial drew standing-room only crowds in the Criminal Courts building downtown and was covered in excruciating detail by the local papers, down to the names and addresses of the people in the jury pool.
After the jury was selected, Chief Assistant Prosecutor James Chenot opened the trial by laying out the state’s case. Jacoby hired the Purple Gang to extort money from cleaners, Chenot said, and he indicated the state had 41 witnesses who would testify to that fact. He also hinted that some of the witnesses had been “reached” by the gang, because cleaners who told police they were paying extortion to the gang were now backing away from those claims. Many of the cleaners who had been paying tribute made it clear on the stand and in the papers that they wanted no part of the case against the Bernsteins, but they had been subpeonaed and forced to testify.
For the defense attorney Edward J. Kennedy blamed the war on Francis X. Martel, leader of Detroit’s Federation of Labor whom the defense said “betrayed a union organization for graft money and engineered the pending extortion charges against Jacoby because he broke from Martel’s organization and ran an independent business,” the Detroit Times reported.
Over the course of the trial, Chenot painted a picture of Jacoby and the Purples threatening other dry cleaners and using Jacoby’s operation as “gun range.”
“One witness will tell how he saw these men twirling guns on their fingers and shooting at walls for target practice,” Chenot said in his opening statement.
Jacoby’s lawyer, Samuel Rhodes called Martel a “oppressor of the poor at whose merest whim the life savings of a man with a large family could be wiped out,”
The finger-pointing continued for several weeks, interrupted by an explosion in the Criminal Courts building that was never positively linked to the cleaners and dyers war and then by the judge’s illness.
Finally, after a brief bit of excitement when Martel disappeared for a few days, the case was turned over to the jury which exonerated the Purple Gang.
In retaliation, Martel was arrested and charged with heavy-handed union organizing tactics, but the case against him was dropped when evidence in the Detroit Federation of Labor’s office was destroyed by a mysterious fire.
The murders of Sam Sigman and Sam Polakoff were never solved and no arrests were made. The Purple Gang managed to skate through the Cleaners and Dyers war with little damage, but the end was near.