Mahnomen Pioneer, 13 December 1929, page 2: Gang member is taken for ride

Page 2 of the Mahnomen Pioneer, Mahnomen, Minnesota, for Friday, 13 December 1929. The column “Gang Member Is Taken for Ride,” with the deck “Retaliation Seen in Slaying of Leader in Detroit Purple Mob,” is datelined Detroit. It is a syndicated feature in a weekly paper, so its “recently” refers to events of mid-1929.

It says Irving Shapiro, “known to the police for the last three years as an extortionist, racketeer and one of the mainstays of the Purple gang,” was “taken for a ride.” It reports that Inspector Henry J. Garvin saw in the killing and in the recent federal conviction of four other members “the ‘beginning of the end for the Purple gang.’” It says the gang “got its name from a Hastings street merchant who called a small group of youths in Detroit’s Ghetto ‘purple’ eleven years ago.”

The name story and the other killings the feature attributes to the gang are the writer’s account and are not repeated as fact here. The feature prints a witness’s street address, which this archive does not repeat.