The Elusive Purple Gang

The Elusive Purple Gang: Detroit's Kosher Nostra is a concise history of one of America's most notorious Prohibition gangs. The Burnstein brothers and their associates were the only Jewish gang in the United States to dominate the rackets of a major American city. From their meteoric rise to the top of Detroit's underworld to their ultimate demise, this is an episodic account of the Purple Gang's corrosive pursuit of power and wealth and their inevitable plunge towards self-destruction.

The Purple Gang - Detroit's ruling organised crime syndicate - became one of the most notorious gangs during the Prohibition Era. The gang was comprised mostly of the offspring of recent immigrants - Eastern European Jews who were hardworking and honest. This vicious gang quickly rose to power by engaging in extortion, gambling and the illicit trade of drugs and alcohol. The book if graphically illustrated with 32 pages of photographs depicting the gangsters, from their lives on the street to their bloody demise.

Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang is a photographic history of one of the most notorious organized crime groups of the 20th century. The photographs chronologically follow the evolution of the Purples from their days as a juvenile street gang through their rise to power and eventual self-destruction. Using rare police department mug shots and group photographs, the book transports readers through the dark side of Prohibition-era Detroit history. Detroit had a gold rush atmosphere and a thriving black market during the 1920s that attracted gangsters and unsavory characters from all over the country.

Learn the story behind one of Detroit's most infamous mobs with rare photographs documenting their rise and fall. Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in Detroit chronicles the storied and hallowed gangland history of the notorious Detroit underworld. Scott M. Burnstein takes the reader inside the belly of the beast, tracking the bloodshed, exploits, and leadership of the southeast Michigan crime syndicate as never before seen in print. Through a stunning array of rare archival photographs and images, Motor City Mafia captures Detroit's most infamous past, from its inception in the early part of the 20th century, through the years when the iconic Purple Gang ruled the city's streets during Prohibition, through the 1930s and the formation of the local Italian mafia, and the Detroit crime family's glory days in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, all the way to the downfall of the area's mob reign in the 1980s and 1990s.

Between the summers of 1967 through 1969, a predatory killer stalked the campuses of Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan seeking prey until he made the mistake of killing his last victim in the basement of his uncle's home. All-American boy John Norman Collins was arrested, tried, and convicted of the strangulation murder of Karen Sue Beineman. The other murders never went to trial, with one exception, and soon became cold cases. With the benefit of fifty years of hindsight, hundreds of vintage newspaper articles, thousand of police reports, and countless interviews, Fournier tells the stories of the other victims, recreates the infamous trial that took Collins off the streets, and details Collins's time spent in prison.

For 14K Triad official Steven Wong, faking his own death to escape trial was easy. But evading investigative reporter Terry Gould -- impossible. For 11 years terry Gould has tracked the man known as the “paper fan” through the organized crime circles of six countries. This riveting, horrifying, yet often hilariously funny book is the story of that search, a daredevil journey through the seductions and terrors of Steve’s world. Steven Wong is the “paper fan,” a thirty-nine-year-old Hong Kong-born mobster. Raised in New York’s Chinatown, he matured into crime in Vancouver, where he founded and headed the murderous Gum Wah Gang in the late 1980s and early ’90s. In 1992, Wong “died” in a traffic accident in a remote area of the Philippines before he could be sent to jail for heroin trafficking, conveniently just after he’d taken out a million-dollar life insurance policy. His urn may still be interred in a Vancouver cemetery, but today, Interpol has a “Red Alert” arrest warrant out for Wong, and his updated file reads like a Hollywood action film -- a post-mortem panorama of organized criminal adventure that circles the Pacific Rim, from Macau to Japan, from Cambodia to the Philippines. Gould’s search takes him into a world in which politicians, police, businessmen and criminals sprint along in one big pack, sometimes nipping each other’s heels, sometimes licking each other’s faces, and sometimes inviting one another back home for all-night mah-jong parties. Forced to work according to right-side-up rules, honest cops haven’t had a chance of arresting Steve in his upside-down world. Four times, Terry Gould has traced Steven Wong through Asia’s circles of corruption and pinned him down, but the law has let him slip away. Fifth time lucky? “Gangsters are good team players who generally exhibit a locker-room familiarity with other men. Still, it surprised me when Steve answered the door on Monday wearing only his polka-dot boxers, showing off his biceps and his chest tattooed with the winged dragons and sharp-taloned eagle. He was talking on the phone and barely interrupted himself as he turned back into the house, whereupon I realized that the display was likely done on purpose. Neck to waist his back was totally covered by a stylized tableau of a dragon crawling against a background of tigers and flowers — a Triad montage no one outside his syndicate world was supposed to see.” -- from Paper Fan

SYNOPSISIn "The Greatest Thieves in the World", the author Neboysha Saikovski mixes urban drama with a crime thriller in this global action-adventure novel about diamond robberies. The result is an adventurous book in which the personalities of the main characters and global criminal syndicates are thoroughly analyzed, the action is shown in abundance through all the chapters, and the scenes of diamond robberies are especially spectacular.After the thieving team of the Pink Panthers successfully carried out three large diamond robberies in Antwerp, London, and Tokyo, they are recruiting an elegant logistics expert and a top make-up artist to prepare for the robbery at the Diamond Biennale in Paris. After successfully completing the job in Paris, they carry out two more spectacular robberies together, at the Amsterdam airport and in Saint Tropez, after which discord and attrition occur within the gang over the division of the loot. If there is no reconciliation, the rest of the gang is forced to forgather and train a new crew for another robbery, this time in Dubai.A WORD TO THE READERDiamond. A symbol of strength, durability, value, success, happiness, and love.Imagine the world you know as one side of the street, where diamonds on display in expensive urban neighborhoods of the world's metropolises evoke a desire for wealth, fame, and, above all, a desire for power.Young people from the former Yugoslavia, as well as the heroes of this book, did not have the opportunity to enjoy their youth like their peers, to play basketball or football in the playground in their neighborhood. They did not have the opportunity to meet that glamorous side of the street where diamonds shine. The god of war seduced some of them into his ranks, to shed the blood of those they called brothers until yesterday, while others sought salvation in that dazzling world until they met again while creating the world's most powerful gang of diamond robbers.You, holding this book in your hand, you likely walk down that street where everything is beautiful, happy, and great. If you have the courage, dare take the step together with our heroes. Cross the street and meet the dark world behind all that glitter and glow. Find out how diamonds are made and come to that array of glittering shops and the blood, sweat, and tears that they represent in reality.From the hot sands of Africa where greedy corporations exploit human and mineral resources in collaboration with corrupt politicians, through shining modern Europe all the way to Dubai, embark on an action-adventure with our heroes, the Pink Panthers, and personally experience the world's most famous diamond robberies.If you want to know what it's like to be a Pink Panther, read this book. As well as if you are interested in how the flows of money and the destiny of diamond robbers intertwine with the interests and activities of drug cartels and human trafficking, the white-collar crime of banking and corporate magnates, and diplomatic-political machinations.One thing is guaranteed.For those of you who read this book, the world will never look the same again.AUTHOR'S NOTEThis novel is the first part of a trilogy that deals with the socio-historical context of emergence, rise, and (temporary) fall of the famous and powerful international robber group, Pink Panthers, created in the whirlwind of war during the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. In close-up are the Pink Panthers characters, their principles, a system of work and organizational structure, tactical patterns of action and logistical processes, described through the example of adventures in preparing and carrying out robberies in Antwerp, London, Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, St. Tropez and Dubai. The background story shows the entire process of the diamond business, from relentless exploitation of rich deposits of poor third-world countries to the intertwining of the diamond business with other criminal cartels.

A warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock’s greatest talents: Prince. Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold,” Prince’s “rock video opera,” as well as the star’s last testament, which may be buried with Prince’s will underneath Prince’s vast and private compound, Paisley Park. According to Prince's former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like.” Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but he never quit Prince, and the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar’s life. Well before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis’s mostly-segregated Northside. (They played basketball at the Dairy Queen next door to Karlen’s grandparents, two blocks from the budding musician.) He asserts that Prince can’t be understood without first understanding ‘70s Minneapolis, and that even Prince’s best friends knew only 15 percent of him: that was all he was willing and able to give, no matter how much he cared for them. Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, often tortured, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse, instead dishing a healthy dose of “mamma jammas.”