Abe Bernstein: Died On This Day in 1968, Aged 76

On this day in 1968 the Prohibition-era leader of the Purple Gang, Abe Bernstein, passed away. He ran the Purple Gang with his brothers Raymond, Isadore (Izzy), and Joseph. Bernstein’s Purple Gang were also the main supplier of whiskey for the Chicago Outfit which was fronted by Al Capone in the late 1920’s, so it is believed that Abe was the man behind the set-up which involved him trying to sell a recently hijacked liquor shipment to be delivered to the garage where the St Valentines Day massacre occurred.

On this day in 1968, Abe Bernstein, one of the most formidable criminal minds of the Prohibition era, passed away at the age of 76, bringing to a close a life lived entirely in the shadow of organised crime. As the eldest and most prominent of the four Bernstein brothers, Abe was the driving force behind Detroit's notorious Purple Gang, a crew so ruthless and unpredictable that even the most hardened gangsters of the era treated them with considerable caution.

The Purple Gang rose to infamy during the 1920s, establishing an iron grip over Detroit's bootlegging trade at a time when the city's proximity to the Canadian border made it one of the most strategically valuable smuggling corridors in North America. Abe ran the operation alongside his brothers Raymond, Isadore — known as Izzy — and Joseph, and together they built a criminal enterprise that controlled the flow of illicit liquor into the Midwest with remarkable efficiency. Their reputation for extreme violence meant that rival gangs rarely dared to encroach on their territory, and law enforcement struggled to penetrate their tightly knit organisation.

Perhaps the most significant chapter in Abe Bernstein's criminal career was his close working relationship with Al Capone and the Chicago Outfit. The Purple Gang served as the primary supplier of Canadian whiskey to Capone's operation throughout the late 1920s, making the arrangement one of the most lucrative bootlegging partnerships of the entire Prohibition period. It is this connection that links Bernstein, at least indirectly, to one of the bloodiest episodes in American gangland history. According to widely held accounts, Abe was the man who orchestrated the lure that brought Bugs Moran's North Side Gang to a Clark Street garage on 14th February 1929, posing as a hijacked liquor shipment available at a knockdown price. The buyers who turned up that morning were instead cut down in what became known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, an event that shocked the nation and ultimately accelerated the downfall of Capone's public standing.

Though the Purple Gang itself began to fragment in the early 1930s following a series of internal disputes and law enforcement crackdowns, Abe Bernstein managed to avoid a violent end — a rare distinction in his line of work. He lived out his later years in relative obscurity, dying of natural causes in 1968. His legacy endures as the architect of one of Prohibition-era America's most feared and effective criminal organisations.