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Millennium City
■Chapter Four
The Detroit mob of the 1930s faced the same tactics the Feds had used against flamboyant mobsters like Capone, and responded by going underground. The various mobs consolidated their affairs into a single organization, referred to as The Combination or The Partnership. The Purple Gang itself disbanded by 1935, with Prohibition over and many of its members either imprisoned or sub- sumed into the Combination.
The Greek And The Shark
Although the heyday of Detroit as a second- ary capital of organized crime ended by 1936, crime families remained within the city. Among the early leaders of the Combination was a man named Andres Kotsimpolous, known as “Andy the Greek” to his largely Sicilian partners. The Greek’s flamboyant lifestyle and murderous tendencies caused Peter Dix to adopt the identity of Mr. X, Detroit’s first costumed crimefighter, in 1939 (see page 11). When the Greek took a fatal plunge off his penthouse balcony in November of that year, it was a crushing blow to the Combination. It largely went underground, and into the vacuum of control stepped the Shark.
The Shark, whose true name and identity no one knew, had risen through the ranks of the Cleveland mob as a fixer, a wrangler of hired
help, and a coordinator of street gangs. By 1938 he’d secured the top spot in the local underworld despite never appearing in public and going masked even among his own men. When Kotsim- polous died, he saw Detroit as wide open and made his move for control, which he achieved in 1940. Though Mr. X and the Detroit police thwarted his ambitions, he maintained gangs of his own and kept trying to control the city’s underworld until his own death in 1952.
The Combination Returns
The Shark’s failure to achieve his goals re-ener- gized the Combination. By the end of the war, it controlled most forms of vice in Detroit, Windsor, Toledo, and Youngstown. Unlike organized crime in some other cities, the Combination and its leaders maintained a low profile, committing few crimes of violence and not getting too greedy. As a result, with the exception of a brief “mob war” during the early 1970s, it remained in control of the Detroit underworld until the Battle of Detroit, an impres- sive record of forty years of relative stability. At various times the fortunes of the Combination’s leaders rose and fell, and occasionally crimefighters like Scarlet Shield and Shadowboxer handed them setbacks, but vigilantes never truly threatened their control of the city. In 1992, however, the destruc-
tion of vast swaths of the city and deaths of most of the organization’s important leaders crippled the Combination at last.
Organized Crime Today
Between all the outsiders coming in bat- tling for the construction rackets, the razing of old neighborhoods, and the influx of “non-tradi- tional” organized criminals from Asia and Russia, the Combination never had a chance to recover. Authorities on organized crime now consider Mil- lennium City an “open city,” one where no single organization controls the mundane underworld and dictates terms to other organizations. Various groups vie for control of Lennie crime, each trying to establish a dominant position.
According to the FBI, the closest thing the Mafia has to a “leader” in the greater Millennium City area is Joseph Sorrelli, an eighty-year-old former Combination member who now lives in Dearborn and owns a Cadillac dealership. Law enforcement officials believe he still sometimes brokers deals between out-of-town rivals seeking to work together in Millennium City.
Another important figure associated with traditional organized crime in Millennium City is Matthew Cresse, supposedly a “respectable busi- nessman” with interests in several industries both in Millennium City and in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Neither the FBI nor the MCPD has any solid evi- dence Cresse is a crook, but he certainly seems to associate with a lot of known mobsters.
The Mafia isn’t the only group interested in Detroit. Thanks to the influx of Chinese residents during the rebuilding, Chinese organized crime has made inroads here, mainly in the Cultural Center neighborhood. The MCPD believes the Chinese gangsters have established, or are trying to set up, heroin distribution networks in Millennium City, and that they use the City as a “waystation” for routing helpless Chinese immigrants to slave- like jobs in other cities.
Less overt than the Chinese, the yakuza have begun plying their own brand of crime in Millen- nium City. Favoring complex financial schemes, blackmail, and computer crime, yakuza gangsters only resort to violence if they have to — but at that point become deadly in the extreme.
Competing with all three groups are Russian organized criminals, many of them former mem- bers of the KGB or the Russian military. Better educated than the average criminal, they can involve themselves both in sophisticated opera- tions like those of the yakuza, and in the most brutal types of “enforcement” and assassination work. In December 2002, Nighthawk reported to the MCPD several recent encounters with what he believes to be large gangs of highly competent (and well-armed) Russian mobsters.
STREET GANGS
Like any city with enough youths who think they have no prospects for the future, Millen- nium City has street gangs. More accurately, the gangs surround Millennium City, since efficient (some would say excessive) policing within the
Loop keeps the City proper’s streets relatively free of gang activity. However, poorer neighbors, like North Detroit, Redford, Dearborn, and Troy con- tend with youth gangs like the Cobra Lords, the Latin Kings, the Maniacs, and the Black Aces. Most of these gangs are indifferently organized but well armed. They rely on the proceeds of drug sales, prostitution, and simple burglaries rather than any sort of organized activity, and spend most of their time posturing or battling each other in turf wars. THE NEW PURPLE GANG
The latest new menace on the streets, how- ever, operates on a different level. Calling itself the New Purple Gang, this group has recruited several groups of “bangers” and given them a sense of discipline and purpose, some fancy weaponry, and a new set of strategies involving bank and jewelry store heists as well as the streetcorner-level drug and vice trade. Wearing leather jackets dyed a sickly dark purple, these gangs feature mem- bers trained both in martial arts and firearms, and sometimes use weapons and devices stolen from the MCPD, and even on one recent occasion PRIMUS weaponry, making them at least a match for the startled police opposing them. Where and how they’ve acquired this ordnance, not to mention their training and newfound strategies, remains a mystery.