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feud with Reid, spoken through the business
end of a shotgun.
    The
gangster world thought Mike Dipisa led a charmed life and that
bullets would never be the cause of his demise. For several years he
was one of the most shot at characters in the Detroit underworld, yet
amazingly had never been hit. Even close friends of Dipisa were
afraid to take a walk with him, but his luck ran out less than two
years after the murder of Johnny Reid.
    In
1928 Dipisa, up to his old tricks, sent one of his musclemen to a
blind pig to extort profits. Police were told two versions of what
transpired that night. One was that the thug walked into the blind
pig and made the 'business proposal,' at which point he was slapped
in the face and told to go back and tell what he'd gotten for his
trouble.
    The
other story was that the thug had been sitting in his car waiting for
the blind pig owner. The owner arrived and accidently bumped Dipisa's
thug while parking. The two men argued and, incredibly, the strong
arm man sent to intimidate was knocked down by the owner.
    According
to both versions the embarrassed thug, Zanetti, left and returned
with Mike Dipisa to help him save face. Unknown to Dipisa and
Zanetti, a constable named Edward McPherson was sitting in the blind
pig waiting to serve it a summons. In his statement to Detroit
police, McPherson explained that when Dipisa and Zanetti returned to
the blind pig Dipisa asked the owner to step outside.
    Mcpherson
crouched inside the blind pig's door, gun drawn. They argued outside,
and Dipisa and Zanetti fired five shots at point blank range.
McPherson rushed out and the gunfight was on. Suddenly one man fell—
it was Mike Dipisa. The impossible to hit gangster had finally been
gunned down, defeated by an argument over his embarrassed thug.
    Dipisa's
funeral was one of the first lavish gangster funerals in Detroit.
Eight cars filled with flowers followed the hearse to Mt. Olivet
Cemetary after a high mass. Attended by Detoit's most prominent
racketeers, the mile long funeral procession was preceded by a
15-piece band which played dirges all the way to the cemetary.
    Although
a bit of a clown in the underworld, Dipisa did order the killling of
Reid that brought together Egan's Rats and the Purple Gang.
Ironically, his clumsy crimes created the monster that was the Purple
Gang and its accomplices, Egan's Rats.
    Rats
member, Fred "Killer" Burke would go on to become the main
talent in Detroit's first machine gun murders. These shootings took
place in a building known as Milaflores Apartments, the site of the
Prohibition Era's famous "Milaflores Massacre".
    The
unprecedented ruthlessness of Milaflores would guarantee the
reputation of the Purple Gang in their aspirations to control
Detroit.

    Chapter
4
    The
Milaflores Apartment Massacre
    "The
machine gun worked, that's all I remember."
    — Deathbed
statement Frank Wright March 28, 1927
    It
was only 4:45 one March morning in 1927, when the tenants of the
Milaflores Apartment Building were jolted out of their beds by the
deafening roar of machine gun and pistol fire. For several moments
all hell broke loose in the building. The last sounds were of shoes
scraping down the back stairway into the alley, and the roar of an
automobile engine into the morning darkness.
    A
deadly silence enveloped the building's corridors. No one dared look
out their door.
    Finally,
one of the tenants on the third floor peered into the hallway. The
air was still thick with the smell of burned gunpowder and cloudy
with plaster that had been ripped from the walls by bullets.
    Near
the doorway of Apartment 308 lay three bullet-riddled bodies. Two had
literally been cut to pieces by the machine gun fire. One man still
seemd to be breathing shallowly.
    Blood
pooled into the hallway. The incident, dubbed the Milaflores
Apartment Massacre, was now part of the bloody history of Detroit's
gangland wars. The three victims were identified as Isaac Reisfield,
William Harrison and Frank