Every bartender knows the type: the man who walks into a bar like he already owns it. In 1927, the most dangerous man in America walked into a Detroit hotel — and Detroit’s own gang told him, politely and completely, that he did not own this town.
Detroit historian Richard Bak tells the story this way: leaders of the Purple Gang met Al Capone at the Book-Cadillac Hotel and warned him to stay off their turf. No surviving guest register proves that meeting happened, and honest history has to say so. But the arrangement it dramatizes is documented fact. The Detroit Historical Society puts it in one plain sentence: Capone “chose to use the Purple Gang to supply Old Log Cabin whiskey rather than battle them for Detroit territory.”
Detroit is the one great American city Capone never tried to take. And the grand hotel where that deal lived is still standing — you can book a room in it tonight.
The Funnel
To understand why Capone came to Detroit as a customer instead of a conqueror, you have to understand the river.
Michigan went dry on May 1, 1918 — nearly two years before national Prohibition. Directly across the Detroit River, about half a mile of black water away, sat Windsor, Ontario, where Canadian distilleries could legally manufacture whisky for “export.” There was no bridge until the Ambassador Bridge opened in late 1929. There were only boats, and at night the river belonged to them.
Historian Philip P. Mason, who wrote the book on rum-running on the Michigan–Ontario waterway, estimated that roughly 75 percent of all the liquor smuggled into the United States during Prohibition crossed that one stretch of river. By 1929, rum-running was bringing in an estimated $215 million a year — Detroit’s second-largest industry, behind only automobiles. The Detroit News counted somewhere between 16,000 and 25,000 speakeasies in the area. In summer the whisky came by speedboat. In winter it came by car and sled, straight across the ice.
Detroit wasn’t a market. Detroit was the faucet for half the country’s drinking — and the faucet had owners.
The Purple Gang
The owners were four brothers — Raymond, Joseph, Isadore, and Abraham Burnstein — and the outfit the newspapers called the Purple Gang. They’d started as the Sugar House Gang, street kids from Detroit’s old Jewish neighborhood, and graduated to hijacking other smugglers’ liquor as it came off the river. Their business model was brutally simple: steal the whisky on the American side, cut some of it, sell it — and sell the good, uncut Old Log Cabin on to Chicago.
That’s the part that matters for our story. Capone ran the numbers the way any good businessman runs them. Fighting the Purples for Detroit would cost men, money, and headlines. Buying from them cost a phone call. So the most feared gangster in America became the Purple Gang’s best customer — and Detroit stayed purple.
The Hotel
The Book-Cadillac was built for a different kind of empire. The Book brothers wanted Washington Boulevard to be the Fifth Avenue of the Midwest, and on December 8, 1924, they opened the tallest hotel in the world: 33 stories, 1,136 rooms, every one with its own bath. Its Italian Garden ballroom had lighting that could imitate sunshine, clouds, and thunderstorms. It was the kind of place where a man conducted business in a suite, over cigars, behind a door that stayed closed.
Abraham — Abe — Burnstein, the eldest brother and the gang’s elder statesman, made the Book-Cadillac his home. By multiple accounts he lived at the hotel for decades and ran his bookmaking operation out of his suite as something close to an open secret, long after Prohibition ended. He died there in 1968, thirty-five years after repeal — the last Purple, in the gang’s grandest address.
The hotel wasn’t just a backdrop, either. In March 1927, a jewel thief named Frank Wright, living at the Book-Cadillac, received a late-night phone call summoning him to the Milaflores Apartments across town. He went — and walked into the first Thompson submachine-gun massacre in Detroit history. In gangland Detroit, the telephone lines of a luxury hotel were part of the machinery.
The Guns That Ended Up in Michigan
Capone’s organization did leave one set of fingerprints on Michigan that no one disputes — because they’re still in an evidence room.
Fred “Killer” Burke, a Capone associate and a prime suspect in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was living quietly in Stevensville, Michigan, under the name Fred Dane. On December 14, 1929, after a minor traffic collision in St. Joseph, Burke shot and killed a 25-year-old patrolman named Charles Skelly. When police forced open a locked closet in Burke’s bungalow, they found two Thompson submachine guns, thousands of rounds, bulletproof vests, and disguises. Ballistics pioneer Calvin Goddard test-fired those Thompsons and matched them to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre — one of the founding moments of forensic ballistics.
Burke got life, served it at Marquette Branch Prison in the Upper Peninsula, and died there in 1940. The Berrien County Sheriff’s Office says the two Tommy guns are still held there as evidence to this day. Chicago newspapers of the era called Berrien County “Capone’s Playground.” The documented truth is narrower and stranger: it was his gunman’s hiding place.
The Purples’ own story ended the way these stories do. On September 16, 1931, three gang members were lured to a “peace conference” at Detroit’s Collingwood Manor Apartments and murdered. Ray Burnstein, Irving Milberg, and Harry Keywell were convicted and sent by special train to the same Marquette prison. By 1935, the gang that told Capone no was gone.
Still Standing
The Book-Cadillac outlived them all — barely. It closed in 1984 and stood empty for almost twenty years, close enough to demolition that Detroiters held their breath. Instead, a restoration of roughly $200 million brought it back: it reopened in October 2008 as The Westin Book Cadillac Detroit, 453 rooms and condominiums under the same Italian Renaissance tower. On its centennial — December 8, 2024 — the hotel opened a lobby history exhibit built with the Detroit Historical Museum.
So yes, you can go there. You can stand in that marble lobby, order a drink a short walk from the river that floated a nation’s worth of whisky, and sleep in the building where Detroit’s underworld kept its best address. Make a weekend of it: Tommy’s Bar on Third Street, two blocks from the river, still pours drinks above “Little Harry’s,” a Prohibition speakeasy that Wayne State archaeologists actually excavated — tunnel, false room, and all. And the Detroit Historical Museum holds the speakeasy’s guest card.
A Note on Legends, From One Storyteller to Another
Northern Michigan loves a Capone story. Every grand hotel and lakeside inn from Petoskey to Escanaba seems to have a turret he slept in or a tunnel he escaped through. I wanted those stories to be true. But the most thorough study of the question — Robert Knapp’s Gangsters Up North — found no documented proof Capone or the Purple Gang ever set foot in northern Michigan at all, and the Charlevoix Historical Society says the same about its own town. The most famous of those houses, the House of Ludington in Escanaba, burned in December 2025 and was demolished this past January — the legend outlived the building, but only just.
Traverse City has an honest Prohibition story of its own, and it’s a good one: in 1930, state police raided Sleder’s Tavern and hauled a truckload of booze and stills out of the rooms above it. No Capone. Just a local tavern, local whisky, and the same river-fed thirst as everywhere else. Sleder’s is still serving, too.
That’s the thing about real history — it doesn’t need the embellishment. A half-mile river, four brothers, the best customer a gang ever had, and a hotel that refused to fall down. Pour something amber, and drink to the city that told Capone no.
A little wild. A lot of heart. Always chasing the light.
— Irish Unc
