In the early morning hours of November 25, 1937, the notorious and feared gangster Harry Millman, a 26-year-old Jewish man, met a violent and bloody end on the floor of Boesky's, a bustling restaurant-deli at the corner of Hazelwood and 12th Streets in Detroit, Michigan. Known in the underworld as 'Lucky' for his numerous escapes from conviction on charges ranging from extortion to armed robbery and kidnapping, Millman's luck had finally run out.
He was a prominent and volatile figure associated with the Purple Gang, a Jewish organized crime group that held significant power in Detroit's underworld.
Millman had cultivated a reputation for his aggressive nature and a particular animosity towards the city's Italian Mafia, frequently antagonizing its leadership. This constant friction, coupled with his attempts to encroach on their rackets, made him a marked man. An earlier attempt on his life in August 1937, a dynamite bomb planted in his car, had failed to kill him but claimed the life of a nightclub doorman. By the time of his death, both the remnants of the Purple Gang and the Italian Mafia sought his removal from the criminal landscape.
On that fateful Thanksgiving Eve, while standing at the bar in a crowded Boesky's, two gunmen brazenly entered and opened fire. They fired nine shots into Millman at close range, with the first bullet reportedly severing his spine. He was struck a total of ten times in the head, chest, and abdomen, and died in a pool of his own blood. The brazen attack also wounded four bystanders, one of whom, a bookie named Harry Gross who was with Millman, later died from his injuries on December 16, 1937.
Though the murder of Harry Millman was never officially solved, underworld rumors and later investigations into organized crime pointed to two infamous assassins from Brooklyn's Murder, Incorporated: Harry 'Pep' Strauss and Harry 'Happy' Maione. It is widely believed that these men were hired by the Detroit Mafia to carry out the hit on the troublesome gangster. The daylight with which the murder was carried out, in front of more than 60 witnesses, signaled a definitive end to the Purple Gang's reign of terror in Detroit and solidified the Italian Mafia's control over the city's organized crime. Despite numerous arrests throughout his criminal career, Millman had notoriously never spent a night in jail for any serious offense; his final chapter was written not by the justice system, but by the brutal code of the streets he had once dominated.
