The Crack of Dawn

volume #128

10/15/22

Newsletter128

The Crack of Dawn

The biggest civil suit attorney here in Detroit is Sam Bernstein, who advertises constantly.  Sam is the grandson of Abe Bernstein, who with his brothers, Joe, Raymond, and Izzy, ran the notorious Purple Gang, the biggest mob in Detroit in the 1920s and ‘30s.  The Purple Gang were the first gangsters to make use of the Thompson submachinegun, or Tommy gun, in their executions.  Al Capone imported members of the Purple Gang to Chicago to commit the Valentine’s Day Massacre (when the murder of seven people with automatic weapons was unthinkable).  In 1926 the Purple Gang started what was known as “Cleaners and Dyers War,” where they took control of the entire laundry business, including all of the delivery drivers.  My grandfather was a laundry truck driver and had to pay the Purple Gang “protection” money.

In 2004 I was at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport sitting and waiting for a flight to L.A. to work on the post-production of my film, Alien Apocalypse (2005).  As I sat reading my book, an older, white haired gentleman sat down beside me.  He and I began to talk, and he was a lively, upbeat, intelligent man and we had a wonderful conversation.  After about 40 minutes, I put out my hand and said, “Hi, I’m Josh Becker, what’s your name?”  He looked at me in astonishment and said, “You don’t know who I am?”  I was confused and asked, “Have we met?”  He said, “You haven’t seen me on TV?”  I confessed, “I mainly watch movies, I don’t watch commercialized television.”  He hung his head in mock sorrow.  “Do you have any idea how much money I spend on advertising?”  I said, “No.  Who are you?”  He said, “I’m Sam Bernstein.”  I wanted to say, “Abe’s grandson,” but I didn’t.  In fact, I didn’t bring up the Purple Gang or my grandfather.  Sam was honestly interested in movies, so we stuck to that.

My grandmother, Olga, immigrated from Hungary to America in 1923 when she was twenty-two years old.  Although she had eight brothers and sisters, she was the only one who came to America.  Family members had arranged a job for her in Detroit at a big laundry factory.  The corner cleaners all brought their dirty laundry to the factory where it was cleaned and pressed, then delivered back to them.  Every piece of clothing had a number on it so it could be returned to the proper cleaners.  My grandma’s job was to separate the collars.  In the 1920s men’s collars detached from the shirt and were starched.  A machine then curled them into circles, where they would then come off onto my grandma’s arms.  Each collar had the number of the cleaners it came from.  Grandma separated them onto dowl rods that represented the various cleaners.  She said that they called her, “Shana greenhorn.”  Shana means little in Yiddish.  It was in this factory that my grandma met my grandpa, the delivery driver.  Grandpa (who died before I was born) was from Transylvania, home of Dracula, and alternately part of Romania or Hungary.

And as a final note, the Hungarian language has nothing to do with any of the Slavic or Cyrillic languages around it.  The only language that Hungarian is linguistically connected to is Finnish.  I was in Helsinki, Finland.  The business names on the buildings are all 24 letters long, and have at least three umlauts, and couple of other punctuation marks you’ve never seen before.  But those guys know how to run a good film festival.

Guten Tag, mein freunde.