Organized Crime Figure. A member of Detroit’s Purple Gang, he was born and raised in Brooklyn along with several other Purples including Abe Axler, Eddie Fletcher, Sam Abramson, and Isadore Cantor. First coming to Detroit in late 1923 to fight in the Oakland Sugar House War, he soon became one of the Purple Gang’s top men. In March 1928 he was acquitted of killing two black men in a bar fight in Detroit’s Paradise Valley in August 1927. Later that year he was tried and acquitted along with many other Purples in the big extortion trial that resulted from the Cleaners and Dyers War. After serving a two-year sentence in Leavenworth, Irving Milberg returned to Detroit in 1931. He was identified and convicted in the “Collingwood Manor Massacre” of September 1931. He, Ray Bernstein, and Harry Keywell were sentenced to life inprisonment for these killings. In September 1938, he underwent an operation for an intestinal obstruction. Peritonitis set in, and he died on September 29, 7 years into his life sentence. His grave is two spaces away from that of Charles “The Professor” Auerbach, an advisor and armorer of the Purple Gang.