Bizarre to see this pop up on HN. I live in downtown Milwaukee, about 5 blocks from the apartment where the car bomb took place. Reading through the rest I know where all those places are, and went by some of them today.
The other interesting thing about this is I had no recollection of organized crime or any of these names having grown up around the city and now living downtown. Is it my fault for not ever wanting to know about the history of the city I grew up in? Or has society changed what it considers interested to where people don't really care about recent local pasts?
These sort of stories are really the thing I hope gets emphasized in the future of local news. Longer stories about people, both from the past but also in the current. Automation with AI generated news can't help become a thing, and hopefully this means more emphasis is put on reporters doing fuller stories, news stories, not news facts.
This is a story not only about the crime scene in Milwaukee ~50 years ago, but also the story of how the author learned about it and how it affects her. In fact, it's less of a story about a crime, and more of a story about what someone had to do in this age to try to understand more about what happened before.
Ah, mobsters were part of the fabric of life in 1970s Milwaukee. Joseph P. Balistrieri, alleged Underboss of the Milwaukee crime family, owned a stately home on the same block as my parents, a few blocks from the lakefront. An old lady (his mother?) answered the door when I went door-to-door offering snow shoveling services. She said no and was not very nice about it. An unmarked surveillance sedan was parked, idling all winter long, across the street from Atty. Balistrieri's home. The agents (presumably FBI) never smiled to the kids who waved. My parents joked to neighbors that we lived on the safest block in the city. It was all very normal.
I ran a music newspaper in Milwaukee in the early 80s (the Express, still in business after all these years as the Shepherd Express). Our advertisers were bars and clubs. One club that wasn't very popular underwent extensive renovation frequently, changing themes from urban cowboy to disco to hard rock, and other club owners said it was a scheme to launder Las Vegas syndicate money. I went to sell advertising to the club owner and he memorably greeted me by saying, "You may be the apple of your mother's eye but you are nothing but a tiny speck of shit to me." After I established that my business partner was best friends in law school with the fiancee of his nephew the dentist and audaciously pitched a full-page ad, he amicably agreed to run a 1/8 page ad every month as long as I never bothered him again.
Yeah, growing up there in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s we had all kinds of rumors about the Balistrieris and where the bodies were dumped. We didn’t know anything of course, but there were definitely stories about speakeasies that some of the older parents may or may not have been involved with.
I never ran into anything resembling organized crime. But then again I don’t know of ninepins have recognized irbid I saw it.
I live in an area of Chicagoland that was a hub of the Chicago Outfit, a short walk from the house where Sam Giancana was murdered, but it's really no more interesting than all the rest of the backstory of the city. Into the 1970s, organized crime might have had some salience for civilians like us, but I think it's been decades since it mattered.
Which is interesting, because so many people (especially abroad) seem to think the area is defined by mafia-type organized crime. I was in a thread a few months back with someone who brought Frank Nitti into an argument about crime in Chicago!
The most interesting thing about the MKE story here is the connection to the movie Casino.
I think you mean that the Chicago Outfit ceased to be relevant. Organized crime in Chicago existed on a massive scale (and spread throughout the Midwest and the South) until the Vice Lords were basically defeated by the Gangster Disciples, and in turn the Gangster Disciples were shattered by arrests of all of their leadership (leading to the "Insanes", etc.) There's still lots of black organized crime based in Chicago, but not at that scale anymore. On the closer-to-respectable side of organized crime in Chicago, even the "Democratic Machine" is largely dead.
That being said, the Mexican cartels operate in a big way in Chicago. Every cartel case anywhere has Chicago connections.
Europeans associate Chicago with Al Capone. It's because the Chicago Outfit became a popular worldwide genre, like Westerns or science fiction. Germans were almost more into Westerns than Americans were.
Hey! I used the word "bizarre" in the comment above because Milwaukee is rarely, if ever, mentioned in a post or comment. Good to know that some others are out there too.
> Former federal prosecutor John Franke led me down the staircase to the basement of his suburban Milwaukee home, stopping at a stash of bankers boxes. “They sat in storage in different houses for the last, what is it, 40 years?” he said. Franke peered inside one of the boxes, which was filled with court documents, FBI wiretap transcripts, notebooks and other files from the years he spent working to win convictions against Balistrieri and his associates.
It’s surprising to hear that the prosecutor was permitted to keep all these documents for himself. No explanation is given in the article about whether this is legal.
Whether or not they are copies is irrelevant(*). Are software engineers normally allowed to keep copies of the proprietary source code of their employer after they leave the company? Do accountants normally keep copies of the financial records of their employer? Is it standard practice for doctors to store medical records of hospital patients in their basement?
(*) If he kept the only copy, that's even worse since a new prosecutor wouldn't have access to the old records if they wanted to pursue a new prosecution or if there was an appeal to an old case.
Sad to see how far organized crime can reach, and how petty those at the top can be. Vicious murder because someone had the audacity to insult them after they failed to kill their best friend, and refused to pay protection money.
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http://web.archive.org/web/20240117234525/https://www.jsonli...
The other interesting thing about this is I had no recollection of organized crime or any of these names having grown up around the city and now living downtown. Is it my fault for not ever wanting to know about the history of the city I grew up in? Or has society changed what it considers interested to where people don't really care about recent local pasts?
These sort of stories are really the thing I hope gets emphasized in the future of local news. Longer stories about people, both from the past but also in the current. Automation with AI generated news can't help become a thing, and hopefully this means more emphasis is put on reporters doing fuller stories, news stories, not news facts.
This is a story not only about the crime scene in Milwaukee ~50 years ago, but also the story of how the author learned about it and how it affects her. In fact, it's less of a story about a crime, and more of a story about what someone had to do in this age to try to understand more about what happened before.
I ran a music newspaper in Milwaukee in the early 80s (the Express, still in business after all these years as the Shepherd Express). Our advertisers were bars and clubs. One club that wasn't very popular underwent extensive renovation frequently, changing themes from urban cowboy to disco to hard rock, and other club owners said it was a scheme to launder Las Vegas syndicate money. I went to sell advertising to the club owner and he memorably greeted me by saying, "You may be the apple of your mother's eye but you are nothing but a tiny speck of shit to me." After I established that my business partner was best friends in law school with the fiancee of his nephew the dentist and audaciously pitched a full-page ad, he amicably agreed to run a 1/8 page ad every month as long as I never bothered him again.
I never ran into anything resembling organized crime. But then again I don’t know of ninepins have recognized irbid I saw it.
Which is interesting, because so many people (especially abroad) seem to think the area is defined by mafia-type organized crime. I was in a thread a few months back with someone who brought Frank Nitti into an argument about crime in Chicago!
The most interesting thing about the MKE story here is the connection to the movie Casino.
That being said, the Mexican cartels operate in a big way in Chicago. Every cartel case anywhere has Chicago connections.
Europeans associate Chicago with Al Capone. It's because the Chicago Outfit became a popular worldwide genre, like Westerns or science fiction. Germans were almost more into Westerns than Americans were.
Deleted Comment
It’s surprising to hear that the prosecutor was permitted to keep all these documents for himself. No explanation is given in the article about whether this is legal.
(*) If he kept the only copy, that's even worse since a new prosecutor wouldn't have access to the old records if they wanted to pursue a new prosecution or if there was an appeal to an old case.
Dead Comment