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.
Also, a lot of old-time syndicates have long moved to more lucrative businesses. Low-level stuff is labour-intensive, low margin, and very exposed; if you have enough capital, there are much better investments to be made.
Even in Italy, where people were still dying in the streets in certain areas in the early 2000s, most cartels have moved on from drugs and prostitution to public works, property development, hospitality etc. The street stuff is now left largely to foreign gangs who have nothing to lose.
Also reminds me of the Sopranos scene where Patsy goes to shakedown a new coffee shop and gets the pushback from the employee that "I cant authorize anything like that, it would have to go through corporate in Seattle."
No one wants to be on the lam forever. Even crims want to go legit someday.
Nowadays, crime is much smaller and more ephemeral, which is good for criminals. They can get away with walking into an establishment and walking out with whatever they like. Most of the time with no problems at all. I think I prefer that to errant car bombs.
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.
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.
You could see 1,000 miles away that someone was going to jump in and object that Chicago has a lot of crime, and a lot of is organized. I'd hoped "mafia-type organized crime" would make it clear, but the objection still got raised on two separate threads. :)
I'm not clear on what you mean. Surely there are gangs, many of them organized along family or ethnic lines, that control the typical crime markets like the drug trade. It may not be Italian-Americans, but there's plenty of other groups in such a large city.
Maybe they are more fragmented, but they are still basically made of full-time criminals who know each other and use violence to contest the market. In terms of scale, the industry is big enough that people specialize (import / distribution / money-laundering / etc) and so there's an economy requiring its own version of a justice system (aka negotiations, violence).
Mafia was a very secretive organization. This was one of their core principles and their survival depended on being good at this. So if you lived in the 70s I wonder how many people would say mafia was a 1930s Al Capone thing and didn't exist as much any more.
Nonsense. The 1960s through 80s were when mafia awareness skyrocketed.
In terms of pop culture, The Godfather came out in the 1970s!
Anyway, Joseph Valachi and others turning states witness in the 60s broke down much of the secrecy. The RICO act was enacted in 1970 primarily to go after the mafia and led to numerous prosecutions over the next 20 years. If you lived in a large city you were aware of what was going on, and if not you heard about it on the evening news.
> Mafia was a very secretive organization.
The organizational structure and operations may have been secretive obviously but obviously they couldn't operate a large business if they were completely a secret.
Allegations that the 1960 presidential election was rigged by the mob were made at the time.
This is a very silly thread but: offsetting that argument is the obviousness of the objection. There is nobody in Chicago who isn't aware of modern Chicago crime, organized and otherwise.
Well it didn't. :) The person replying to your comment was basically saying the organized crime in Chicago is still relevant for civilians, and gave several examples, a direct rebuttal to your statement that "Into the 1970s, organized crime might have had some salience for civilians like us, but I think it's been decades since it mattered."
You'll note that this sentence of yours does not specify "mafia-type organized crime", so when someone replies about the relevance of what you did specify, organized crime, its a pretty clear line. :)
At any rate, my point is just that the Italian Mafia in Chicago and the midwest has an outsized influence in the popular consciousness and has for the last 30 years played essentially no role whatsoever in daily life (unless you're an enthusiast --- there's a community of them --- who keeps tabs on the remnants of the old Outfit and who "runs" it today).
> On the closer-to-respectable side of organized crime in Chicago, even the "Democratic Machine" is largely dead.
When did that happen? I have a buddy of mine who attends community action groups run by local alderman out of churches on the south side. As of maybe 2017 he was telling me about how "The Machine" was alive and well and aldermen were still afraid to speak out about it (even if they move across the country afterward).
As exemplified by the story we're commenting on, in the heyday of top-down large-scale organized crime, mob hits were a commonplace. We have RICO today because he violence, over the preceding 50 years, had gotten way out of hand. We have violence in Chicago today --- more than we had in the 1970s! --- but we don't so much have mob hits. An organized crime operation, protected by violence, run out of the Cook Country Democratic "Machine" would be one of the best kept secrets in the country. People would semiregularly get killed to keep it. But that doesn't happen.
I'm sure there's a lot of graft and corruption. There is everywhere we have single-party rule. But the "Democratic Machine" is not an Outfit-style criminal organization.
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.
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.
It's long-form writing. The point of this story is to read it. If it's too long to read, you're probably not going to be interested in the details. They're sprinkled all across the story, anyways.
Once upon a time, the mafia was big in Milwaukee. They killed this reporter's cousin. I think that's a fine summary.
I sometimes do it when I've read something and usually find it easy to do so for others. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35434603 is an example I was able to find in 10 s using algolia.
Easier to see if payoff is worth it or if you're reading a recipe-like essay. Honestly, this is pretty normal stuff. No reason to be offended. It's not a personal request to you specifically.
It can come across as a superficial complaint about the article. But I'm not sniping at you; I'm saying: if you're not interested in reading this article, the summary probably isn't that much more interesting to you. "There was a big Mafia presence in MKE" is pretty much the whole takeaway, to the extent you don't enjoy reading true crime stuff.
It's more a reading-for-enjoyment kind of story than a trying-to-educate-you kind of story. The only thing you really missed was some potential enjoyment.
> 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.
As long as there's an archive of the prosecutor's records, they're either public records (as most government records are, by default), or they're exempt, but the prosecutor already had access to them, and no interest is served in demanding their destruction. This isn't proprietary source code, and it isn't proprietary financial information.
"FBI wiretap transcripts" sound like very private conversations, probably including innocent people and innocent topics. Just because they had a court order for the wiretap doesn't mean the conversations are now public record. So they are exempt, but then it's still private and not something that you should be taking home.
> prosecutor already had access to them
I don't think that argument works. The same could be said for a software engineer. He had access to the source code, so why can't he keep a copy of it?
Because it has commercial value, and the engineer would be misappropriating it. Anyways, I don't much care beyond "the situations are not really comparable".
They seem comparable. Similarly, employee HR records also aren't source code or financial information, but you still wouldn't want copies in your former HR team members' houses.
59 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 59.5 ms ] threadhttp://web.archive.org/web/20240117234525/https://www.jsonli...
Even in Italy, where people were still dying in the streets in certain areas in the early 2000s, most cartels have moved on from drugs and prostitution to public works, property development, hospitality etc. The street stuff is now left largely to foreign gangs who have nothing to lose.
"It's over for the little guy."
Nowadays, crime is much smaller and more ephemeral, which is good for criminals. They can get away with walking into an establishment and walking out with whatever they like. Most of the time with no problems at all. I think I prefer that to errant car bombs.
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.
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.
I'm not clear on what you mean. Surely there are gangs, many of them organized along family or ethnic lines, that control the typical crime markets like the drug trade. It may not be Italian-Americans, but there's plenty of other groups in such a large city.
Maybe they are more fragmented, but they are still basically made of full-time criminals who know each other and use violence to contest the market. In terms of scale, the industry is big enough that people specialize (import / distribution / money-laundering / etc) and so there's an economy requiring its own version of a justice system (aka negotiations, violence).
Isn't that pretty much the same as the mafia?
(typo edited)
In terms of pop culture, The Godfather came out in the 1970s!
Anyway, Joseph Valachi and others turning states witness in the 60s broke down much of the secrecy. The RICO act was enacted in 1970 primarily to go after the mafia and led to numerous prosecutions over the next 20 years. If you lived in a large city you were aware of what was going on, and if not you heard about it on the evening news.
> Mafia was a very secretive organization.
The organizational structure and operations may have been secretive obviously but obviously they couldn't operate a large business if they were completely a secret.
Allegations that the 1960 presidential election was rigged by the mob were made at the time.
You'll note that this sentence of yours does not specify "mafia-type organized crime", so when someone replies about the relevance of what you did specify, organized crime, its a pretty clear line. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almighty_Vice_Lord_Nation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangster_Disciples
When did that happen? I have a buddy of mine who attends community action groups run by local alderman out of churches on the south side. As of maybe 2017 he was telling me about how "The Machine" was alive and well and aldermen were still afraid to speak out about it (even if they move across the country afterward).
I'm sure there's a lot of graft and corruption. There is everywhere we have single-party rule. But the "Democratic Machine" is not an Outfit-style criminal organization.
The conflict between mob and police seems to have gradually resolved into organized crime as policing.
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.
You good?
Once upon a time, the mafia was big in Milwaukee. They killed this reporter's cousin. I think that's a fine summary.
Easier to see if payoff is worth it or if you're reading a recipe-like essay. Honestly, this is pretty normal stuff. No reason to be offended. It's not a personal request to you specifically.
It's more a reading-for-enjoyment kind of story than a trying-to-educate-you kind of story. The only thing you really missed was some potential enjoyment.
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.
> prosecutor already had access to them
I don't think that argument works. The same could be said for a software engineer. He had access to the source code, so why can't he keep a copy of it?