This Mafia Quietly Took Over Milwaukee — And Then Erased Itself – HT
The 30th of June, 1978. 9:10 a.m. Juno Village Garden Apartments, downtown Milwaukee. August Orgie Palmisano turned his key in the ignition of his 1,977 Mercury sedan. The explosion tore through the underground parking garage with such force that pictures fell off walls in nearby apartments.
The blast damaged 28 other vehicles. A small fire broke out when gasoline leaked from one of the wrecked cars. Total damage exceeded $20,000. Palmisano’s body was so badly mangled that investigators had to use fingerprints to identify him. His right foot was gone. His face was destroyed.
All that remained at the scene was a single Radio Shack alligator clip. the only evidence the bomber left behind. When reporters asked neighbors about the murder, most refused to talk. Fear hung thick in the air. One unemployed man told police that Palmisano was known to give money to the homeless.
The landlord said was a good man who paid his rent on time, but everyone in Milwaukee’s tight-knit Italian community knew the truth. Frank Balistrieri, the boss of the Milwaukee crime family, had ordered the hit. Weeks later, an undercover FBI agent sat across from Balistrieri at a meeting in the Shorest Hotel.
The agent would later testify that Balistrieri started talking about Palmisano unprompted. He was arrogant. Balistrieri said, “He called me a name to my face. Now they can’t find his skin. This is the story of the Milwaukee crime family. The mafia nobody talks about. For 90 years, a succession of Sicilian bosses controlled organized crime in Wisconsin’s largest city.
They ran bootlegging during prohibition. They controlled vending machines, gambling, extortion, and labor unions. And in the 1970, they helped skim over $2 million from Las Vegas casinos. But unlike the five families in New York or the Chicago outfit, the Milwaukee mafia operated in the shadows, deliberately keeping their names out of newspapers and history books.
But here’s what makes the Milwaukee story different. This wasn’t a massive organization like New York or Chicago. At their peak, they had maybe 50 made members. They operated as a satellite of the Chicago outfit, always needing permission from Tony Accardo and Sam Gianana for major moves.
Yet for decades, they controlled an entire city through fear, family connections, and a willingness to use extreme violence against anyone who stepped out of line. You have to start in Milwaukeee’s third ward to understand how this all began. In the late 1800s, the third ward was Milwaukeekey’s Irish neighborhood.
Then came the great fire of 1892, which burned through the area and destroyed much of the housing. When reconstruction began, Sicilian immigrants moved in to fill the void. By 1900, the third ward population had mushroomed to around 6,000 people, almost exclusively Italian. They came from towns in the province of Palmo, Santa Flavia, Porticello, Prity, Bulgaria, small villages where everyone knew everyone and old feuds crossed the Atlantic along with the immigrants.
The first known boss of the Milwaukee mafia was Vito Guadalabini who arrived from Santa Flavia, Sicily in 1903. In Milwaukee, Gardabini became a successful banker providing loans to newly arrived immigrants. when mainstream banks wouldn’t touch them. But he was more than a banker. Memoirs from Nicola Gentiel, a mobster who traveled between American mafia families in 1910 and 1920s, described Gardabin as the king of Little Italy in Milwaukee’s third ward.
Gardalabani never ran for public office, but he was considered the political ruler of the third ward. With his family connections through sons Giovanni Batista and Angelo and son-in-law Isidori Ayeloo, he controlled who got hired and fired, who received bank loans, and who paid tribute for the privilege of doing business.
Through this centralized authority, he could force new Italian immigrants to pay him if they required these services. It was protection wrapped in community leadership. When Veto Gordali died of natural causes on the 6th of February 1921, his son Giovani Batista briefly took over. But by 1924, leadership had transferred to Jeppe Big Joe Damato, a distant relative from Santa Flavia.
Damato died of pneumonia at age 41 on the 28th of March 1927 and power shifted to Joseph Valone. Valon’s rise coincided with the greatest opportunity in American crime history. Prohibition. On the 17th of January 1920, the Volstead Act took effect. Alcohol was now illegal across the United States, and Milwaukee, a city built on brewing, was not about to stop drinking.
The Third Ward became a center for both illegal production and sale of liquor. By 1913, Milwaukeee’s district attorney had publicly stated that the third ward was home to secret murder and blackmail organizations that police could do little to combat. Prohibition turbocharged that criminal infrastructure.
Peter and Angelo Guadabin, Veto’s sons, ran the Monte Carlo at 171 Detroit Street, described by the Milwaukee Sentinel as Milwaukeey’s best known late night rendevu. Dozens of smaller speak easys were run by locals affiliated with the organization. Raisin wine production exploded. Homestills operated openly.
The party was on. But it didn’t last. By the mid 1920s, federal prohibition agents led by W. Frank Cunningham cracked down. Raids on speak easys and stills became common in the Third Ward. The easy money dried up. The bosses adapted. Under Joseph Valon’s leadership, from 1927 to 1949, the Milwaukee family consolidated.
In the early 1930s, a federal grand jury indicted Valona along with third ward political power Angelo Guadalaben and 43 others for participating in a regional bootlegging syndicate. This was the period when the American mafia outside of New York’s five families consolidated into single organizations per city under Chicago’s oversight.
Milwaukee was no exception. When prohibition ended in 1933, Valu and his left tenant Pasqual Miglia opened Broadway Liquor Company. Legitimate business provided cover for lone sharking, gambling, and extortion. Valon’s administration included Joe Gumina as under boss and Charles Zarone as Concigieri.
In 1949, Valon retired. He’d groomed Salvatorei Sam Ferrara, a relative from Prissy, to succeed him. But Ferrara’s reign would be short and disastrous. In 1952, Ferrara became involved in a dispute with an underling Frank Balistry. Ferrara wanted an ownership share of the Ogden Social Club, a gambling venue owned by Balistry.
Balistry resisted. Ferrara expelled him from the family. Bad move. The membership voted Ferrara out and requested intervention from the Chicago outfit. A panel of senior Chicago mobsters including Tony Aardo, Roco Fishetti, and Sam Gianana ruled that Ferrara had abused his position. They demoted him and installed John Alioto as the new boss.
John Alioto was born the 25th of August 1888 in Portoello, Santa Flavia, Sicily. He’d served prison time in the 1930s for forgery and lasseny, but Chicago trusted him to bring stability. His administration included Joe Gumina as underboss and Frank Balistrieri who was reinstated as a member and began his climb to power.
Alioto introduced something new to Milwaukee, a leadership panel called Sajia to resolve internal disputes. It was an attempt to prevent the kind of personal feuds that had caused Ferrara’s downfall. But in 1954, trouble erupted. Anyway, John Ditraani, a relative and godson of the deposed Sam Ferrara along with Frank Loalo and Jacka plotted to seize control from Alito.
The rebellion was quelled through murder. Diet Trapani was shot and killed in his car on the 18th of March 1954. Ana was found shot to death in a ditch in Walkasha County on the 29th of November 1955. Lo Galbo survived by fleeing to Chicago where he joined a Chicago Heights crew while continuing to live in Milwaukee under outfit protection. The message was clear.
Challenges to authority ended in death. By the late 1950s, Aliotto was grooming his son-in-law to take over. Frank Peter Balistry was born the 27th of May 1918 in Milwaukee to a family of Sicilians. Intelligent and ambitious, he graduated from Marquette University and briefly attended law school before fully embracing organized crime.
In the late 1950s, he married Antonyina Alioto, John’s daughter, cementing his position in the family hierarchy. When Alioto retired in 1961, Balistrieri was installed as the new boss of the Milwaukee crime family. He was 43 years old and would rule for the next 32 years. But Balistrieri’s reign started with conflict.
FBI records indicate that in 1961 he entered a feud with Chicago outfit boss Tony Aardo. The problem was a murder. Balistraieri allegedly ordered the killing of nightclub operator Isidor Izzy Pogrob in 1960 without consulting Aardo first. Pogro’s body was found in his car, shot multiple times.
Balistraieri had broken protocol and Aardo was furious. How the dispute was resolved isn’t fully documented, but Balistry remained boss. Perhaps Chicago recognized his value. Perhaps Balistry made amends. Either way, he survived and began building his empire. Balistrieri soon earned a reputation for arrogance, cruelty, and ruthlessness.
He allegedly received the nickname mad bomber because he frequently used improvised explosive devices attached to cars as weapons. Car bombings became his signature. The message was always the same. CrossFrank Balistrieri and your car becomes your coffin. By the time he fully consolidated power in the by the early 1960s, Balistrieri controlled a substantial lone shark operation, vast illegal sports betting operations, and a tight grip on the vending machine market.
He ran his business from a table at Snug’s restaurant in Milwaukee’s Shorest Hotel, giving orders over a red telephone. He once referred to himself as the most powerful man in Milwaukee. The claim wasn’t entirely wrong. Balistry controlled not just criminal rackets, but legitimate businesses. Nightclubs, restaurants, strip clubs, vending machines, and gambling operations all funneled money to him.
Through his sons, John and Joseph, both lawyers, he hid controlling interests in many legal businesses. The legal expertise helped him dodge investigators for years. But Balistrieri’s real power came from fear. In March 1967, he was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to 2 years in federal prison.
>> The Ballisteri case is a involved a long and and difficult examination and there were many delays before we finally got it to this point. Of course, we felt from the beginning that there was a substantial uh evasion of income taxes here and now it seems that our our opinion was justified as a res result of this decision in Springfield.
>> The case was nearly derailed when Balistry found a microphone hidden behind wood paneling in his office with a wire stretching to a telephone pole. The FBI had planted an illegal wire tap. Prosecutor Franklin Gimble managed to prove the wiretap had no effect on the tax case and won the conviction anyway.
Balistrieri was released from federal prison in Sandstone, Minnesota in June 1971. He immediately resumed control and the bodies started piling up. On the 11th of September 1975, Milwaukee mobster and FBI informant August Maniachi was shot and killed outside his home on the city’s east side.
Maniachi had been feuding with Balistrieri. In August 1977, someone tried to carb bomb Maniachi’s brother, Vincent. 20 sticks of dynamite were attached to Vincent’s Buick Electra, but they failed to detonate properly. Vincent fled to Honolulu. Then came the 30th of June 1978, the car bombing of August Palmisano.
Palmisano was a complicated figure. Born in 1928 to Sicilian immigrants, he grew up helping at his father’s produce business on Commission Row, a gritty stretch of Broadway packed with fruit and vegetable merchants. He graduated from Lincoln High School, the same school Balistry had attended a decade earlier. Palmisano married Jean Rose Lassa in 1952.
They had four children and bought a home in Whitefish Bay, but Palmisano also ran illegal gambling operations. FBI agents raided his tavern, Palmy’s Bar, in 1974 and seized over $16,000 in cash, over $87,000 in promise to pay slips, 93 sticks of dynamite, and several firearms. He was convicted and suspected of being an informant.
The FBI believed Palmisano had feuded with Balistrieri over bookmaking. Balistrieri wanted all bookmaking to go through his associate Salvatorei Libritzi. Palmisano resisted. He was also friends with the murdered August Maniachi. That made him a liability. When the bomb went off on June 30, destroying Palmisano’s car and damaging 28 others.
Everyone in Milwaukee knew who ordered it. Detectives interviewed witnesses. Most refused to talk. But when they spoke with Joyce Wilson, owner of Satin Dolls Lounge and a close friend of Palmisanos, she didn’t hesitate. She several times stated that she feels that one Frank Balistry was responsible for having August Palmisano killed.
Detectives wrote in their report. As they were leaving, Wilson told them, “Frankie Bal has gone too far this time. Balistrieri was never charged. No one was ever convicted. The case remains officially unsolved. But while Balistrieri was busy eliminating rivals in Milwaukee, the FBI was building a much bigger case.
Operation Strawman, a multi-state racketeering probe focused on organized crimes infiltration of Las Vegas casinos. In May 1974, Balistrieri met with Kansas City boss Nicholas Clla in Las Vegas. They also met with Alan Glick, a San Diego real estate developer who’d recently purchased the Stardust and Fremont Casinos 62.
75 million loan from the Teamsters Central State’s pension fund. Balistrieri had helped arrange that loan and he expected a return on his investment. Frank Lefty Rosenthal, a Chicago bookmaker with deep outfit ties, was given the job of running the casinos. Even though Nevada gaming authorities denied Rosenthal a license, he earned about $250,000 annually as executive consultant to Glick.
His real job was supervising the skim. Here’s how the operation worked. Casino employees used rigged weighing machines to undercount slot machine coins. They skimmed cash from counting rooms before it could be recorded for tax purposes. The stolen money was placed in brown paper bags and delivered to couriers who distributed it to crime families across the Midwest.
FBI agent EMTT Michaels broke the case in May 1981. Agents placed Stardust employee Bobby Stellar under surveillance. They followed him to a hardware store parking lot on Maryland Parkway where he met Phil Ponto, a maid member of the Chicago outfit. The agents watched as a paper bag changed hands.
Cleveland mob witness Angelo Lonardo testified in 1985 that the Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Cleveland crime families each received between $40,000 and $100,000 monthly from the Stardust Skim alone. That’s approximately $400,000 per month in untaxed cash flowing to the Milwaukee family. Carl Thomas, who orchestrated the skimming operation, testified to these amounts in federal court.
Over the life of the operation, federal prosecutors estimated between $7 million to $15 million was skimmed from the Stardust. Across all Argent corporation casinos, the total could have exceeded $50 million. In September 1983, a federal grand jury indicted 15 mobsters, including Frank Balistrieri and his sons John and Joseph, for skimming over $2 million from Las Vegas casinos.
The trial began in Kansas City in September 1985. On the 31st of December 1985, facing overwhelming evidence, Frank Balistry pleaded guilty to racketeering charges related to the skimming. John and Joseph were each acquitted, but Frank was sentenced to 10 years in prison to run concurrently with his previous 13-year sentence from the 1984 Dorian conviction.
That extortion case was another FBI triumph. In 1977, the FBI initiated a sting operation in Milwaukee. They sent special agent Joseph Piston, working undercover in New York as Donnie Brasco, to Milwaukee to help set up a vending machine company called Best Vending. The company was an FBI front. Piston introduced undercover agent Gail Cobb, operating as Tony Conte, to Banano crime family soldier Benjamin Lefty Rugierro.
For a fee, Rugierro helped Cobb establish himself in the vending business. Piston visited Milwaukee several times in 1978, attempting to forge closer ties between the Milwaukee and Banano families. Initially unaware that Cobb was protected by New York, Balistry allegedly assigned three men to kill him because he’d entered the vending business without permission.
Riierro arranged a meeting between Cobb and Balistrieri. Cobb obtained permission to operate. Then in August 1978, Frank Balistrieri and his sons entered into an agreement with Cobb, becoming silent partners in best vending. The ballastrieris terminated the partnership in December 1978. They suspected Cobb was a government agent, but didn’t report these suspicions to New York or Chicago.
On the 1st of October 1980, 15 members and associates of the Milwaukee and Bonano families, including Frank, John, and Joseph Balistrieri, were indicted at the culmination of the FBI’s three-year investigation. On the 9th of April 1984, all three ballistry were convicted in federal court in Green Bay of attempted extortion and conspiracy to commit extortion.
Frank was sentenced to 13 years. John and Joseph each got 8 years, later reduced to five. Both sons, who were lawyers, had their law licenses suspended and were later disbarred. The Operation Straw Man investigation resulted in convictions of 19 senior mobsters and virtually eliminated the leadership of crime families in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Kansas City.
For the Milwaukee family, it was a death blow. During Frank Balistry’s imprisonment, his brother Peter Balistry served as acting boss, but the family was hemorrhaging members. convictions, natural attrition, fear of cooperating witnesses. By the late 1980s, the once powerful Milwaukee mafia was collapsing. On the 5th of November 1991, Frank Balistrieri was released early from prison due to poor health.
In December 1992, he was admitted to Street Mary’s Hospital in Milwaukee for colon surgery. On the 7th of February 1993, Frank Balistry died at age 74. His brother Peter succeeded him as boss but died of natural causes on the 17th of August 1997. Joseph Joe Camel Camoniti, the former conciglier, took control.
But by then there was almost nothing left to control. As the Milwaukee family deteriorated, the Chicago outfit moved in. They assigned Southside Cappo John Johnny Apes Montalone to seize control of organized crime in Milwaukee. By the late 1990s, the organization had fewer than 15 made members.
Most lucrative rackets had been taken over by Chicago. Further diminished by attrition, the Milwaukee Mafia ceased to function as an independent family in the late 2000s. It essentially became a faction of the Chicago outfit. Joseph Camoniti died at age 87 on the 30th of January 2014. Peter Pitch Pichurro, the last known titular boss, died on the 6th of January 2024 at age 94.
As of 2024, there may be as few as eight made members still living. None hold real power. The organization that Veto Gardain founded in 1903 no longer exists as an independent entity. So what happened? Why did the Milwaukee mafia collapse when families in New York and Chicago endured? Size was part of it. With only 50 made members at their peak, Milwaukee never had the manpower to withstand massive federal prosecutions.
When Operation Strawman took down the leadership, there weren’t enough capable replacements. But the real problem was Frank Balistry himself. His arrogance and violence drew too much attention. The car bombings, the public feuds, the refusal to stay in the shadows. When he bragged to an FBI informant about making Palmisano’s skin disappear, he was essentially daring law enforcement to come after him. And they did.
the illegal wiretap in his office, the three-year undercover operation with Donnie Brasco, the multi-state casino skimming investigation, the FBI threw everything at Milwaukee, and Balistry’s leadership style made him an irresistible target. Contrast that with Tony Aardo in Chicago, who died peacefully at age 86, having spent exactly one night in jail.
Akardo understood that real power operates in silence. Balist Drier wanted respect, fear, and recognition. That need for validation destroyed him and his organization. The Milwaukee family also suffered from being a satellite of Chicago. Every major decision required approval from Tony Aardo or Sam Gianana. That dependency meant Milwaukee could never truly act independently.
Frank Balistry wanted to be the most powerful man in Milwaukee. For a time he was. But what did it get him? Prison, betrayal, a family lawsuit over money, an organization absorbed by Chicago. A legacy of fear and violence that his descendants are still trying to escape. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe.
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