Comment by jackschultz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackschultz | Hacker News Reader

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.

> But then again I don’t know of ninepins have recognized irbid I saw it.

You good?

It's probably swypos.

Probably "But then again I don't know if I would have recognized it if 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.

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. :)

> mafia-type organized crime

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?

No, the mafia is a specific thing.

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.

(typo edited)

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.

Doesn't putting "-type" kind of defeat that point? If you meant the mafia, just say the mafia

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).

Where can I read more about the Vice Lords / Gangster Disciples war?

I Googled using: Vice Lords / Gangster Disciples war wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almighty_Vice_Lord_Nation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangster_Disciples

> 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.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...

The conflict between mob and police seems to have gradually resolved into organized crime as policing.

Completely unrelated to the post but greetings from Milwaukee :) it's awesome to see another hacker news user from Milwaukee

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.

Out here too!

We need a hacker news meetup in Milwaukee lol

Here as well!

There are many of us, it seems! Milwaukee born-and-raised here, still living in the city!

you might be interested in this too: https://www.milwaukeemag.com/murder-of-a-tyrant-karl-lothari...

Interesting. Lotharius encounter with Palmisano shows him as a mafia guy and not just a 'hustler'.

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