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My cousin was killed by a car bomb in Milwaukee. A mob boss was the top suspect. Now, I’m looking for answers.
Florence Grady and Augie Palmisano reached the elevator doors at the same time.
Both were tenants at Juneau Village Garden Apartments in downtown Milwaukee. And shortly before 9 a.m. that Friday — June 30, 1978 — both were heading to the basement of the apartment complex.
Grady was carrying a basket of clothes to the laundry. Augie was going to the underground parking garage. They chatted about the weather and Summerfest.
When they reached the basement, she went to the laundry room. He walked to his car, a 1977 Mercury Marquis.
Less than a minute later, there was a massive explosion. Grady thought the boiler had exploded. But when she looked into the garage, she saw Augie’s car in flames.
The blast shook the city. Paintings fell from walls and books tumbled off shelves. One woman said her recliner lifted off the ground. Tenants ran from the building as firefighters and police rushed to the scene.
Augie Palmisano was my cousin.
His murder has never been solved.
We don't talk about Augie
I was told very little about Augie’s life when I was a child. I heard even less about his death — except when my father was trying to scare me straight.
“Don’t fall in with the wrong crowd. Look what happened to Cousin Augie.”
“Don’t gamble. You don’t want to end up like Cousin Augie.”
“Don’t talk back to the wrong person. You know what happened to Cousin Augie.”
I actually knew almost nothing about what happened to Augie. I was four years old when he was killed, and have no memory of ever meeting him.
The most I heard about Augie probably came from TV news in the early 1980s when reputed Milwaukee crime boss Frank Balistrieri was facing gambling and extortion charges. I remember a TV reporter talking about how Balistrieri was suspected of being involved in Augie’s murder. I hurried from the living room to the kitchen, where my mom was making dinner, and told her they were talking about Cousin Augie on the news. She looked mortified.
Through the years my siblings and I have heard various stories, typically passed on in hushed conspiratorial tones, about why Augie was murdered. In one version, he was killed over gambling debts. In another, he became some sort of Mafia kingpin. In yet another widely believed — and still often repeated — theory, he was an informant.
I had no idea which of those stories was true.
I was raised hearing stories about my grandparents and their families coming from Sicily to the United States, and how they rose to success through hard work and sacrifice. They were more than family stories to me. They were lessons in how to live.
But my father didn’t ever want to talk about Augie. He was the youngest of 13 in a Sicilian immigrant family, and I think he wanted to keep his own children out of trouble and far away from even the mention of organized crime.
After my dad died 11 years ago, I thought my Aunt Marjorie — the last survivor of the 13 Spicuzza siblings — might tell me why Augie was killed.
“Why do you want to talk about that?” she snapped, ending the discussion before it started.
Now an investigative reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I mustered the courage to try to find out what happened to Augie, and why.
I turned to police files, FBI reports and newspaper articles — and tracked down former detectives, FBI agents, prosecutors and others who knew Augie, many of whom agreed to speak with me about the case for the first time.
What I found was a story about loyalty, jealousy, and power — and what some people are willing to do for it.
'The King of Commission Row'
Agostino (August) Palmisano was born in 1928. He was the son of my great-uncle Giovanni (John) Palmisano and his wife, Angeline, making him my father's first cousin.
Like many Sicilian Americans in Milwaukee, Augie’s story is rooted in the Third Ward.
The Third Ward – which lies on the southern edge of downtown – was an Irish enclave for much of the 19th century. It came to be known as the “Bloody Third” due to its rough reputation, thanks in part to the high number of saloons and brawls.
After a massive fire in 1892 destroyed more than 400 buildings and left some 2,000 people homeless, Italian immigrants moved into the neighborhood.
Most, including my father’s family, came from Sicily. And many of them made a living in the produce business, selling fruits and vegetables – first from push carts, then horse-drawn wagons and eventually trucks. The Palmisano and Spicuzza families were among them.
Augie grew up helping at his father’s produce business in the heart of what was then known as Commission Row — a gritty stretch of Broadway that was packed with fruit and vegetable merchants. One fading black and white photograph shows a John Palmisano & Sons Wholesale Produce truck with “AUGIE” painted on the driver’s side door.
Augie graduated from Lincoln High School on Milwaukee’s east side, where he ran cross country, acted in plays, and was a manager for the football team. I’ve been told so many Sicilian Americans attended Lincoln High that at one point plays were called from the sideline in Italian. It was the same school that Frank Balistrieri graduated from a decade earlier.
In 1952, Augie married Jean Rose Lassa. They had four children together and bought a home for the family in Whitefish Bay. He worked second shift at American Motors while helping run the family produce company. After his father died in 1964, Augie took over the company, which by then was named Palmisano Produce.
In the years that followed, Augie started running the tavern adjacent to Palmisano Produce. It was called Richie’s on Broadway, but he eventually renamed it Palmy’s.
Augie’s side-by-side businesses – perched on the corner of North Broadway and East St. Paul Avenue – became a gateway of sorts to Commission Row.
The tavern was especially popular with Commission Row’s produce workers. It had a long bar, a pool table, a couple of pinball machines, and a jukebox that frequently played Frank Sinatra songs. A typical Friday night included a fish fry featuring the catch of the day from Lake Michigan.
By many accounts, it was a wild place where illegal craps games were sometimes played on the pool table, people would stop for dice or card games, and a lot of money changed hands.
Most nights, Augie held court while tending bar, ready with a witty remark or practical joke, or just to loan a friend some cash or a sympathetic ear.
Behind the bar hung a painting that showed Augie and a bottle of Early Times whisky, both hovering larger than life over his two businesses. The artist who painted it said it was meant to portray him as “the King of Commission Row.”
As his legitimate businesses grew, so did his gambling operation.
'A Harvard education in the hustle game'
One afternoon, I went to the now-shuttered Journal Sentinel printing plant in West Milwaukee to search for more information in our archives, known by people in the industry as “the morgue.” I found several small, musty-smelling manila envelopes and file cards with Augie’s name on them – all stamped “DEAD” in green ink – and many more devoted to Frank Balistrieri. I borrowed them all.
The envelopes were filled with newspaper clippings and microfiche that offered more glimpses into Augie’s life.
He first became front page news in the early 1960s.
“Gambling Crackdown! 3 Arrested,” was splashed across the top of the Milwaukee Sentinel – above the name of the newspaper – on March 23, 1962.
The front page of The Milwaukee Journal that same day featured a photograph of Augie with his hand covering his face. It was the first picture I can remember seeing of my cousin.
Augie was nearly 6 feet tall and had a slender build, which made him appear even taller. He had dark brown eyes and black hair parted on the side. But in the photograph, it looked like he was trying to disappear beneath his left hand and hat. Only his nose and ear were visible.
The articles detailed how Augie was accused of accepting bets on college basketball games. He was eventually convicted and fined $1,000.
Through the clips — and hundreds of pages of FBI records — I learned that Augie grew his small gambling activities into a fairly large bookmaking operation, one that reportedly spanned several taverns across the city. Although profitable, it also drew unwanted attention from law enforcement, who seemingly had his tavern under constant surveillance for months at a time.
Augie’s tavern was one of nine locations raided on Super Bowl Sunday in 1974, when 60 FBI agents searched locations in and around Milwaukee. In the raids, agents confiscated piles of gambling records, guns and about $20,000 in cash.
Agents also found something else in the basement of Augie’s tavern – 93 sticks of dynamite stashed in a crawlspace. It was unclear how long the dynamite had been there, and Augie said he had no idea where it came from. The charges linked to the dynamite were dropped, and he eventually pleaded guilty to conducting a gambling business.
A Milwaukee Sentinel article about the case said Augie’s attorney argued he “comes from a good family, is the father of four children, gets up daily at 4 a.m. to start operations at Palmisano Produce, works eight hours operating a truck and then helps run his tavern.” The article said Augie “had been working 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week since he was a young man.”
One of Augie's former employees, who asked not to be identified because of safety concerns, told me he was “a good dude” who “had his hands in everything.”
“I got a Harvard education working at Palmy’s,” the man said. “I really got a Harvard education in the hustle game.”
The way he tells it, Augie was “bigger than God,” and at the center of it all.
He, like others, described Augie as well-liked and funny, somebody who played by his own rules but would also lend people money or give them food when they needed it.
I asked the former employee – who said he fled town after Augie’s murder – why my cousin was killed. His eyes filled with tears.
“He was too big. He got too big,” he said. “And Frank Balistrieri couldn’t put up with it.”
Fancy pants
Most Sicilian Americans in Milwaukee had nothing to do with organized crime.
The same could not be said about Frank Balistrieri.
Born in 1918, Balistrieri graduated from Marquette University and briefly attended law school there. But by the 1950s, the FBI had placed him on its nationwide list of "top hoodlums."
Balistrieri reportedly took over as Milwaukee’s organized crime boss by the early 1960s, and had a wide range of legal and illegal business interests: nightclubs, restaurants, strip clubs, vending machines and gambling.
FBI documents show that starting around that time, Balistrieri decided bookmakers in Milwaukee should be required to give him a cut of their profits, and sent his enforcers to collect.
And Balistrieri – who frequently conducted business from a table at Snug’s restaurant on the ground floor of the Shorecrest Hotel, which was owned by his family – became a key figure in skimming money from Las Vegas casinos, a story made famous in the 1995 movie “Casino.”
Balistrieri was a short man, but had an ominous presence. Franklyn Gimbel, a former federal prosecutor who won a tax evasion case against Balistrieri in 1967, said his eyes were like “spotlights… from his skull that penetrated everything he looked at.”
Some called him “Frankie Bal,” “Mr. Big,” or “Mr. B.” He was also known as "Fancy Pants" due to his hand-tailored, custom-made suits. That nickname was especially popular among people who didn't like him.
Balistrieri demanded respect, and was notoriously ruthless when it came to getting it.
Longtime Milwaukee Sentinel investigative reporter Mary Zahn and columnist Bill Janz once reported that Balistrieri’s willingness to resort to violence even drew criticism from his father-in-law, John Alioto, who preceded him as Milwaukee’s crime boss. Alioto pleaded for more merciful solutions after Balistrieri threatened to kill two men during an argument secretly recorded by the FBI.
“L’amazzari,” Balistrieri said in Sicilian. I’ve got to kill them.
He was suspected by law enforcement of ordering a string of murders in and around Milwaukee, none of which were ever solved.
In 1960, nightclub owner Isadore “Izzy” Pogrob was shot to death and left in a ditch in Mequon. The murder reportedly happened soon after Balistrieri got a phone call at one of his taverns, glanced over at several of his associates, and slid his index finger across his throat.
In 1963, the body of Anthony Biernat, a jukebox distributor, was found in the basement of a vacant farmhouse near Kenosha. He’d been tied up and beaten to death, and his body was covered in lime in an apparent effort to speed decay.
In 1972, Louis Fazio was shot several times with a .38-caliber gun outside his home. Balistrieri was later heard gloating about Fazio’s death.
In 1975, August Maniaci was murdered outside his East Side home by someone with a .22-caliber pistol equipped with a silencer. Maniaci had openly feuded with Balistrieri.
Soon after, an informant told the FBI that Balistrieri thought Maniaci’s brother Vince might try to get revenge. Balistrieri reportedly put out the word that Vince “should be killed like his brother.”
Balistrieri was never charged in any of the murders.
Vincent Maniaci
Vincent Maniaci was my cousin’s best friend. They were so close, they were like brothers, a former FBI agent told me.
Vince ran a bar on Water Street named Little Caesar’s Cocktail Lounge, later known as Under the Bridge. He was also a regular at Augie’s tavern, often seen laughing and joking with my cousin as he tended bar.
Like Augie, Vince had some run-ins with the law. The same year his brother was murdered, Vince was sent to prison for fencing four stolen mink coats and threatening someone who owed him money.
When he was released from prison, the FBI was so convinced somebody wanted Vince dead that agents started following him everywhere he went.
The morning of Aug. 17, 1977, Vince tried to start his car but could tell something was wrong. The accelerator was so stiff he couldn’t push it down to the floor. He drove 15 to 20 mph – as fast as it would go – from the north side halfway house where he was staying to the East Side.
After a brief stop he went to his mechanic, who opened the hood and immediately spotted a package with wires coming out of it. “I’m going to call police,” he told a shaken Vince. “It looks like a bomb.”
Vince ran for cover and was picked up by the FBI agents who’d been following him. They took him to an agent’s house, where he had a stiff drink and told investigators he had no idea who would want him dead. Soon afterward, federal officials sent Vince back to prison for his own protection.
Members of the Milwaukee Police Department bomb squad found a taped-up gray package placed near the engine on the driver's side of Vince’s car, jammed near the accelerator and wired to the ignition with alligator clips. The bomb had 20 sticks of dynamite and a booster but luckily failed to detonate, possibly due to faulty wiring.
A police report described the device as an “overkill bomb” designed to “destroy all traces of possible evidence that could connect anyone” with the crime.
Donnie Brasco
Not long after someone planted a bomb in Vince’s car, the FBI brought in an agent named Joseph Pistone to help infiltrate the Balistrieri crime family.
Today, Pistone is better known by his undercover name: Donnie Brasco.
He wrote about his experience in a book, which inspired the 1997 movie starring Johnny Depp as Pistone and Al Pacino as New York crime family member Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero.
One scene from Pistone’s book in particular stuck with me – the strong reaction Ruggiero had when Pistone mentioned Milwaukee. Ruggiero didn’t know it at the time, but “Donnie” was trying to help another undercover FBI agent who was posing as a new vending machine company owner in Milwaukee.
“He’s crazy, Donnie. Doesn’t the f------ guy know you can’t operate a vending business anywhere without connections? Especially Milwaukee. They’re crazy out there. It ain’t like in New York, Donnie, where they may just throw you a beating and chase you out. Out there they’re vicious. They answer to Chicago, you know. They blow people up. Donnie, if this guy’s a friend of yours, you better tell him to get the hell out of that town.”
When I reached Pistone, he was gracious with his time, patient, and had an impressive memory.
At the time, organized crime in Milwaukee wasn’t as well-known as the Outfit in Chicago or the Mafia in New York. But Pistone said Balistrieri was a “very well-known” Mafia boss throughout the U.S. who was closely aligned with the Chicago Outfit — and notorious for his brutality.
Pistone recalled one night when Balistrieri took him and others to a charity banquet on a whim. Pistone said people scrambled to clear a table in a prime spot for Balistrieri and his entourage.
“It had to be a couple hundred people. Everything just stopped when they saw him. The maitre d’ came over and said, ‘Oh, Mr. Balistrieri, I didn't know you were coming,'" Pistone remembered. "It was like, you know, if you were in a foreign country, a president walking in. Or the queen walked in, I mean, you could see that that everybody knew who he was. And either they were terribly afraid of him or respected him."
“But he was the man," Pistone said. "He was the man in Milwaukee.”
Despite Pistone’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Mafia, he didn’t have a lot of answers when it came to Augie.
Pistone told me he doesn’t believe he ever met my cousin, but clearly remembers his murder – which he also wrote about in his book.
“He wasn’t a boss,” Pistone said. “I think he probably was involved in bookmaking operations.”
He did recall Balistrieri claiming that Augie was “a snitch.”
“Whether he was, I don't know,” Pistone said, adding that he made it a point not to know.
“It's human nature,” he said. “You’re going to act differently if you know that somebody, you know, is on your side.”
Pistone’s work in Milwaukee in 1978 would eventually help dismantle organized crime here. But not before it claimed another life -- Augie's.
Closing time
Augie spent his final hours like he did much of his life. He was working.
He closed his tavern at 2 a.m., then spent 20 minutes cleaning up with his 24-year-old son, John, before they left together.
"I'll see you tomorrow," Augie told his son as he walked toward his car.
Augie stopped at Pitch’s Lounge and Restaurant on the East Side, where he joined an old friend known as “Teach” for breakfast. “Teach” would later tell police Augie came and left alone, but that he was too drunk to remember the exact time.
Augie’s routine was to stay awake after closing his tavern long enough to go back to the Third Ward and check on the day’s produce delivery, which typically arrived at 4 a.m. It was Friday, an especially busy day at work, so he would often sleep for only a few hours at his apartment before heading back to work on Commission Row.
That’s where he was going when he stepped into the elevator with his neighbor, Florence Grady.
She was the last person to see him alive.
The seat of the blast
Augie’s car was still engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived.
The explosion mangled the overhead door to the parking garage so badly that firefighters had to pry it open and prop it up with wooden beams. The blast also shattered the lights, leaving it almost pitch-black inside. The air was heavy with smoke, and the garage was flooded from the sprinkler system and water streaming from burst pipes in the ceiling.
The front of Augie’s Marquis was essentially gone, and parts of his car lay scattered across the garage. The damage spread to 28 nearby cars, but miraculously no one else was injured because Augie was alone in the garage that morning.
It wasn’t until firefighters extinguished the flames that they found Augie’s body. His right foot was missing — investigators determined it had been incinerated by the blast. His face was so badly burned that police identified him through fingerprints.
He was 49 years old.
Those who responded to the crime scene that morning included about 25 firefighters, members of the Milwaukee Police Department bomb squad, the state fire marshal, and Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann, as well as numerous police officers and FBI agents.
Notably absent, according to police reports: longtime Milwaukee Police Chief Harold Breier, who famously said there was “no prosecutable evidence of organized crime” in the city.
“We demand honest government in Milwaukee,” Breier said in that 1975 TV interview. “Our city wouldn’t stand for it. We’re different. We’re quite a community."
Ted Engelbart, then a new member of the bomb squad, was at the crime scene that morning. He told me that they quickly realized it wasn’t an accidental fire.
Engelbart said they determined the “seat of the blast” was in the front of the car, and the bomb was placed near the engine. The explosion followed the path of least resistance – right toward Augie.
The bomb even moved the foundation of the apartment building. Had it exploded outside, the damage would have extended several city blocks, said Engelbart, who’s now retired.
“That is sending a message,” Engelbart said. “Something like this tells other people, ‘Oh, watch your ass.’”
The bomb likely had numerous sticks of dynamite and a booster, much like the one found in Vince’s car. Among the debris, investigators found a key component: an alligator clip just like the one in the bomb that nearly killed Augie’s best friend.
McCann, the former DA, told me that the incident was “clearly no act of passing violence.”
John Palmisano
The explosion woke up Augie’s son, John, who like his dad had an apartment at Juneau Village.
After the building manager knocked on John’s door and told him Augie’s car was on fire, John called Palmy’s, then drove to Commission Row to look for his dad. Somebody said they thought they’d seen Augie early that morning, but nobody knew where he was.
After John returned to the apartment building, an officer showed him a silver watch with a broken band found near the mangled car. John recognized it as his father’s watch.
Police who stopped at Palmy’s later that day found a locked door with a note that read: “Sorry, the tavern is closed. My father died today.”
'Augie got put on a troublemaker list'
In the aftermath of Augie’s murder, Milwaukee police detectives interviewed nearly every resident of Juneau Village Garden Apartments, talked to business owners and workers along Commission Row, and spoke to Augie’s friends throughout the city, according to police reports from the time.
Just hours after the bombing, an anonymous caller reported seeing a late model white Cadillac with Ohio license plates occupied by people “who appeared to be gangster types.” The FBI traced the license plate number to a car dealership, whose manager said the sedan had been leased to a “self employed contractor” named Larry John. The reports don’t say whether investigators found him or determined if that was the getaway car.
Several days after the murder, a detective stopped at a halfway house to question Anthony Francis Pipito, a Balistrieri employee who’d been convicted of armed burglary and other crimes. Asked whether he had any information about Augie’s murder, Pipito told the detective he wouldn’t give him “any information regarding Frank Balistrieri.”
Asked why he brought up Balistrieri, Pipito refused to answer.
Others dropped similar hints. When detectives went to the Iron Horse Diner in Glendale to interview its owner, Anthony Fazio, he told them that only four or five people in Milwaukee “would be able to hire a bomber.” He added that police “should probably start looking on Prospect Avenue.”
The detective wrote, “Probably meant Snug’s bar – Frank Balistrieri.”
Fazio, whose brother Louis was murdered six years earlier, told detectives he and others believed “that some people in the Milwaukee Police Department are on the take and therefore we are not conducting a proper investigation into this homicide,” the report said.
He also warned them people “who might have information regarding this murder are afraid to come forward because they fear for their lives.”
A newspaper article about the murder quoted a Palmisano Produce truck driver who said Augie was “good to bums, paupers, rich men and poor men” and would feed people off the street. The owner of the building described Augie as a “nice fellow” who always paid his rent on time and slept very little, often starting work before 5 a.m.
But the narrative that Augie was a Mafia leader or suspected informant seemed to stick.
One front-page article, quoting police sources, described Augie as a “substantial figure in organized crime in Milwaukee,” and said that “somebody thought he was going to talk.”
Another said his killing was “part of a long standing feud between criminal factions in the city.”
Yet another said Augie “had been branded as a troublemaker by organized crime leaders” for protesting too publicly about the attempted bombing of his close friend, Vince Maniaci.
“Augie got put on a troublemaker list,” a source told The Milwaukee Journal.
The Satin Doll
One person didn’t hesitate to name Balistrieri as a suspect in Augie’s murder: lounge owner Minnette Wilson.
Today, a fading Schlitz sign still hangs over the lounge Wilson owned on West Fond du Lac Avenue. The concrete walls of the now-shuttered tavern are covered in graffiti, and weeds grow through cracks in the parking lot.
But in 1978, Satin Doll’s Lounge was a hotspot for jazz, vice and wild characters. And few were wilder than its owner. Wilson was a stunning former dancer who performed with Duke Ellington and claimed to have inspired his hit song “Satin Doll.”
She often went by the Satin Doll, or just the Doll.
When a pair of detectives first went to the lounge to interview Wilson about Augie’s murder, she was visibly distraught. The lounge was packed, and she told them she was too busy and upset about her old friend’s death to talk – noting Augie’s funeral had just been held.
Detectives spotted two large portraits of Augie hanging on the back walls of the lounge and suggested a follow-up interview.
“It is apparent that she is more than just a close friend of the deceased,” they wrote in their report. “We were unable to determine at this time just how close the relationship was.”
But there’s nothing else that might indicate they were romantically involved.
Wilson told another pair of detectives who returned the following night that she and Augie had dinner together a couple of times in the days leading up to his murder, and he didn’t show any signs of concern about his safety. But she added he was “the type of person that if something was bothering him, even though it would be quite serious, he would not tell anyone else about it,” the police report said.
“She several times stated that she feels that one Frank Balistrieri, otherwise known as Frankie Bal, was responsible for having August Palmisano killed,” detectives wrote.
As they were leaving, Wilson told detectives: “Frankie Bal has gone too far this time.”
'I'm in a lot of trouble'
Detectives kept getting hints Balistrieri was behind Augie’s murder, but they struggled to find details about a motive.
A painting found in Augie’s apartment led them to his close friend, a stockbroker named Sante DiAntoni, who went by Sam Denton. Denton told police that when he and his wife found out Augie was murdered, they both sat on their bed and cried.
After what detectives described as a “long conversation,” Denton revealed more. He said about six months before the murder, Augie confided in him that he’d been threatened over his friendship with Vince Maniaci, who by then had fled town for Hawaii.
“I think I’m in a lot of trouble,” Denton recalled Augie saying. “I was told if I help Vince, I would be in more trouble – that I should stay away from Vince forever.”
Three months later Vince decided to come back to Milwaukee, and Augie went to pick him up at the airport, Denton said. Augie waited for three hours but Vince never showed up. Augie later found out that Vince had arrived in Milwaukee but immediately took a flight back to Hawaii. Denton told police that Augie was very upset and frightened, and thought Vince may have been threatened when he arrived at the airport.
Then, a month before the murder, Vince again called Augie and told him that he was having trouble finding a job, and wanted to come home to Milwaukee.
“It’s better for you to stay where you are, and I’ll stay where I am. That will be best for both of us,” Denton overheard Augie tell Vince.
Denton told detectives he hoped they would solve the case, but said he didn’t think it would be possible.
A meeting at FBI headquarters
Less than a week after Augie was killed, a group of federal agents met with Milwaukee police detectives at FBI headquarters in downtown Milwaukee.
There had been tension simmering between the FBI and Milwaukee Police Department for years, with some officers accusing agents of not sharing enough information with them. Several former FBI agents told me they knew some officers were on Balistrieri’s payroll and were worried about corrupt cops leaking information — concerns also documented in FBI reports from the time.
But that day, the agents had information to share. They told detectives the FBI was contemplating a grand jury investigation focused on the attempted car bombing of Vincent Maniaci as well as Augie’s murder, and said the agency might be willing to give out immunity in some cases with the idea of “shaking loose information not forthcoming at this time.”
The agents then told police they’d identified a possible hit man in the Maniaci car bombing case, and said he was also a suspect in Augie’s murder. His name was Nick George Montos, a career criminal who escaped from prison five times and was the first person to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list twice.
FBI agents conducting surveillance had spotted Montos following Vince Maniaci before someone tried to kill him.
Gary Magnesen, one of the FBI agents at the meeting that day, told me they nicknamed Montos “The Mope” because he looked so unremarkable.
“A car pulled up almost right in front of us - a black sedan - and a short little guy dressed in gray work clothes got out of the car,” Magnesen said. “He was a Chicago guy. They had used him quite a bit. He was not Italian and he was not part of the mob, but he was a guy that was an expert in bomb making.”
Retired FBI Agent Bob Walsh told me he also saw Montos in Milwaukee when he noticed him trailing Vince into a McDonald’s shortly before the attempted bombing.
But neither police nor FBI knew whether Montos was in Milwaukee the day Augie was murdered.
The FBI also asked about similarities in the explosives used in the two bombings. They suspected both bombs were closely linked, and likely built by the same person.
No answer
A few weeks later, Milwaukee police detectives tried to talk to Frank Balistrieri at his large Shepard Avenue home on Milwaukee’s East Side. Detectives stopped several times one day, noting the car in the driveway.
“No one would come to the door,” they wrote of the visit. “However, it seemed as if someone was present in the home.”
They also went to the home of Peter Balistrieri, Frank’s brother. Nobody answered there either.
“In addition, we checked at the Shorecrest Hotel,” the report said. “But found that neither one of the Balistrieri brothers were in.”
It appears the officers never returned.
Over time, tips coming into the Milwaukee police slowed to a trickle.
One anonymous caller told police that someone using the name “Michael Block” had moved into Juneau Village shortly before Augie was killed and hadn’t been seen since the murder. He reportedly left behind an expensive razor and nice clothing.
Another tipster told police the killer was a Mafia hitman named Richard Montey, who’d since gone into hiding using the alias “Dick Montage” and was living in a cabin behind a tavern near Athens, in northern Wisconsin.
Yet another called police and said their son’s friend, a man nicknamed “Dough Pop,” would get high on cocaine and brag that he had something to do with Augie’s murder.
Police hit one dead end after another. But the feds were just getting started.
'He called me a name to my face'
Frank Balistrieri had been on the FBI’s radar for years. Augie’s murder helped inspire an all-out crackdown, former agents told me.
“Now we had a crime, a very serious crime – a homicide – to tie him to,” Magnesen said. “Once those murders began, we knew he was behind it. The problem was to prove it. So that’s when we started pushing really hard.”
Just weeks after the meeting at FBI headquarters, undercover FBI agent Gail Cobb, who was posing as a new vending machine company owner named Tony Conte, was summoned by Balistrieri to a meeting at Snug’s restaurant in the Shorecrest Hotel.
He went with New York Mafia member “Lefty” Ruggiero, who was helping him work out an arrangement between the New York and Milwaukee crime families over vending machine profits with the help of undercover agent Joe Pistone posing as "Donnie Brasco."
It was July 29, 1978 — nearly a month after Augie's murder.
Balistrieri, sitting across the table from Cobb, had reached out to shake his hand when Ruggiero introduced him as Conte. Balistrieri recoiled in shock.
“We’ve been looking for you all week. We were going to hit you," Cobb remembered him saying. "We figured you were the G.” (The G, or G-man, is short for a government agent.)
Balistrieri reportedly laughed as he explained that he’d had three guys following Cobb. The would-be hit men had even trailed Cobb to the meeting and were still waiting until Balistrieri waved them away.
After Ruggiero reassured him Cobb wasn’t an informant, Balistrieri made it clear the vending machine business in Milwaukee belonged to him.
Then the conversation turned to Augie.
“He was arrogant. He called me a name to my face,” Balistrieri said, touching his fingers to his face.
He added: “Now they can’t find his skin.”
There was no recording of the exchange. It would have been too dangerous for Cobb to wear a wire to the Shorecrest that night.
Shortly afterward, a shaken Cobb told Pistone: “First thing I’m going to do is put a remote starter in my Cadillac.”
A few weeks later, Cobb and Pistone were at a bar with Balistrieri when they ran into Peter Picciurro, the owner of Pitch’s Lounge & Restaurant, where Augie had his last meal.
Balistrieri reportedly laughed as he told the two men that Picciurro hadn’t talked to him since “the guy had his accident” and “got blown up.”
“They were buddies — goombahs — real close,” Balistrieri added.
That same night, Balistrieri bragged to the undercover agents that nobody had ever lived to be a witness against him.
Only in this case, if Balistrieri was trying to gain power by making an example out of Augie, he may have instead set in motion his own downfall.
A full-court press
In October 1978, Cobb was frozen out by Balistrieri, who reportedly had discovered that he was an undercover agent. But by then he and Pistone had already gathered extensive information about Balistrieri’s gambling ring and extortion activities.
The FBI’s investigations into Balistrieri and his associates would ultimately involve a federal grand jury, subpoenas, search warrants, wiretapping and other physical and electronic surveillance.
“We call it a full-court press,” said Magnesen, the longtime FBI agent who’s now retired.
The FBI targeted several locations for surveillance, including the Shorecrest Hotel. After obtaining blueprints to the Shorecrest and a search warrant, a group of FBI agents broke into the building one night. They were able to slip in through the front door after two agents pretended to make out in front of the entrance -- blocking the door from view as an FBI lock expert cut a key in real time.
Magnesen, one of the agents who broke in that night, said he still remembers the concrete dust falling on them as they drilled a hole in the basement ceiling. They then placed a listening device under the carpet.
It turned out they had put the microphone in the wrong place, and had to enter the Shorecrest for a second time to move the microphone.
Magnesen said one of the conversations agents heard thanks to that microphone was a worried discussion about a subpoena served to Nick Montos, who Balistrieri warned had “real, real, real good information” on what he called “the boom.”
That quote was one of several glimmers of hope that prosecutors would be able to charge Balistrieri with the murders they believed he’d ordered.
Despite Balistrieri gloating about the deaths, officials never felt like they had enough evidence to win a homicide conviction.
In 1980, after months of around-the-clock surveillance, the FBI broke down Balistrieri’s front door with a sledgehammer. He was later charged with gambling, tax evasion and extortion.
John Franke
One September afternoon, 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.
As Franke flipped through a manila folder, an old black and white photograph caught my eye.
“Is that Augie?” I asked.
“That might be your cousin. Yeah, it probably is,” Franke said, turning it over and reading the name on the back. “Augie Palmisano.”
The file also held pictures of Balistrieri, including a booking photo and another of him dressed in one of his custom suits.
“Fancy Pants,” Franke said. "Well-dressed as always."
Frank Balistrieri had proven to be slippery in the past. About a decade before Franke joined what was known as the Organized Crime Strike Force, a federal tax evasion case against Balistrieri was nearly derailed when Balistrieri discovered the FBI had illegally planted microphones to conduct electronic surveillance without a warrant.
To prepare for the Balistrieri trials some 10 years later, Franke and others on the Organized Crime Strike Force spent weeks listening to hours of conversations between Balistrieri and his associates that had been secretly -- but this time, legally -- recorded by the FBI.
“I don't know how many hours I spent in that room with those big old reel-to-reel tapes running,” Franke told me.
In 1983, Balistrieri was convicted of gambling and tax charges. The following year, he and his two sons were convicted of extortion. At the trials, former undercover agents Pistone and Cobb were among those who testified.
Franke said one thing that "caught everyone's attention" was the explosion that killed Augie. While he was prosecuting the case, people would tell him where they were when the bomb went off, he said, because it could be felt from blocks away.
“That was a pretty dramatic moment in terms of, creating the sense in the community that maybe there is organized crime here, and maybe it’s something that we should actually worry about,” Franke said. “Because it’s not just, you know, gangsters gunning down gangsters. It’s people doing things that could kill innocent people easily.”
When I asked if he thought Balistrieri got away with murder, Franke fell silent.
“The most compelling statement from Frank was not recorded,” he said after a long pause. “That would be ‘they can't find his skin. He was arrogant to my face.’”
But it was clear he was reviewing the case in his mind.
“Look, you're making me pause. Because I'm sure if we thought that was enough, we would have pursued it. But, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he ordered it just because he was gloating about someone's death,” Franke said. “I don't know. Maybe we missed something. But it really probably wasn't enough to convince a jury.”
Bad blood
The convictions of Balistrieri and his associates dealt a massive blow to organized crime in Milwaukee, and the investigations that led to them are widely considered to be among the greatest success stories for the FBI here.
For his crimes in Milwaukee, Balistrieri was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Two years later, in a separate federal case involving skimming money from Las Vegas casinos, Balistrieri pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a concurrent 10 years.
He was released from prison early due to his failing health in 1991, and died two years later at age 74.
Nick Montos had a long criminal career and spent years as a fugitive. In 1995, he tried to rob a Massachusetts antique store, where he tied up the 73-year-old Jewish owner and called her an antisemitic slur. She was able to escape and fight off Montos, then 78, with a baseball bat. He was still a prisoner when he died at age 92.
Montos was never charged in Augie's murder or Vince's attempted car bombing. But to this day, retired FBI agents Magnesen and Walsh told me they believe that Montos built the bomb that killed my cousin on the orders of Balistrieri.
As for motive? Magnesen said it was well known Augie “had contempt" for Frank Balistrieri. And he wasn’t the only one.
“All of the soldiers and so on despised (Balistrieri) because he didn’t have cred. He was a nobody really. He had never really shown himself to be a good criminal or anything like that. So they didn’t like him,” Magnesen said. “And Augie Palmisano – although he was not a made member – he didn’t like (Balistrieri) at all either. And would talk about him on the street.”
Magnesen said Balistrieri, through his enforcer, put pressure on Augie to pay a percentage of his gambling winnings to him — “or else.” That enforcer was observed by another FBI agent in a big argument with Augie shortly before he was murdered, he added.
Magnesen stressed that my cousin was neither a made member of the Mafia nor was he a "rat," as Balistrieri had claimed.
“Palmisano was not an informant. But (Balistrieri) told the Chicago people he was, and therefore a threat to him and therefore a threat to them,” Magnesen said. “He just lied. He did everything he could to get them to do his dirty work.”
FBI documents corroborate that there was bad blood between the two, including a July 1978 report stating that Augie had “openly showed his disgust with Balistrieri for having a bomb placed in Vincent Maniaci’s vehicle.”
The report also said that Balistrieri had previously accused Augie of operating a bookmaking business without paying off “the LCN,” or La Cosa Nostra.
Family history suggests the bad blood may have started years earlier, when Augie’s brother married Balistrieri’s sister, against the Palmisano family's wishes. The relationship reportedly got worse when Balistrieri and Augie began feuding over a shared relative they both wanted to hire who'd taken a job as a bartender at Augie's tavern.
Former FBI Agent Bob Walsh said Augie and Vince refused to take orders from Balistrieri.
“They were sort of outsiders,” Walsh said. “He couldn’t control them. They were kind of on their own.”
He believes Balistrieri used them as an example to scare others into doing as they were told.
“I think he wanted to show that he’s in charge here,” Walsh said. “And every once in a while, you’ve got to flex your muscles and put somebody down.”
Chasing ghosts
In the more than four decades since Augie’s murder, the Third Ward has undergone a seismic shift. What was once the working-class stretch known as Commission Row has been replaced by posh boutiques, restaurants, bars and other high-end businesses that now line Broadway.
The building that was home to Palmisano Produce and Richie’s on Broadway, or Palmy’s, is now Café Benelux. The boards that used to cover the windows are gone, as is the pool table. Now the bar serves Belgian beers and craft cocktails, and a staircase leads to a rooftop patio.
As for me, trying to report on the 45-year-old unsolved murder of a cousin I never knew has felt a bit like chasing ghosts – or trying to put together a puzzle with too many missing pieces.
Many of the key figures involved have died. Some would only talk anonymously because they were still afraid of the reach of organized crime, or simply didn’t return my phone calls. Others declined to be interviewed, like Frank Balistrieri’s son, John. Augie’s children did not respond to interview requests.
It’s been a relief to learn that Augie was not some murderer or Mafia kingpin – nor was he a “made” member, according to the FBI agents I interviewed who knew him. Those same agents said that while Augie was no angel, he was funny, charismatic and well liked. And many of his gambling activities that were front-page news decades ago are now basically legal.
Months spent poring over hundreds of pages of police reports, FBI files, court records and wiretap transcripts made me realize that in a sense I’d been blaming Augie for his own murder – or at least trying to figure out what he did that led to the car bombing.
Franke noticed I was still struggling to make sense of the murder when I called him months after our initial interview to ask about additional documents that may shed some light on the case.
“Mary, I know you’re trying to understand what your cousin did or didn’t do that led to his death,” Franke told me. “But this was about power.”
He was right. Augie may have been a gambler who refused to give Balistrieri a cut of his profits, and criticized the attempted murder of his best friend. And he probably even called Balistrieri a name to his face. But he didn't deserve to die the way he did.
He was a businessman and a hustler. A convicted gambler and a devoted friend. A rebel who bucked authority. He was adored. And he had some powerful enemies.
His name was Augie Palmisano, and he was my cousin.
Contact Mary Spicuzza at (414) 224-2324 or mary.spicuzza@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MSpicuzzaMJS.
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