The Balistrieri Tapes, Part 8: "Microphones gave FBI a chair at Balistrieri's table"
“The Balistrieri Tapes” was a twelve-part series originally published in the Milwaukee Sentinel beginning October 31, 1988. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is republishing select excerpts from the series.
Frank Balistrieri died in 1993 and his son Joseph Balistrieri died in 2010. His son John Balistrieri was released from prison in 1989, after the publication of this series. In 2014, the Wisconsin Supreme Court denied John Balistrieri’s request to reinstate his law license despite the recommendation of a court-appointed referee who said his conduct had been exemplary since his release.
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Nine years ago, microphones were put back in the life of Frank P. Balistrieri, Milwaukee's crime boss who talked himself into prison while the FBI listened.
The FBI committed legal burglaries to break into Balistrieri's life, but agents were sidetracked briefly by a stubborn door at one location and a rat - a real one - at another spot.
Balistrieri often ruled organized crime from a table in Snug's Restaurant, and as a result of the government break-ins, the FBI was at the table with him without his knowledge.
The installation of listening devices in three key Balistrieri places began the biggest investigation in the history of the Milwaukee FBI office.
Ironically, the first conversation heard on a secret taping device that was being installed at one restaurant was the scream of a female agent who was frightened by a rat.
In turn, the scream scared the rat into smashing some glasses on top of a bar and interrupted the heartbeats of the agents listening to the ruckus.
At least 40 agents were working in the early, chilly, dark hours of a day in October 1979 so that two of the agents could break into Snug's restaurant, located in the Shorecrest Hotel, 1962 N. Prospect Ave.
The work that began that night led to the interception of 7,000 conversations, and some of these words put Balistrieri in prison for 13 years.
The work on N. Prospect Ave. in those pre-dawn hours focused on two FBI agents - a man and a woman - who acted as if they were lovers and hugged in front of Snug's to cover the break-in.
As the male FBI agent worked to open the door, the woman, who wore a receiver in her ear, kept in touch with agents in the neighborhood, many of whom were parked in vans at key intersections.
The lookouts warned her about traffic and people on the street and told them when they had to stop working on the door and start embracing.
While waiting to get the bugging devices in place and start recording Balistrieri's conversations, "It was like waiting for Christmas to come when you were a little kid," FBI agent Michael DeMarco said.
"We were so geared up. We looked at this as the closest we have ever come to success on the La Cosa Nostra in Milwaukee in 25 years."
Their recordings of Balistrieri's days and nights succeeded beyond their dreams, DeMarco said. But first they had to get through a stubborn door at Snug's without a key.
In preparation for placing the recording devices, the FBI had done a monthlong survey of the areas around the Shorecrest, which is owned by the Balistrieri family, and around Leonardo's, which was formerly at 1601 N. Jackson St. and was one of Balistrieri's places.
FBI agents knew every car, human and dog on the street between midnight and 8 a.m.
"We knew exactly when the milkman came, when the bakery was delivered, when people got up and walked their dog," said Fred Thorne, another FBI agent who worked on the case. "We even knew how many cars came down the street at any given hour. We knew when the police would do regular patrol."
During the nights they broke into Balistrieri's restaurants, FBI agents were worried about police, who had not been informed that federal agents were breaking and entering.
Some agents listened to police radio frequencies for any reports of burglaries in progress so they could stop squads before they blew apart the investigation.
One night, Thorne was in a van with agents who spotted a man stealing tires from a car. The agents turned on their lights briefly, which frightened the thief. An agent called police anonymously and gave them the thief's license number.
Besides knowing the routine of neighborhoods, agents also knew Frank Balistrieri's daily routine.
"We assumed he got up late in the day because he went home so late at night," DeMarco said. "He would go out on the street in midafternoon. Usually, he'd go to Snug's, LaScalla and Leonardo's – places he had an interest In.
"At Snug's he'd make four or five phone calls, then he'd slide over to Leonardo's around 6 pm. and make a lot of phone calls, maybe have some drinks. A lot of times he drank nonalcoholic beverages.
"About three times a week, around 7 or 8 p.m., he'd call his wife at home and say, 'Put it on. I'll be home in five minutes,' meaning have dinner ready. It would usually be a half-hour to one hour after the phone call before he'd leave whatever location he was at.
"Five minutes, it didn't mean a damn to him. Then he'd go back to Snug's and Leonardo's. He stayed in places he felt were his domain. He would go home anywhere between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m."
During a taped conversation, Joseph P. Balistrieri, a son, said: "See, my old man, we're on different, you know, we're in different … zones … , I get up 7 o'clock in the morning. I go to work. I come back 6, 7 o'clock at night. I'm beat, you know.
"He comes, he gets up in the afternoon. He's all talced and shaved and ready for an argument at 7 o'clock. My tongue is hanging out. You know then my father's got a nice, you know, he's got a nice way of opening. Ah, you know he doesn't want to say, 'Sit down, I wanna talk to you.' He says, 'You (obscenity) guys, you think you know everything.'"
One thing Frank Balistrieri didn't know was that his tirades were being taped. Eventually, the lock on Snug's gave up, but it didn't happen that first night.
"He (the male agent) worked on the lock from about 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. and gave up," DeMarco said. "He couldn't get in."
Agents broke into Snug's three days later, and they also got into Leonardo's.
At Leonardo's, agents "were getting ready to leave when the female agent saw a big rat on the bar," DeMarco said. "The rat was chewing on cherries you put in cocktails. The woman shrieked, the rat jumped and knocked four glasses off the bar.”
"Our nerves shattered like the glasses."
But agents said the tense work was worth it because the recordings sent Balistrieri to prison on charges of illegally skimming money from Las Vegas casinos, extortion and gambling.
His sons, John and Joseph, were acquitted of the skimming charges, but were sent to prison for extortion.
The agents taped Balistrieri bragging, "I'm surrounded with a battery of brains, with lawyers, accountants and ... I infiltrate the ... legitimate business."
In addition to Snug's and Leonardo's, agents also bugged an office in the Shorecrest.
"The monitoring of the calls took place on the seventh floor of the federal building in the FBI offices," DeMarco said. 'They had two rooms. One where the calls were monitored and another workroom…
"There were long tables all around the room. Seven places to listen to the reel-to-reel tapes and 14 machines running. While the calls were being monitored there was simultaneous surveillance going on at the outside locations."
Legally, agents were not allowed to listen to any conversations Irrelevant to the evidence they were seeking, as authorized by a judge.
The agents had to establish the relevance of a conversation quickly and decide whether or not to listen to it, knowing that if they made the wrong decision, the tape would not be useable in court.
Eventually, as a result of investigations in several cities, at least six top mob bosses were convicted, and prosecutors here and in Kansas City unscrambled pieces of the nationwide puzzle of crime.
By November 1979, DeMarco said, meetings were being held in different cities to discuss the results of wiretap investigations here and in other parts of the country.
"While we're doing this, we're continuing to get bombarded with numerous pieces of information everyday," DeMarco said. "We have wiretaps going, the other offices are sending us information, our informants are telling us things and all of this had to be collated, and we had to get all this new information to the level of the monitoring agents so they knew what they were listening to. We finally realized we had the chance before us to once and for all knock out a portion of the skimming in Las Vegas."
Officials said the Milwaukee wiretap investigation began in 1979, after DeMarco and Geir Magnesen, another FBI agent, determined that the office had enough intelligence on Balistrieri's organization to ask a judge for wiretap permission. It took five months before the paperwork was ready and permission was granted.
When Balistrieri's places were raided in March 1980, agents interrupted a gambling operation on E. Brady St. that resulted in them accepting basketball bets while they searched the home.
So that agents could surprise Salvatore Librizzi, a Balistrieri associate, a female agent stopped her car in the middle of the street, and raised the hood. When Librizzi answered her knock at the door, she said she was having car trouble and, of course, Librizzi immediately had cop trouble.
Agents stormed in and gathered gambling evidence, while DeMarco answered the phone and took bets on basketball games.
"It was very funny," DeMarco said. "They gave me the bets. I read them back to them. I asked them if that was right."
When callers asked who he was, "I used my first name, Mike, and I used a made-up Italian last name."
Agents who monitored those conversations with listening devices wrote down Mike's assumed name phonetically. They wrote Mike Foolaroundo. During the investigation, agents also learned that a mob courier would be bringing Las Vegas skim money to Chicago by way of Milwaukee, DeMarco said.
"They (FBI agents) surveilled him from Chicago to Las Vegas and back to Milwaukee where he rented a car and drove to Chicago," DeMarco said. "It was a Saturday morning and here was this nondescript white-haired guy, 55 to 60 years old, coming down the escalator with this big oversized coat down to his knees ... "We knew the money was stuffed inside the lining of the coat."
Agents didn't stop him because stopping him might have stopped their investigation of Balistrieri. But DeMarco remembered him, because the man had so much money stuffed in his coat that he looked like someone.
He looked like BoBo the clown.
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Read the next selected excerpt: The Balistrieri Tapes, Part 9: "Undercover agent was target for Balistrieri's hit men"
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The Balistrieri Tapes, Part 8: "Microphones gave FBI a chair at Balistrieri's table"
