John Balistrieri, the younger son of Milwaukee crime boss Frank Balistrieri who was convicted with his father and brother and who battled for years to get back what he lost, has died. He was 75.
John Balistrieri will always be connected to his father — and the crimes they were convicted of — but friends said this week they knew a different man.
“He was the kindest, nicest man you could ever meet,” said Santo Galati, a longtime friend. In recent years, John and his wife, Debi, would often eat at Galati’s restaurant, Santino’s Little Italy, in Bay View.
“He was a great father, great husband, great friend. I hate all the bad press that John got. I have only good things to say about him.”
In recent years, Balistrieri was active in fundraisers and charitable events. He was chairman of the National Italian Golf Invitational, held in Lake Geneva in August.
Late last week, John had a bad fall and died over the weekend. Details on the funeral were not immediately available. His father died in 1993. His brother died in 2010.
John Balistrieri was born in 1948, around the time his father, Frank, was “made” — formally initiated — into the Milwaukee La Cosa Nostra family, according to an FBI affidavit, as reported in a 1996 Milwaukee Journal story.
By 1973, John had graduated from Valparaiso University Law School and opened a practice with his brother, Joseph. A few years later, John showed up as an agent or officer of enterprises that the FBI says were controlled by his father — restaurants, vending machine companies and clubs.
In 1977, sources had told the FBI that Frank was “grooming” John to take over La Cosa Nostra.
John declined to be interviewed for a recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation into the murder of August “Augie” Palmisano in 1978.
More: Balistrieri Tapes, Part 12: ‘Balistrieri convictions left void in local Mafia, FBI agents say’
In 1984, John Balistrieri was convicted — along with his father and his brother — of attempted extortion, a felony, after an FBI sting and a subsequent federal trial that revealed the role of organized crime in the Milwaukee vending machine business.
In addition to the vending business, Frank Balistrieri controlled bars, restaurants and strip clubs and was purported to control gambling operations in Wisconsin and was skimming from Las Vegas casinos, according to FBI records. He ruthlessly demanded respect and several deaths were linked to him, though he was never charged.
Frank Balistrieri was sentenced to 13 years in prison on the extortion charge. The Balistrieri brothers were each sentenced to eight years, a term that was reduced to five years after they publicly repudiated their father as an “evil force” who dragged them into his world and public ruin, the 1996 story noted. John was released from prison in April 1989.
After their release from prison, the brothers said they had “severed all ties to that world.”
John and Joseph lost their law licenses in 1987. John attempted multiple times to regain his license, but was denied by the state Supreme Court. In 2014, the court wrote he had not “clearly and convincingly proven that he has the required moral character to practice law.”
The court noted that “while (Balistrieri) is now willing to say that his attitude has changed and he accepts that there was a conviction, he also explicitly testified yet in this proceeding that he did nothing wrong, which means that the conviction must still be illegitimate to some degree in his view.”
Then-U.S. Attorney Thomas Schneider and other law enforcement officials opposed Balistrieri’s bid to get his license back.
“John Balistrieri used his skills and training as an attorney to commit this criminal activity (extortion) … just as a burglar uses a pry bar and the dark of night to steal,” Schneider argued. “Unlike most caught up in the crime, John Balistrieri had all the advantages of his wealth, education and his skills as an attorney.”
In a letter supporting John’s relicensing, Stephen M. Glynn, John’s defense attorney in the early 1980s, wrote, “He is now, as he has been for many years of his life, visited with the sins of his father.”
“It’s not as the FBI describes it — that he’s the heir apparent to the Mafia throne,” Glynn told a reporter in 1996. “Since he’s been out of prison, he got married, had a family and he’s a law-abiding citizen.”
This week, Glynn said John’s conviction was one of two cases from his career out of hundreds that he still thinks about today, where he thinks the verdict should have been not guilty.
“It is such a shame. It is one of these classic Hollywood stories: kid grows up with the curse of his family, does good things in his own life but has a hard time getting past it,” said Glynn, who is now retired.
Marty Kohler, another retired Milwaukee attorney, knew Joseph and John Balistrieri well.
“(John) was extremely bright, a very good lawyer, very smart, understood taxes very well, and he was just the nicest guy to me,” Kohler said this week.
Kohler, now retired for eight years, said he saw John at Santino’s Little Italy a few years ago. They exchanged their usual hugs, he said.
On Monday, Kohler happened to be walking by the Shorecrest apartments on N. Prospect Ave. and thought about John, not realizing yet he had died.
“I am so sorry to hear he is gone,” Kohler said.
The 1996 Journal article described John as “quiet, serious and with a head for numbers,” and reported that he managed the day-to-day operations of The Shorecrest, an east side residential hotel owned by Joseph.
“I never wanted John to become a lawyer,” Joseph once testified. “John was always interested in business … I am a lawyer who happens to be in business. My brother John is actually a businessman who happens to be a lawyer.”
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge William Sosnay, who knew Balistrieri for many years, said he was disappointed he didn’t get his license back, but John accepted the decision of the high court.
“He wanted to be able to practice law and had the ability to be a very good lawyer,” Sosnay said. “He wanted to be able to help represent people who needed help.”
Sosnay said he and Balistrieri grew closer in the past 10 to 15 years, going out for lunch and dinner often.
“He was a good friend. I knew him to be a devoted husband to a wonderful wife and a devoted father,” Sosnay said. “He paid his debt to society. The past was the past.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: John Balistrieri, son of Milwaukee Mafia boss Frank Balistrieri, dies at 75
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