In the late 1950s, Balistrieri married Antonina Alioto, a fellow
Sicilian, and daughter of
Milwaukee crime family boss John Alioto. They had four children together. In 1961, Balistrieri was installed as the new boss of the Milwaukee family, replacing the retired Alioto. In May 1974, Balistrieri met with
Kansas City boss
Nicholas Civella in
Las Vegas, Nevada. Balistrieri also met businessman Allen Glick. Glick had recently bought the
Stardust and
Fremont casinos with a $62.75 million loan from the
Teamsters, and had given
Frank Rosenthal the job of running the casinos at the insistence of Balistrieri, who had arranged the loan for Glick. In 1977, the FBI initiated a sting operation in Milwaukee aimed at Balistrieri. They sent Special Agent
Joseph Pistone, working undercover in New York City as "Donnie Brasco", to Milwaukee to help set up a vending machine company. In 1978, the FBI named Balistrieri in a news release as a "crime leader" in Milwaukee. In 1978,
August Palmisano, a convicted gambler, reputed Milwaukee mobster and suspected informant, was killed in a car bombing. Authorities attributed the bombing to Frank Balistrieri but he was never charged. Soon Balistrieri and Civella entered a feud over each other's share from the casino skimming operations, and the two requested arbitration from
The Outfit. The results of the arrangement, as ruled by Outfit leader
Joseph Aiuppa and underboss
Jackie Cerone, demanded that The Outfit receive a 25 percent tax as its cut in skimming operations. Balistrieri blamed Rosenthal, the Outfit representative at the Stardust Hotel, for Balistrieri's problems in Las Vegas. In 1982, Rosenthal narrowly averted death in a Las Vegas car bombing that was attributed to Balistrieri.
Imprisonment On October 9, 1983, Balistrieri was convicted of five gambling and tax charges related to a sports betting ring that grossed at least $2,000 a day from 1977 to 1980. The investigation had included wiretapping of the Shorecrest Hotel, owned by Balistrieri's son, Joseph, and a raid on Balistrieri's house in which FBI agents knocked the front door down with a sledgehammer. On April 11, 1984, Balistrieri and his sons were convicted of attempted extortion of a
vending machine business. On May 29, 1984, Balistrieri was sentenced in Milwaukee to 13 years in prison and fined $30,000. In June 1984, his sons were sentenced to eight years in prison, but the term was reduced to five years; each son, who were lawyers, had their law licenses suspended and later disbarred. In September 1985, Balistrieri was tried in Kansas City with eight other people for skimming an estimated $2 million of the gross income of the
Argent Corporation casino operations. ==Death==