[HN Gopher] Milwaukee reporter investigates cousin's 1978 car bo...
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Milwaukee reporter investigates cousin's 1978 car bombing death
Author : pilfered
Score : 84 points
Date : 2024-01-28 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jsonline.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jsonline.com)
| pilfered wrote:
| https://archive.ph/lY0v5
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20240117234525/https://www.jsonli...
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Sad to see how far organized crime can reach, and how petty those
| at the top can be. Vicious murder because someone had the
| audacity to insult them after they failed to kill their best
| friend, and refused to pay protection money.
| tptacek wrote:
| Could reach, not can reach. This type of mafia violence hasn't
| been a thing, at least in the midwest, for over 30 years.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Is that because the law enforcement squelched them or because
| the economics of their business died out?
| dralley wrote:
| A bit of Column A, a bit of Column B probably
| tptacek wrote:
| That's my understanding too --- a combination of RICO and
| deindustrialization.
| toyg wrote:
| Also, a lot of old-time syndicates have long moved to
| more lucrative businesses. Low-level stuff is labour-
| intensive, low margin, and very exposed; if you have
| enough capital, there are much better investments to be
| made.
|
| Even in Italy, where people were still dying in the
| streets in certain areas in the early 2000s, most cartels
| have moved on from drugs and prostitution to public
| works, property development, hospitality etc. The street
| stuff is now left largely to foreign gangs who have
| nothing to lose.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| And BigCorporate bought everything out. Moms and pops and
| dons couldn't compete.
| hash872 wrote:
| Matt Stoller should investigate and write a slightly
| hysterical, loose-with-the-facts piece about this
| troubling monopoly
| asta123 wrote:
| People don't get shot in US?
| jackschultz wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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. :)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Does anyone have an abstract or equivalent of this?
| tptacek wrote:
| The title captures it well.
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