A German Mafia Runs Wisconsin?

Prejudice among ethnic groups within Wisconsin:

"Early German settlers of Wisconsin....had to share it with Scandinavians.... but certain stereotypical German burgher traits—from rule-boundedness to tidiness to anti-Semitism—are sometimes said to have persisted in Wisconsin life" - Lorrie Moore

Didn't Kocourek make a cameo appearance in the movie Top Secret? The Germans had such a penchant for quick executions that they had a rubber stamp for it, "FIND HIM AND KILL HIM." - deplorablaw at reddit

TV: The Shame of Wisconsin (Excerpt) 
By Lorrie Moore
February 25, 2016

The story one does see clearly here is really a story of small-town malice.

The label “white trash,” not only dehumanizing but classist and racist—the term presumes trash is not ordinarily white—is never heard in this documentary. Perhaps the phrase is too southern in its origins. But it is everywhere implied.

The Averys are referred to repeatedly by others in their community as “those people” and those “kind of people.” “You did not choose your parents,” says an interrogator, trying to ply answers out of sixteen-year-old Brendan, though his parents are irrelevant to the examination and are not being criminally accused of anything.

Yet the entire family is socially accused: outsiders, troublemakers, feisty, and a little dim.

What one hears amid the chorus of accusers is the malice of the village.

Village malice toward its own fringes has been dramatized powerfully in literary and film narrative—from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to the Michael Haneke film The White Ribbon to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games.

Trimming the raggedy edges is how a village stays a village, how it remains itself.

Contemporary shunning and cleansing may take new and different forms but they always retain the same heartlessness, the unacknowledged violence, the vaguely genocidal thinking. An investigator ostensibly on Brendan’s defense team speaks openly of his distaste for the Avery family tree and says, “Someone said to me we need to end the gene pool here.”

The German word Mitläufer comes to mind: going along to get along, in a manner that does not avoid misdeeds—one of the many banalities of evil.

Certainly one feels that frightened herd mentality among the Manitowoc law enforcement as well as members of the jury, the majority of whom were initially reasonably doubtful but who, swayed by a persuasive minority, soon unified to a unanimous vote of guilty.

Even the jury in Brendan’s trial did not question the nature of the defendant’s several and contradictory confessions, such was their prejudice against the boy.

It may or may not be useful to recall that early German settlers of Wisconsin, escaping the nineteenth-century military autocracy in Europe, once believed that the American Civil War would break up the Union, producing some independent states that could then come under German rule.

These ordinary German citizens did not get their own state, of course, and in fact had to share it with Scandinavians, Poles, and even Bulgarian and Cornish miners, but certain stereotypical German burgher traits—from rule-boundedness to tidiness to anti-Semitism—are sometimes said to have persisted in Wisconsin life. (A shocking number of Nazi sympathizers once resided in Milwaukee.) A reputation for niceness may obscure rather than express the midwestern character.

END EXCERPT



German Americans (German: Deutschamerikaner) are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans are the largest of the ancestry groups reported by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey. The group accounts for about one third of the total ethnic German population in the world. Traditional Oktoberfest celebrations and the German-American Day are popular festivities. There are major annual events in cities with German heritage including Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, and St. Louis. [Source]

Germans are by far the largest group in Wisconsin, land of beer and brats. There, 44 percent of residents reported Germany ancestry in the 2000 census. In Iowa, it's 40 percent. Minnesota does have the nation's highest concentrations of Norwegians and Swedes. But Michigan, too, is predominantly German — way German. There, 38 percent of Minnesotans reported German ancestry. The next-largest groups were Norwegians, 17 percent; Irish, 12 percent; and Swedes, 10 percent. In Illinois and Michigan, only 20 percent report German ancestry, but that's still the largest ethnic group. Throw a dart at a map, and you'll hit a town full of Germans. [Source]

Our German Ancestors in Wisconsin



Joe Bonanno [head of the Bonanno crime family for three decades] was a part-owner of a company called the Grande, which is the cheese company in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. [Source]

Yep, the mob had a hand in the dairy industry, according to Gavin Schmitt, author of The Milwaukee Mafia: Mobsters in the Heartland. "The Milwaukee guys owned Grande Cheese, a national cheese producer and distributor. The business was used for laundering money, and in the 1950s through the 1980s was strongly suspected of helping to import heroin, though nobody was ever charged," he says. "In fact, the business was started by the Mafia around 1940 and several shareholders were murdered when it began. Today, there are still people who own it who were named by the FBI as being mob members, but it seems to be legit." [Source]

Milwaukee’s Brady Street neighborhood, bounded by the Milwaukee River, Lake Michigan, Ogdon Avenue, and Kane Place, is arguably the most densely-populated square mile in the state of Wisconsin. A mix of historic shops, single-family homes, apartments, and condos, Brady Street boasts of great diversity that draws from many distinct eras. It began in the mid-19th century as a crossroads between middle-class Yankees from the east and early German settlers. Polish and Italian immigrants soon followed, working the mills, tanneries, and breweries that lined the riverbank. After these groups had assimilated and many of their descendents moved to the suburbs, the hippies in the 1960s arrived with their counterculture to fill the void. By the 1980s, the area fell into blight, neglect, and decay; now, a true model for new urbanism, the Brady Street neighborhood is in the midst of a renaissance. [Source]

The Milwaukee crime family or Balistrieri crime family is an American Mafia crime family based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The crime family was considered a branch of the Chicago Outfit. The family's most influential boss was Frank "Mr. Big" Balistrieri, who was greatly involved in the Las Vegas skimming casinos. Today, the crime family is nearly extinct, since Balistrieri died in 1993, with the Chicago Outfit gaining control over some of the illegal rackets in the area. [Source]

Around here, there are many ways to get in touch with your inner German. Certain towns are bastions of Teutonic culture. Along Lake Michigan, from Milwaukee to Sheboygan, it's hard to find anything that wasn't influenced by the Germans. Sheboygan calls itself the bratwurst capital of the nation. In nearby Elkhart Lake, immigrants from Germany built grand lakeside resorts. In Milwaukee, tourists go to Old World Third Street to buy smoked sausages at Usinger's and have a meal in heavily Teutonic Mader's restaurant. German Fest, held on the lakefront in July, is the largest German celebration in North America. In western Minnesota, heavy concentrations of Germans settled in the fertile farmland between the Minnesota and Mississippi river valleys, where towns bear the names New Germany, Hamburg, Cologne and New Munich. And at the junction of the Minnesota and Cottonwood rivers, a group of German workingmen and Turners bought land and established the town of New Ulm. Along with schools and churches, they took time in 1897 to put up a 32-foot copper statue of the Alemannic warrior Hermann, who routed the Romans from the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D. His hillside throne is part of the New Ulm tourist route, as is Domeier's German Store, the Glockenspiel downtown and Schell's Brewery, the second-oldest family-owned brewery in the nation and likely the most picturesque. In eastern Iowa, a group of devout German Inspirationists formed a communal society in 1855, pooling their resources and adhering faithfully to Scripture. The name they gave their settlement, Amana, comes from the Bible and means "remain true." They dropped the communal system in 1932 but retained their language and traditions. Today, restaurants in the seven Amana Colonies still serve meals family-style, and Millstream Brewery makes its beers according to old German purity laws. The skills Amana workers developed — its residents now use to draw tourists to the many shops and artisan studios.  [Source]

German Americans are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans are the largest of the ancestry groups reported by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey. The group accounts for about one third of the total ethnic German population in the world. [Source]



AMERICANS FOR HITLER – THE BUND
By Mark D. Van Ells, America in World War II
Copyright 2007 by 310 Publishing, LLC

On the eve of World War II, the German American Bund insisted the Nazi salute was as American as apple pie.

Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. Only a Nazi would have dared to compare. “Hitler is the friend of Germans everywhere,” one girl in a Nazi youth camp remembered being told, “and just as Christ wanted little children to come to him, Hitler wants German children to revere him.” The comment may hardly sound shocking, considering the Nazi mindset, but the girl who heard it wasn’t in Düsseldorf or Stuttgart or Berlin. She was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the heartland of America, American children were being indoctrinated into Nazism as the Nazis prepared to take over Europe.

The youth camps were run by an organization of German immigrants in the United States to cultivate a loyal Nazi following in their adopted homeland. All but forgotten today, the group known as the German American Bund (bund is German for “alliance”) was one of the most controversial political groups of the politically uncertain 1930s. 

Nazi ideology taught that all Germans were united by blood and that the descendants of German emigrants around the world needed to be awakened to their racial duties in support of Hitler.

The United States, 25 percent of whose population traced ancestry back to Germany, was a tempting target for Nazi recruiters.

Forty-three percent of the population of Wisconsin, a state noted for its beer and bratwurst, was either German-born or first-generation German American in 1939. Nazis believed those German Americans could be awakened to their cause.

World War I had been traumatic for Germans on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, a wave of anti-German hysteria had swept through the nation. Fear spurred by government propaganda led some to attack what they believed was the enemy in their midst, even though there was little evidence to justify their fears. So-called superpatriots maligned German culture. Some localities banned German music and instruction in the German language. Sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage.” There were reports of dachshunds being attacked, and German-language books being hauled out of libraries and burned in the street. Some Germans endured humiliations such as being forced to kiss the American flag in public, being spied upon by their neighbors, and in some cases even being attacked. In Illinois, one German immigrant was killed by a mob. Many German Americans hid their ethnic identity. What remained of the public German-American community grew insular, defensive, and wary of outsiders.

After the war, another wave of German immigrants came to America. Most assimilated successfully, but some did not. These maladjusted new arrivals were German fascists, described by historian Sander Diamond as “self-proclaimed émigrés” who feared “proletarianization” in Germany’s unstable new democracy. They had experienced the humiliation of Germany’s wartime defeat and occupation, and the social and political chaos that reigned there afterward. Many were young, middle-class professionals, and some had participated in street fighting against socialists and communists. Once in America, these fascists formed political groups like the Teutonia Association, founded in Detroit in 1924.

Just four months after Hitler came to power in January 1933, Nazi groups in the United States merged to form the Friends of the New Germany. The involvement of German nationals in the organization caused friction between Berlin and Washington, so in 1936 it was reorganized as the German American Bund and was to consist only of American citizens of German descent. Headquartered in New York, the Bund was led by Fritz Kuhn, a chemical engineer from Munich who had served in the German army during the war. Dubbed the “American fuehrer” in the press, he arrived in America in 1928, settling first in Detroit and then in New York. He became a citizen in 1934.

Not officially part of the Nazi party, the Bund behaved as if it were. It operated on the Nazi leadership principle, which demanded absolute obedience to superiors. 

Like Germany’s Nazi party, the American Bund divided its territory—the United States—into regional districts, and created a youth program and a paramilitary Order Division. Members donned uniforms with brown shirts and jack boots eerily like those of Germany’s Nazis. Despite their foreign appearance, members considered themselves to be loyal, patriotic Americans who were strengthening their adopted homeland, protecting it from Jewish-communist plots and black cultural influences such as jazz music. The Midwestern regional leader George Froboese of Milwaukee described the Bund as “the German element which is in touch with its race but owes its first duty to America.” To avoid another clash between Germany and America, it urged US neutrality in European affairs.

The Bund made far more enemies than friends in the United States. Socialists and communists immediately opposed it. So did Jewish Americans, who organized a boycott of products from Nazi Germany (the Bund, in turn, organized a boycott of Jewish merchants and harassed Jewish and communist groups). In Washington, Congressman Samuel Dickstein of New York began an investigation of Nazism in America. The Bund also attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The German-American reaction to Hitler and the Bund was mixed. Most supported American neutrality, and many were glad to see the revival of Germany and were angry about the Jewish boycott of German goods. But they were also uneasy about Hitler. Some tried to be cautiously optimistic. The Milwaukee Sonntags-post argued in 1933, for example, that “the Hitler dictatorship represents for the moment the most efficient and expedient concentration of the united will of the German nation.” Any hopes German Americans may have placed in Hitler would soon be dashed. Nazi behavior overseas and the presence of the Bund in America would soon revive German Americans’ deepest fear: a repeat of World War I’s anti-German hysteria.

The Bund used several methods to try to awaken German Americans to Nazism. 

One was to infiltrate existing German ethnic clubs. The Bund hoped to Nazify German-American cultural life as Hitler had done under his policy of “political coordination.” The infiltration instead tore German-American communities apart. 

The Bund then tried to take control through intimidation. When the Wisconsin Federation of German-American Societies voted to ban displays of the swastika at cultural events in 1935, for example, Bund members threatened anti-Nazi delegates. The meeting became so heated that the police were called to restore order. Bund harassment of anti-Nazi Germans continued, and the Wisconsin federation president once received an anonymous letter saying “It is a very poor bird that dirties its own nest.”

One way the Bund promoted its cause was by sponsoring meetings and rallies, well-publicized events in which leaders outlined Nazi ideology and members distributed propaganda. Uniformed members gave the Nazi salute and shouted “Heil Hitler” as the Order Division kept a stern watch over the proceedings. There was fiery rhetoric aimed at Jews, communists, and certain politicians. Bund leaders lambasted President Franklin Roosevelt, calling him “Franklin Rosenfeld” and criticizing his “Jew Deal” social programs.

The Bund took care to display patriotism for America during its gatherings. George Washington’s birthday was a common occasion for Bund rallies. On stage, the American flag and portraits of Washington appeared side by side with the swastika. Both countries’ national anthems were played.

Bund rallies frequently became public spectacles. Protesters were a common sight, sometimes appearing in numbers comparable to the Bund members in attendance. Violence seemed all but inevitable. In Milwaukee in 1938, riots broke out at two separate Bund rallies. “Hecklers arose to break up the meeting,” the Milwaukee Journal reported of a Washington’s birthday rally in February. “The order division went to work, gloved fists flying.” One heckler lost several teeth in the melee. A month later, violence erupted again when a communist rushed the stage during a rally, enraged by the sight of children in Nazi youth uniforms.

Children were an important part of the Bund. Members sent their children to places such as Camp Hindenburg in Wisconsin each summer to participate in a youth program the Bund compared to boy and girl scouting. The camps were also gathering places for adult activities—everything from picnics to rallies. At these camps, children dressed in Nazi uniforms and drilled military-style, with marching, inspections, and flag-raising ceremonies. Although the Bund denied it, children were taught Nazi ideology.

The rise of the Bund stimulated considerable discussion in America. A few homegrown racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Christian Enforcers, and the Silver Shirts (who sniped that democracy was “strictly kosher)” found common ground with the anti-Semitic, white-supremacist Bund. Most Americans, however, objected to the Bund’s racist and undemocratic ideology, and the fact that the Bund rose to prominence just as Hitler began expanding German control in Europe raised other concerns. 

The Bund seemed to most Americans like a dangerous foreign element, perhaps a secret Nazi fifth column in the United States. 

By 1938, the anti-fascist movement broadened to encompass a diverse coalition ranging from communists to veterans groups.

German Americans were torn. Some German clubs had spoken out against the Bund early on, but others resisted public criticism of the organization, fearing that a divided German community would be subject to further cultural erosion.

But by 1938, anti-Bund sentiment had grown so strong that German-American leaders concluded they either had to dissociate themselves completely from the Bund or run the risk of being branded Nazis themselves.

In 1938, the Wisconsin Federation of German-American Societies issued a statement declaring it had “nothing whatsoever to do with the propaganda of racial hatred and religious intolerance fostered by the Volksbund [literally, the people’s alliance—the German American Bund].” The federation claimed that the average German American was “strongly opposed to the Nazi doctrines of hate” and pleaded “America, please take notice!”

The Wisconsin federation backed up its words with action. In 1939, with the help of some in the business community, it acquired the lease to Camp Hindenburg, renaming it Camp Carl Schurz in honor of the 19th-century German-American political leader and turning it into its own youth camp. Federation president Bernhard Hofmann stated that children would be instructed there in Americanism and that there would be “no flag but the stars and stripes.” Froboese claimed the site had been “stolen,” stating “I am glad they had the decency to abandon the name Camp Hindenburg.” The Bund meanwhile obtained another site, just a mile to the south. These and other rival German-American camps operated around Milwaukee for several years.

As the 1930s came to a close, various problems had begun to take a serious toll on the Bund. The Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 took the fire from the Bund’s anti-communist rhetoric. By the end of the year, Kuhn had been jailed for illegal use of organizational funds. Protests against the Bund continued as well, including the bombing of its Chicago offices in July 1940. The Bund developed a bunker mentality, holding its 1940 national convention secretly among three Midwestern camps.

Although the Bund continued to speak out against the Jewish boycott and the “tories and internationalists” trying to provoke war with Germany, press coverage of the Bund tapered off as the group declined and public fear of domestic Nazism waned. Hundreds of dispirited Bund members returned to Germany.

When Hitler declared war against the United States four days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Bund members found themselves stranded in enemy territory. 

Federal agents seized Bund records. Many of its members faced denaturalization proceedings and imprisonment. In a letter to the Bund’s lawyer, Froboese, who had risen from Midwestern regional leader to become the Bund’s national leader just weeks earlier, offered his assessment of the organization’s brief but tumultuous existence:

True it is that we made mistakes especially in the field of what you call “mental psychology.” Still, I would like to again emphasize, that I never looked upon the [Bund] as an offensive organisation. From the beginning it was a defensive movement. We have never been a cause, but instead have always been a reaction to a cause…. We always stood with both feet on American soil and in the final analysis of all of our doings, had only the very interests of this our America at heart.

In 1942, Froboese was issued a subpoena to testify before a New York grand jury concerning Bund activities. En route to New York, he got off the train in Waterloo, Indiana, and committed suicide by laying his head on the tracks in front of an oncoming train.

German Americans continued to emphasize their American-ism after the Pearl Harbor raid. “We appeal to the public not to think that everything German must be Nazi,” declared the Wisconsin Federation of German-American Societies. “We are not covering any aliens…[and] will not stand for anything that is against this country.” In New York the Loyal Americans of German Descent claimed that World War II “throws a searchlight” on German Americans and that “failure to distinguish between loyal Americans and Nazi sympathizers can create disaster.” In 1942, American Legion magazine featured the article “I Killed Americans in 1918, but Now I Fight for America.” The author called his US citizenship oath “sacred” and stated that immigrants such as he “must rally in defense of honor, family, and German-America.” Indeed, many German Americans served, fought, and died in defense of the United States during the war.

The emphasis on Americanism paid off, and a revival of anti-German hysteria did not occur. There were some unfortunate incidents of violence and prejudice against Germans during World War II, but they were not widespread. The extent of the government’s internment of German Americans during the war is hotly debated among scholars, but it was indisputably small in comparison to the internment of Japanese Americans. Most Americans seemed to make a distinction between what they believed were good Germans and bad Germans, and America became a refuge for many German intellectuals fleeing Nazi rule. In the Pacific, one of the troops’ favorite generals was German-born Walter Krueger, commander of the US Sixth Army. Actress and USO entertainer Marlene Dietrich, also born in Germany, was even more popular with the average GI than Krueger.

For all its prominence and bluster, the Bund involved only a small portion of the German-American community. Precise membership figures are not known. Estimates range from as high as 25,000 to as low as 6,000. Historians agree that about 90 percent of Bund members were immigrants who arrived in America after 1919. In Wisconsin, the most heavily German state, the Bund seems to have mustered barely 500 members, which would rule out the possibility of anywhere near 25,000 members nationwide.

Ironically, the Bund’s goal of awakening Germans in America actually weakened German culture where it had once thrived. The Holocaust, the lack of new immigrants after the war, and suburbanization hurt, but the mere existence of the Bund had forced many German Americans to emphasize the American part of their identities and sacrifice the German.

Mark D. Van Ells is a professor of history at the City University of New York. This article originally appeared in the August 2007 issue of America in WWII. Find out how to order a copy of this issue here. To get more articles like this one, subscribe to America in WWII magazine.

The Cheesehead Mafia: Paul Ryan and the Rise of Wisconsin Republicans
The Atlantic
August 29, 2012

How Ryan, Scott Walker and Reince Priebus came out of the Badger State together to reshape American conservative politics.

In 2006, Brad Courtney, a Republican activist and forklift-business owner in suburban Milwaukee, threw a Christmas party at his house near Lake Michigan. Republicans had recently been trounced in another state election, failing to unseat either the Democratic governor or U.S. senator on the ballot. The Milwaukee County executive, an old friend of Courtney's named Scott Walker, was there, as was another die-hard party activist, Reince Priebus. Outside, a snowstorm raged, and an up-and-coming young congressman, Paul Ryan, called to say he wasn't going to be able to make it.

"We all sort of grew up together in politics," Courtney, now the chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, told me. But at the time, the men often had little but their friendships to sustain them in the face of a hostile political landscape.

Today, things look very different. Here's a poster Courtney received as an email forward, created by a talk-radio host in Arizona, that celebrates Wisconsin's political stars alongside the state's recent success in athletics and beauty pageants:

Ryan, Walker and Priebus are three of the GOP's brightest national stars, and Wisconsin -- the state that helped birth the Progressive Movement and shape the New Deal -- is suddenly the leading exporter of a hard-charging, sharply ideological brand of conservatism. The Republican trio sometimes dubbed the "Cheesehead Mafia" have made their state "the capital of the Obama-era Republican resistance," as one writer put it. And they are reshaping the Republican Party.

"People in this country are hungry for real, authentic people who make promises and keep their promises. That's what you're seeing come out of Wisconsin," Priebus, who now chairs the Republican National Committee, said in an interview. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Priebus became close friends with a man named Andy Speth who would go on to become Ryan's chief of staff and top adviser. Around the same time, Priebus also interned at the state legislature, where he met a young member of the assembly: Walker, elected at the age of 25 in 1993.

Today, Walker is the governor whose assault on public-sector unions provoked an angry backlash -- and whose survival of recall election this summer cemented his status as conservative folk hero. Priebus, elected to the national committee after years as a Wisconsin party lawyer and official, has steered the national party out of debt while keeping its disparate factions on message and in the tent. And then there's Ryan, the onetime enfant terrible of the House of Representatives, who has shepherded his vision of budget-slashing entitlement reform from an idea so extreme no one would touch it to the official platform of his party -- and galvanized the party base with his presence on the presidential ticket. "What Texas was to the Republican Party in the 1990s," says Nathan Conrad, spokesman for the state GOP, "is what Wisconsin is becoming now."

Ryan, Walker and Priebus have brought a new generation's insurgent mindset to the establishment perches they now inhabit, says Charlie Sykes, a Milwaukee-based conservative radio host on whose show all three have been regulars since the 1990s. "They're all from exactly the same school," Sykes said. "It's a slightly dissident wing of the party that was a little bit frustrated with the old-line Republican [view of] 'tax and spend, but spend it on our tribe.' If you talk to them at any length, they sound remarkably similar."

Though all three are social conservatives -- "they check the box" -- what animates them is an uncompromising commitment to fiscal conservatism. "They are extremely conservative when it comes to taxes, spending, budgets and [attacking] the whole liberal infrastructure," Sykes said. "They really want to do big things, as opposed to your usual politician who just wants to be somebody. There is a kind of edginess to them in that they really see themselves as change agents."

Unlike a more traditional, status quo-oriented brand of conservative, the new Wisconsinites are self-styled reformers. They're looking not just to rein in what they see as liberalism's excesses, but to roll back the welfare state, from state workers' pensions to seniors' Medicare benefits. And while that rigid policy vision has bitterly polarized a state that has voted for the Democrat in every presidential election since 1984, the conservative reformers have succeeded in part by making sure to get rid of internal competition. Long before the Tea Party crusaded to drive moderates out of the GOP nationally, Wisconsin Republicans were redefining their party as explicitly conservative, purging moderates in primaries in the 1990s and, led by Priebus, using the party's clout to direct resources to candidates like Walker.

"If you are a moderate Republican in Wisconsin today, you are just not welcome at those state conventions," said Dennis Dresang, a retired political scientist at the University of Wisconsin's La Follette School of Public Affairs -- named for the early 20th Century Progressive leader "Fighting Bob" La Follette. Politicians like Walker, he said, have succeeded by tapping the economic anxieties of the predominantly white, upper-middle-class suburbs of Milwaukee.

Members of the state's once-vibrant liberal community see politicians like Ryan as putting a friendly face on a set of extreme policy positions. But multiple recent polls show Wisconsin, despite its history, in play in November's presidential election.

"Ryan is very effective because even if I think what he's proposing is dangerous and destructive, it's still hard to dislike him personally," said Robert Kraig, a longtime liberal activist who heads the progressive coalition Citizen Action of Wisconsin. Ryan, says Kraig, frequently buttonholes him for earnest-minded policy debates on flights to Washington.

"They give conservatism a different feel," he said. "They come off as reformers. To the extent the public thinks things aren't working, they're able to credibly say 'I'm going to shake things up,' while progressives get pigeonholed as defending failed institutions."

To proponents, the above-the-fray approach of Ryan and his brethren is a mark of virtue. "The Wisconsin brand of conservatism is about having big ideas, but not personally attacking anyone," said Rep. Sean Duffy, a onetime contestant on MTV's Real World who in 2010 won a congressional seat that had been held by a Democrat for 30 years. "Paul Ryan exemplifies that. A lot of liberals don't agree with him, but they respect him, because he keeps the discussion on the level of ideas." Ryan has been a mentor to Duffy, a rising star in the party who, along with Walker, got a speaking slot at the national convention Tuesday night.

In a way, the godfather of the current GOP surge in Wisconsin is Tommy Thompson, the four-term Republican governor and George W. Bush-administration cabinet secretary who recently won the party's Senate nomination for November. Thompson's push to reform welfare in Wisconsin became the template for President Clinton's national welfare reform in the 1990s, and he was a pioneer in pushing for school choice, another idea that has achieved national prominence. Even as he pushed for conservative reforms, he maintained an immense, bipartisan popularity in the state. But in a sign of how things have changed since Thompson last held office in 2001, Thompson barely survived the recent senatorial primary, attacked by two opponents who accused him of being insufficiently conservative, in part because of his record of support for health-care reform.

Priebus rejects the idea that he, Ryan and Walker are ideologues who shun compromise. But he said their success is proof that voters want politicians who stick to their guns, know what they believe and are willing to fight for it. "My general view is you have to be on offense all the time," he said. "I've never believed in being meek or not responding to attacks. If we really believe that liberty and freedom are at stake in this election, we are going to have to fight for it. And I have no problem putting on the brass knuckles in order to make that case to the American people."

The liberals who have watched the Cheesehead Mafia rise with a mix of admiration and horror have no doubt that's the case.

"These are movement leaders, not just people who want to hold office. They want to push the country further to the right and undo the Great Society," says Kraig, the progressive activist. "They take strong positions and they don't take to the center in order to win elections. I'd like to see more leaders like that on our side."

'The mafia are invisible but almost everywhere in Germany', experts say
DPA/The Local
July 13, 2017

Ten years after one of the bloodiest mafia shoot-outs in Germany, Italian and German politicians and researchers gathered in Berlin to discuss how to combat such criminal groups that still have a solid presence in the Bundesrepublik.

On August 15th 2007, images were broadcast around the world of bodies, lying in their own blood, splayed across the asphalt outside a pizzeria, white sheets partially covering them from sight.

The photos weren’t taken in the mafia stronghold of Sicily, but rather in the west German city of Duisburg.

Six people were shot and killed that day amid a feud between two clans of the 'Ndrangheta organization, one of the most powerful mafia groups in Europe. And it was one of the worst mafia bloodbaths in German history, the scale of which has not been seen inside the country since.

But experts warn that this is not a sign that such organized crime groups have left Germany behind.

“There is no reason to give the all-clear,” says Sandro Mattioli of the group Mafia? Nein, Danke! (Mafia? No thank you!), which works to combat mafia activities in Germany and raise awareness about the continued presence of such networks.

Mattioli met with other researchers, politicians and activists on Wednesday in Berlin to discuss how to fight these Italian crime rings in the first conference of its kind.

“The mafia here is invisible, but represented almost everywhere,” Mattioli warned.

“You could be sitting at a classy cafe in central Munich, and actually be a guest of the mafia - you would not know. You could be swaying to the music inside a festival tent, and be a guest of the mafia - you would not know.”

The Federal Criminal Police Office estimates there to be around 560 suspected mafia members inside Germany.

But modern mafiosos can’t be distinguished by their stereotypical pinstripe suits. Rather, they’re managers who invest in real estate or restaurants in order to launder money, the experts explained.

“Today the mafias commit ever fewer murders and homicides, as well as less violence and crime,” said Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti at the conference.

“But that does not mean, that they no longer exist… [they have] gained territory.”

Minniti added that the mafia presents an “epochal challenge”.

Europol agent David Ellero explains that mafia groups have infiltrated various industries, and see Germany as a refuge for money laundering as well as drug dealing. This is in part due to Germany’s excellent infrastructure and booming economy.

In Ellero’s view, the mafia in Germany are able to sustain themselves like a “three-legged beast”.

The first leg is the legal loopholes in Europe that allow them to survive, for example that simply being a member of a mafia group in Germany is not itself a crime.

The second leg is the lack of awareness about the danger that the mafia actually presents in the country. 

The third leg is the fact that police resources are more heavily dedicated to fighting terrorism than to addressing organized crime.

“When we chop off one of these legs, the beast will fall down,” says Ellero.

As the beast still remains standing, the German government is planning harsher new laws against criminal gangs, looking to Italy’s own anti-mafia policies as an example, said German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière.

The minister added that they will now look into revising the legal consequences for criminal organizations, including making membership in the mafia a punishable offence. De Maizière also mentioned making it easier to seize assets of mafia groups.

“They destroy confidence, they undermines structures, they destabilize state order,” he said.

Graphic saved on Ken Kratz's office computer as Calumet County District Attorney: Attorney General John Byron Vanhollen is also "Most Worshipful Grand Master" of Wisconsin Masons

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Antonio Smith: The Milwaukee-Appleton Connection (November 22, 2017)
The Tale of Kathi’s Sauna (November 21, 2017)
Milwaukee Mafia, the Balistrieri Years II: 1967-1972 (October 31, 2017)
Milwaukee Mafia, the Balistrieri Years III: 1973-1979 (September 26, 2017)
The Equals Club: Milwaukee’s Black Mafia or Key to Political Power? (July 30, 2017)
Sally Papia: A Mob of Her Own (June 30, 2017)
Milwaukee Mafia, the Balistrieri Years IV: 1980-present (June 28, 2017)
Milwaukee Mafia, the Balistrieri Years I: 1962-1966 (June 18, 2017)
Did the Mafia Kill JFK? (June 18, 2017)
Harold Klein: The Milwaukee Mafia’s Fence? (June 4, 2017)
"Milwaukee, WI Crime family" (2000) Rick Porrello's American Mafia.com

American Gangland: Balistrieri Crime Family
Dieland: The Milwaukee Family
Milwaukee Mafia, 1918-present

Schmitt, Gavin. Milwaukee Mafia. Arcadia, 2012

Prostitution in 1970s Milwaukee, an Interview with Thomas Schneider (June 2, 2017)
Shawano, 1932: The Murder of Paddy Berrell (June 1, 2017)
Emmanuele Palazzolo, and the Pizza Connection (May 11, 2017)
The Strange Death of Harry Quadracci (May 3, 2017)
The Murder of “Honest Bob” McGillis (April 16, 2017)
The Milwaukee Mafia’s Mortgage Forgery Scam (1961-1976) (April 13, 2017)
Black Sheep: The Story of Louis Fazio (April 4, 2017)
Dirty Slots: The Life and Murder of Herman Paster (February 24, 2017)
Unused Chapter on Isadore Pogrob (January 2, 2017)
Organized Crime in Kenosha, 1913-1960 (December 29, 2016)
The Slaying of David Alt (December 23, 2016)
The Bombing of Scott Wozny (December 23, 2016)
The Rise and Fall of Rocco Youse and Del Chemical (December 9, 2016)
The Great Meat Hijacking (November 19, 2016)
Silk, Milwaukee’s Mobbed Up Strip Club? (August 31, 2016)
The Ogden Social Club of Milwaukee (July 30, 2016)
Milwaukee’s Outlaws and Heaven’s Devils, 1964-present (July 9, 2016)
Capone’s Brothels: A History of Hurley (June 23, 2016)
Black Organized Crime in Kenosha in the 1970s (February 23, 2016)
Chicago’s Crazy Irish Mobster, Gene Geary (January 4, 2016)
Barney Grogan, Whitey Bulger’s Man in Chicago (December 23, 2015)
Andrew Lococo and the Milwaukee – California Connection (December 9, 2015)
Bebe Rebozo, Nixon’s Bagman (December 9, 2015)
Racine’s Drug Trafficker Daniel Slaughter (December 4, 2015)
Joseph “The Viper” Guarniere (October 16, 2015)
Interview with producer Stephen David, “Making of the Mob” (October 16, 2015)
Harry Kaminsky and Auto Acceptance Corp (July 21, 2015)
The Cocaine Empire of Tony Peters, 1979-1983 (June 28, 2015)
The Murder of Carol Burns at the Hands of Mr. Picciurro (June 24, 2015)
George Harrison Sprague, Milwaukee’s Controversial Cop (June 22, 2015)
The Milwaukee / Balistrieri Family: Don’t Sell Them Short (June 8, 2015)
Frank Carchidi, Milwaukee’s Mysterious Informer (May 8, 2015)
Milwaukee’s Black Mafia: Michael Lock (March 30, 2015)
Rosemont: The Empire of Donald Stephens (March 18, 2015)
MP: Melrose Park Sausage Stand and the Death of Chris Cardi (February 8, 2015)
MP: Barbooth (February 6, 2015)
MP: The Charm Club and Mary Lou’s (January 28, 2015)
MP: The Casa Madrid (January 23, 2015)
Dirty Slots: The Chicago Outfit’s Control of Vending (January 13, 2015)
The Death of Football Star Alfred Klug, 1957 (January 8, 2015)
Sidney Landon DeLove: Patriot, Anti-Communist… Con Man? (December 31, 2014)
Minnie and the Spizzirri Family (December 27, 2014)
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Sam Cerro, Madison’s Last Mafia Boss? (September 18, 2014)
MP: Joseph Bronge, 1959 (August 2, 2014)
Bobby Pick, Florida’s Milwaukee Gambler (July 10, 2014)
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MP: The Fall of Vito Scavo (May 19, 2014)
Rotten: Melrose Park, Chicago’s Most Corrupt Suburb (May 19, 2014)
Del Chemical, Corruption and the Mafia (March 8, 2014)
Empire Strikes First: Remembering Sid Caesar (February 12, 2014)
Waukesha’s Fox Head Brewing: A Mob-Infiltrated Business? (December 31, 2013)
Richard Kuklinski: Fact and Fiction (February 24, 2013)
The Adopt-a-Mobster Program (December 18, 2012)
Dorothy Crooker, Superior’s Dirty Dame (December 13, 2012)
The Legend of Radio Bob (December 7, 2012)

Police reports: Only SA suspect but BIG RED FLAGS on others. Must have to do w/BIG GREEN DOLLARS. ‪#MakingAMurderer - Kathleen Zellner, Twitter, February 10, 2016

No Report Dennis Jacobs. Mr Do we have a body yet? and the supposed collector of GZ VM from Teresa that is missing lives Right between The Sheriff Being sued back then Kocourek, and the Current Sheriff Hermann? Interesting!! pic.twitter.com/8d2TnjSjH5

— JynxTheAwesome (@MysticJynx) July 27, 2018

Lt. Bill Tyson of the Calumet County Sheriff’s Department receives a check from Bob Krupp (left) and Willard Matznick of the Chilton German American Society.

German American Society donates to Calumet K-9

October 20, 2017

This Calumet County Sheriff’s Department K-9 Unit recently received a donation from the Chilton German American Society. 

A check was presented to Lt. Bill Tyson of the Sheriff’s Department to be used for the purchase of a second K-9 unit for the county. 

Lt. Tyson spoke to the club and stated a second dog would be beneficial by greatly curtailing drug activity in the county and surrounding areas.

(Please see the Oct. 19 issue of the Tri-County News for more on this story.)

Bill Tyson, Chilton

I met Mark Wiegert 25 years ago when both of us were young officers patrolling Calumet County Highways. Besides getting to know Mark as a police officer, I got to know him as a person. I learned he was raised in Valders and was the son of a former Village of Valders Police Chief. He told me stories when back in the day he assisted his mom and dad with emergency calls that came to their residence because the Valders ambulance service had been run by his parents out of their family home. Mark also volunteered with the Valders Fire Department.

Throughout those years as young patrolmen, we assisted each other on some of the most tragic, horrifying calls one could imagine. He always impressed me because even at those tragic calls he was always willing to be the guy to be in charge of the incident. It was really no surprise to anyone when Mark received a promotion to be an Investigator. After a very successful career as an investigator, Lieutenant/Undersheriff Mark Wiegert chose to join the management team and is currently the Calumet County Jail Administrator and also supervises Calumet County’s current investigators.

Mark has been instrumental with the planning process for our new county jail. Mark also is in charge of the Calumet County Drug Task Force. Mark has seen Calumet County grow from 32,000 people to 50,000 people and understands what resources will be needed from a law enforcement perspective. On June 9th, 2018, the sworn officers within the Sheriff’s Department chose to put endorsing a sheriff candidate on their union agenda. They voted overwhelmingly to endorse Mark Wiegert as their next sheriff. They want him to be their next boss. I couldn’t agree more. Mark Wiegert has been a county officer for 25 years. Join me on August 14th and let’s make him Calumet County’s next sheriff.