Inside the FBI investigation that brought ‘Donnie Brasco’ to Milwaukee

When my cousin, August “Augie” Palmisano, was killed by a car bomb in Milwaukee in June 1978, two undercover FBI agents were already infiltrating organized crime.

One of them was Joseph Pistone, whose undercover name was Donnie Brasco. Pistone was later portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 1977 film “Donnie Brasco,” which also starred Al Pacino as New York crime family member Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero.

The other was Gail T. “Ty” Cobb. He posed as a businessman named Tony Conte who wanted to launch a new vending machine business in Milwaukee, despite the fact that vending was considered the domain of reputed crime boss Frank P. Balistrieri.

The duo faced a number of obstacles, including a tricky fingerprint set, death threats and a leak that revealed Cobb’s true identity.

The undercover operation, and the efforts of other officers here, are highlighted in this week’s episode of the podcast “My Cousin Augie,” which chronicles my journey to find out who killed my cousin and why. It’s available on Spotify , Apple , or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here are some highlights of Pistone and Cobb’s activities:

A set of fingerprints nearly ruined the operation

A requirement for a license to operate a vending machine business was that he be fingerprinted by police. Cobb was fingerprinted for a license under his secret name, Tony Conte, and forgot that he had been fingerprinted years earlier when he applied for a job with the Milwaukee Police Department.

As a result, he was called in by an agent and questioned about why there were two sets of matching fingerprints – one belonging to Tony Conte and the other to Gail T. Cobb. He was interviewed about the situation for the 1988 Milwaukee Sentinel series “The Balistrieri Tapes,” by Mary Zahn and Bill Janz.

“I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to blow it all now,'” Cobb told the Sentinel. “I probably spent 20 minutes saying, ‘I don’t know who Gail Cobb is, I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, I don’t know what’s going on.’ And he’s not buying it.”

Cobb eventually asked for a meeting with longtime Police Chief Harold A. Breier to explain the situation. He said Breier assured him that everything would remain confidential and that he would keep both sets of fingerprints in a safe in his office.

Joe Pistone’s “Donnie Brasco” cover was almost ruined in Milwaukee too

Pistone told me that Ruggiero started asking questions as they drove through Milwaukee after Cobb accidentally called Pistone by his real name.

“Ty was one of the best undercover cops I ever worked with. I mean, he was good. But one day we were in a car,” Pistone told me. “And Ty must have had a brain freeze because he kept calling me Joe. He said, ‘Isn’t that right, Joe?’ Finally, Lefty said, ‘Tony, who the F is Joe? There’s me, you, and Donnie in this car. Who the F is Joe?’

But Pistone added that Cobb quickly came up with a story to protect the operation.

“So without missing a beat, Ty says, ‘That’s the new thing in Milwaukee: Everybody’s Joe. Everywhere you go, you call somebody Joe,'” Pistone said. “So all night long we’re going to a restaurant and Ty’s calling a bartender Joe, calling a waiter Joe, calling a waitress Joe.”

Pistone added: “You know, there were some comedic moments in those six years.”

The undercover agents had even more perilous situations

At one point, several men were ordered to kill Cobb, but Balistrieri allegedly called them back after Ruggiero told him that Cobb had been approved by the Mafia in New York.

Cobb described in detail the meeting in which Balistrieri told him he planned to kill him.

Balistrieri “was sitting right across the table from us and we were about to shake hands, when Lefty said, ‘Tony Conte.’ And Frank brought his hand back,” Cobb told Zahn and Janz.

“‘Tony Conte?’ he says. ‘We’ve been looking for you all week.’ He said, ‘We were going to hit you. You got the white Cadillac, an apartment in Greenfield, a storefront on Farwell….’ He knew it all,” Cobb said.

Balistrieri was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, because he didn’t want to be in Milwaukee when he was killed.

Cobb said, “If I had known it would come to this, I wouldn’t have taken the job.”

According to Pistone, Cobb was shocked by the meeting.

“When he said he was going to have me beaten,” Conte told me, “I got so nervous I was afraid to light a cigarette because I didn’t want these guys to see my hand shake,’” Pistone wrote in his book “Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia.”

Frank Balistrieri joked that he could pick out ‘snitches’

Pistone and Cobb were invited to dinner at Frank Balistrieri’s house one evening in 1978, not long after my cousin’s murder.

Pistone said Balistrieri bragged that night about how he could expose informants.

“Ty had a remote starter on his car. And in one of the meetings we had with (Frank) Balistrieri, we were talking about telltales, and he said, ‘Yeah, you can tell all the telltales because they have a remote starter on their car,'” Pistone told me. “And here’s Tony Conte, the undercover guy, who had a remote starter on his car. So that kind of shook him up a little bit.”

Cobb was especially shocked by my cousin’s car bombing.

“It caught my attention,” Cobb later said of my cousin’s murder.

The Balistrieri discovered the secret operation

Frank Balistrieri is said to have learned that Cobb, aka “Tony Conte,” was actually an undercover FBI agent, but it is unclear how he found out.

Pistone said he is not sure who leaked the information.

“Well, there had to have been a leak somewhere. Where, we don’t know,” Pistone told me. “But Ty was a police officer at one point in a town outside of Milwaukee. And I’m sure they checked to see what people knew about Ty. And I think that’s how they found out.”

Mary Spicuzza is an investigative reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Contact her at (414) 224-2324 or [email protected]. Follow her at X on @MSpicuzzaMJS.