In January 1963, the Milwaukee Mob murdered a jukebox operator who ran routes through bowling alleys across Wisconsin. The Professional Bowlers Association never acknowledged it.
Anthony Biernat owned Lakeside Music Company — eighty-five jukeboxes placed across cocktail lounges, bowling alleys, and the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in northern Illinois. That concession was what Frank Balistrieri’s Milwaukee crime family wanted. When Biernat refused to cut them in, three men dragged him from a Kenosha train station on January 7, 1963. His body was found three weeks later, frozen in a basement floor. One thousand people attended his funeral.
In 1968, a dying Milwaukee crime family associate named Joseph Gurera confessed to investigators. The killing, he said, was not the plan — Milwaukee’s order was to intimidate, not murder. Biernat fought back. One of the three men needed a doctor afterward. No indictments ever followed Gurera’s confession. The two other men in his account were never publicly identified.
The bowling trade press ran nothing. Bowlers Journal International — the sport’s paper of record since 1913 — published no sustained coverage. The Professional Bowlers Association, whose founding members Eddie Elias, Don Carter, and Dick Weber were active in Chicago-area bowling while Biernat’s route operated, has no surfaced acknowledgment in any accessible archive. The documentation of why he was killed sits with the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. No equivalent has surfaced from the bowling industry.
Chapters
- 0:00 — The PBA’s Launch and a Cash Problem
- 1:30 — Anthony Biernat and His 85 Machines
- 3:45 — The Kidnapping: January 7, 1963
- 6:00 — Twenty-One Days, No Suspects
- 7:30 — The Route Was the Asset
- 10:00 — Federal Response and Its Limits