anyone heard of this guy?

A Milwaukee Mystery Deepens
2 Bodies Revive Speculation In `89 Slaying Of Restaurateur
April 11, 1991|By Rogers Worthington, Chicago Tribune.

MILWAUKEE — Police have never solved the 1989 slaying of Max Adonnis, a one-armed restaurateur and aspiring mafioso. Now they have two more bodies, which only deepens the mystery.

Two unidentified black men were found this month buried beneath the concrete basement of a deserted house in a South Side neighborhood where few, if any, blacks live. Like Adonnis, they died of gunshot wounds. They appeared to be in their 20s and of below-average height, which roughly fits the description of Adonnis` killers. And they were judged to have been killed sometime in 1989.




News accounts say a police tipster named the two dead men as Adonnis`

killers. But tight-lipped Milwaukee police officials, who have sealed the coroner`s report, say their tipster said no such thing and that not a shred of evidence exists to link the three murders.

Somewhere among the unabated speculation lies the story of Max Adonnis, 53, a tyrannical restaurant manager and small-time crook who made enemies and friends with equal fervor and who, in death, finally may have acquired the image he so coveted in life.

``The theory is that these guys killed Max, and either Max`s friends did these guys, or else the people who paid these guys to do Max had it done,``

said James Romenesko, a senior editor at Milwaukee Magazine and author of the 1981 book ``Death Log,`` a chronicle of unusual murders and deaths.

One of the two men is believed to be from Chicago, based on two crudely rendered tattoos associated with Chicago gangs: On one arm is a winged heart over crossed pitchforks with the initials ``G.E.,`` and on the other arm is a Playboy-style rabbit head with a cocked left ear. The winged heart is associated with the Black Gangster Disciples and the rabbit with the Vice Lords, according to youth gang workers in Milwaukee and Chicago. The appearance of both on the same person is said to indicate membership in Brothers of the Struggle, a gang formed in Illinois prisons by members of the two street gangs.

Milwaukee police have asked anyone knowing the man`s identity to call them at (414) 935-7302.

Max Adonnis was born Max Ludwig Gajewski Jr. on Milwaukee`s South Side. As a young man he was a competitive swimmer until he lost his right arm in a bread-dough machine while working in a bakery.

While Adonnis played the role of gregarious host at Giovanni`s restaurant near downtown, he also played tough guy. Short and weighing 265 pounds, he was quick to threaten violence and hint at organized crime connections and clout with the powerful. Old acquaintances thought it a show, a front he had created for himself.

``Max lived in a fantasy world. He was just make-believe; a (Pole) who somewhere along the way became Max Adonnis and had a lot of people conned by implying he was a mafioso,`` said Sal Monreal, a Milwaukee night club owner who grew up with Adonnis.

Adonnis earned some of that reputation, however, eventually winning the Justice Department-FBI characterization of ``LCN (La Cosa Nostra) associate.`` In the 1970s, while working at another restaurant, Sally`s Steak House, Adonnis was accused of threatening to have a chef`s wrists broken with a baseball bat. He was convicted three times in the `70s of crimes ranging from aggravated battery and grand auto theft to extortion, crimes for which he served unusually short sentences.



After refusing to name the others involved in the battery case-the severe beating of a man suspected of burglarizing Adonnis` former employer-Adonnis spent 2 years in prison. For this, say those who knew him, Adonnis won the gratitude of the restaurant owner, Sally Papia, now in prison for a union kickback scheme, and her then boyfriend, Frank Buccieri, brother of the late Chicago crime syndicate street boss Fiore Buccieri.

In 1985 Adonnis was stabbed in the chest with an ice pick by a man who claimed Adonnis had mistreated his mother.

Shortly before his murder Adonnis was under investigation for drug activities, say FBI officials in Milwaukee. Two and a half weeks before he was murdered, his $30,000 white Lincoln town car, with its ``EAT`` license plates, was blasted with shotgun pellets. Adonnis dismissed the incident as random malicious mischief by teenagers. A key witness to his murder, a 56-year-old woman employed at Giovanni`s, told police that on the morning of March 18, 1989, two black men knocked on the restaurant window and said something like, ``Hey, brother Max.`` She said it was unusual for Adonnis to be at the restaurant in the morning, but remembered that the same two men had visited him there two days earlier.

After shooting Adonnis in the head, the two men shot the woman in the neck three times, leaving her for dead.

Milwaukee police officers close to the case say they doubt Adonnis was killed by hit men hired by the very mob he so aspired to be recognized as part of.

``Would the mob send these two guys to knock on the door in broad daylight and ask, `Is Max around?` Would they do that?`` asked one.

Then who did the two men represent? If, as federal authorities suspected, Adonnis was involved in narcotics trafficking, and if he was dealing with black distributors, chances are good Brothers of the Struggle was involved.

Federal prosecutors say some Chicago members of BOS traveled to Milwaukee, where the local BOS organization was among the city`s biggest narcotic dealers until mass federal prosecutions convicted more than 30 of its members last year.

A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration affidavit, unsealed in federal court in February 1990, disclosed that federal informants identified the gang`s source of cocaine in Illinois.

Just how Adonnis may have fit into this, whether buying or selling, is unclear.

There are other theories, too, among them that Adonnis was a middleman for a Florida-based Mariel Cuban cocaine ring, and even that he was a federal informant.

Whatever, Max Adonnis had crossed somebody, and they wanted him dead.

``He was forewarned,`` said Sal Monreal. ``Why he didn`t take it seriously, I don`t know.``

Now it remains to be learned who wanted the two men found in the basement dead, and why.

I've been doing some reading on the Milwaukee family lately and ran in to this blog post about Sally Papia, his former employer, who was pretty connected.

http://mafiahistorymilwaukee.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-milwaukee-queen-bee-of-organized.html

Good post Scorsese. Thank you Tony Pro for the link. I heard Gajewski always wanted to be Italian, he wasn't really connected till after he went to prison, and the Bucceris were happy for what he had done. He was allowed at a couple of mob hangouts after his release from prison but he was never put on record as an associate to Chicago or Milwaukee. It was said that he was branching out at the time of his death into bigger things, and he was having trouble with the local brothers of struggle chapter.