THE LOCAL HISTORY
From WORD DILLINGER to DAHMER LONGER
NO ONE KNOWS FOR SURE when the FBI opened its first Milwaukee office, but it was up and running by at least November of 1917. During the 1920s, the handful of FBI agents in southeastern Wisconsin spent most of their time investigating relatively uninteresting cases of bankruptcy, car theft, labor violations and also tried to figure out if any local residents belonged to the Communist Party.
“These certainly weren’t the field offices as we know them today,” explains John Fox, the FBI’s official national historian.
There was quite a bit of shuffling, reshuffling and growing pains in the regional field offices back in those first couple of decades after the FBI was created in 1908, Fox says. In fact, the Milwaukee office was shuttered in 1925 – Wisconsin was split between the Chicago and St. Paul offices – before being reopened a decade later.
During that period, a watershed crime took place in Wisconsin: the murder of FBI Special Agent W. Carter Baum.
On April 22, 1934, notorious bank robber and gangster John Dillinger was hiding out in Wisconsin with his cronies, including another gangster known for his ruthless violence, Lester Gillis, aka George “Baby Face” Nelson.
“The bureau had gotten a pretty good lead that Dillinger and some of his crew were up at the Little Bohemia Lodge,” says Fox.
Baum and other agents from the Chicago office confronted Dillinger and Nelson at the resort near Manitowish Waters, about 50 miles north of Rhinelander, but the gangsters escaped in a gunfight. Later, during the search, Baum responded to the report of a disturbance and found Nelson. But the tables quickly turned – Nelson shot another FBI agent before turning his gun on Baum, killing him.
Fox says while the Milwaukee FBI office wasn’t reopened because of Baum’s death, it was a response to the growing wave of organized crime and Milwaukee’s “central role in the wider Midwest support structure of the gangsters.”
Since then, the Milwaukee office’s investigations have ranged from the hunt for Nazi sympathizers in the 1940s to the investigation of Milwaukee mafia boss Frank Balistrieri during the 1970s to providing forensic and investigative support in the case of serial murderer Jeffery Dahmer in the 1990s. The severity of those have proved a need for a Milwaukee office, Fox says.
“Being a key city in the Midwest, Milwaukee has, not surprisingly, been a focus for our efforts for many, many years,” he says.
as violence that crosses state lines or national security threats.
The priorities evolve over time, Hensle says, noting that a recent local rise in violent crime and gang activity “has been a significant focus.” And the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars have increased the focus on counterterrorism.
Hensle, who joined the FBI in 2003, also spends a fair amount of time meeting with state business leaders in “a domestic security alliance,” he says. The goal is to proactively prevent intellectual property theft from foreign or insider threats. “It’s really a way of getting ahead of a problem before it happens.”
Two of the more challenging but important kinds of federal violations to investigate involve elected officials and discrimination, harassment or worse based on a person’s skin color, sexual orientation or religion. “We have primary jurisdiction for public corruption and civil rights [cases],” says Hensle. “We’ve focused on those areas over the last few years and really seen exponential increases in case openings. We’re seeing real progress in those areas.”
He notes the four-month prison sentence of former Milwaukee Ald. Willie Wade on wire fraud and bribery charges in 2020 and last summer’s sentencing of a West Allis man to nearly three years in prison for racist harassment of his neighbors. Hensle says he’s ready to devote more investigative resources to public corruption cases here. “It’s our No. 1 criminal threat priority and we’re laser focused,” he says.
That said, Hensle says recent politicization of FBI investigations of political leaders – that have led to calls by former President Donald Trump and some other Republicans to defund and dissolve the FBI – doesn’t dissuade his agents. “What’s said at a political level, it doesn’t impact us on a day-to-day basis,” he says.
Given the broad range of types of crimes, Hensle says the FBI has the unique position of both going after criminals and snooping on those seeking to harm Americans.
“Traditionally, the FBI was the premier law enforcement agency in the country, and we still are,” he explains. “We also, since September 11th, have served as one of the core intelligence agencies for the United States. We have 56 field offices and hundreds of smaller satellite offices around the country. And we’re in over 100 countries and embassies and we work with our other federal partners overseas to help protect the homeland before the threats get here.”