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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.
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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.
