THIS STORY IS PART OF OUR MILWAUKEE FBI FEATURE. READ MORE HERE.
The meetings were set for motels, parking lots and other poorly lit locations where the suspects figured they could make a quick getaway, if needed.
Using illicit websites that advertise the sale of illegal acts, the would-be customers made these arrangements all over metro Milwaukee – from many spots inside the city to Oak Creek to Brookfield.
Having committed this same crime several times before and even multiple times a day, the perpetrators expected a simple transaction: Sex in exchange for money.
But that wouldn’t be happening tonight.
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Instead, when the suspects arrive, dozens of FBI agents swarm them, cut off any chance of escape, then quickly detain and arrest some. Unlike the prostitution stings you’ve seen on TV, however, the whole incident happens quickly and quietly.
“We’re not guns out, we’re not screaming – it’s nothing like that,” says Jason J. Soule, a supervisory special agent with the Milwaukee field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “We immediately identify who we are, so there’s less risk of some sort of escalation. Then once the victims are in the room, they can breathe easy, knowing that they’re with law enforcement.”
The victims Soule mentions weren’t always viewed as such – these men and women, who are often young and sometimes minors, aren’t selling their bodies because they want to. They’ve been kidnapped, coerced, threatened and/or beaten into submitting themselves to prostitution.
“We consider them victims now, so we’re not citing them, not arresting them,” says Soule, a 15-year veteran of the FBI. “We’re trying to stop that cycle, and we do that by trying to get them services” like help for mental health or substance abuse.
The real targets are “the ones directing this kind of behavior. We’re after the traffickers,” Soule says. “If we can put them away and give this person [the trafficking victim] a second chance, we’ve done our job.”
There’s no shortage of TV dramas depicting – or attempting to depict – the work of FBI agents. There have been literally dozens of them. From “Today’s FBI” of the early ’80s to Netflix’s new “The Night Agent” and everything in between: “FBI: International,” “Numb3rs,” “Bones,” “Without a Trace” and even more with even worse names. And let’s not forget that Scully and Mulder from “The X-Files” were FBI agents, too.
Ask any actual FBI agent about these shows, however, and you’re likely to get an audible groan and eye roll.
“I have a hard time watching any of them – none of them are super accurate,” says Milwaukee FBI Special Agent in Charge Michael Hensle. “One that came close for a while is the show ‘Criminal Minds’” – because of its portrayal of the bureau’s behavioral science work.
Hensle understands that TV “has to be entertaining” but notes the work – “a lot of paperwork” – is not usually so exciting. “Those sensational pieces only happen occasionally.”
The action in Milwaukee last August – which netted three traffickers and identified six victims, including one minor – was part of an annual, nationwide sting known as Operation Cross Country. It’s just one example of the wide-ranging, versatile work that the FBI’s 200-plus local agents, analysts and other employees do out of their lakeshore headquarters in St. Francis.
The unifying theme to the Bureau’s nine investigative priorities – terrorism, counterintelligence, weapons of mass destruction, cybercrime, public corruption, civil rights, organized crime, white-collar crime and violent crime – is the need for high levels of resources, and that the crimes tend to cross state lines or threaten national security.
Soule says whether it’s the hyper-local efforts of the national human trafficking sting or a drug or health care fraud case, the FBI’s work not only captures offenders but also deters future criminals from following in their footsteps.
“We’ll hit the streets using good old-fashioned police work or we’ll do proactive undercover operations,” he says. “We’re stopping that cycle and then getting that level of cooperation that can build on our cases.”
FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, Milwaukee has been ground zero for a sweeping international investigation of dark-web commerce called Operation Cookie Monster.
The local field office opened the case in 2018 and directed an investigation that included 45 of the FBI’s 56 field offices, 14 partner countries and more than 500 “law enforcement actions” such as arrests, searches and interviews. The investigation is still ongoing.
The probe – named for internet cookies, which are small bits of private data like usernames and passwords – began when FBI agents here identified a massive digital criminal commerce website. Hackers used the sprawling “dark web” marketplace called Genesis Market to sell an estimated 80 million pieces of stolen access credentials and so-called “digital fingerprints” that granted criminals access to everything from compromised Netflix and email accounts to bank accounts. When the FBI took down the site, some 59,000 cybercriminals were accessing and buying stolen data.
A notable bit of FBI history took place in Milwaukee in February 1979, when John D. Glover was appointed special agent in charge in Milwaukee, making him the first Black man to lead an FBI field office.
“It could be used for lower-level identity theft and fraud, all the way up to initial access for ransomware attacks,” says Amanda Knutson, the supervisory special agent overseeing the Milwaukee FBI cybercrime division.
According to news reports, Genesis sellers reaped some $9 million in cryptocurrency from selling users’ online credentials. “Bot” programs used to steal such data went for as much as $450 each, while passwords could be found for as little as $5 each. Officials estimated the total financial losses for people whose information had been compromised was as much as tens of millions of dollars.
“The extent of it was worldwide. It impacted victims in almost every country,” Knutson says. “The reason [this case] came to Milwaukee is because we have some excellent, forward-leaning agents who identified the issue and took the initiative to investigate it.”
Genesis and sites like it have contributed to exponential increases in cybercrimes over the years, says Knutson. “I don’t see cybercrime decreasing anytime soon because the threshold for entry for a cybercriminal is so much lower than it used to be, because they have these criminal services that are available to them,” Knutson says. “Somebody who’s interested in making money doesn’t necessarily need to be able to code their own malware or need to be able to get initial access to a company. They don’t need to set up their own infrastructure. They can purchase or rent all of this stuff on the dark web.”
The Tools
As you might imagine, FBI agents have a lot of technology at their disposal. Three of note:
TOURNIQUET: Resembling a thin belt with a small rod used for tightening the device, all agents carry one to control bleeding in the event a suspect or an agent is shot in the limb and in danger of losing a fatal amount of blood.
FIREARM: FBI agents’ standard issue gun is the Glock 19, a compact, semiautomatic pistol with a 15-round clip of 9mm bullets. It weighs just under 2 pounds.
THROWBOT: This robot is essentially a small remote-controlled video camera that agents can toss into a building to provide recon on hostage takers, bank robbers or in other dangerous standoff situations.
BEYOND LARGE-SCALE OPERATIONS like Cross Country and Cookie Monster, there are dozens of local FBI agents chasing down leads and exploring a wide range of crimes and potential threats, says special agent in charge Michael Hensle, who has led the Milwaukee FBI office since January 2022.
Given the cost in human and financial resources of FBI investigations (the bureau’s 2023 budget was $10.8 billion), the threshold for cases it takes is equally high. “There has to be a violation of federal law that we can investigate,” he says, such 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.”
The FBI Gift Shop
Perhaps the least likely feature of the FBI’s impenetrable headquarters? A gift shop. The FBI RA (recreation association) is a separate not-for-profit that works as a kind of booster club of sorts, putting on social events for agents.
It pays for events with money made at the gift shop, open to employees and others allowed into the high-security building. For sale are pint glasses, hoodies, beer koozies, bottle openers, commemorative coins, denim shirts and even basketball shorts adorned with the FBI logo. One style of pen features a chalk outline of a dead body.
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.
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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.”
