The Mystery of Bill Berrien

Bill Berrien. Photo courtesy of Berrien’s campaign.

In early July Bill Berrien announced his run as a Republican candidate for governor. He described himself as a former Navy Seal who owns a New Berlin-based manufacturing company and an “outsider” who would “shake up Madison” like Donald Trump is shaking up Washington.

“It’s time that we fire the bureaucrats and hire a businessman to fix the problems and take our state back,” he declared.

Berrien, 56, called himself a Wisconsin “convert” who moved to the state and chose to raise his family in Whitefish Bay.

But precisely when Berrien moved here, how he acquired his wealth and how much business acumen he has is unclear. The candidate mentioned not a word about his family or upbringing.

His full name is Willard Berrien III, son of Willard Hewitt Berrien Jr., also known as Bill, who passed away in March after a long career in finance, with companies like Hemphill Noyce & Co., Goodbody, Loeb Rhodes and Lehman Brothers. He remained an avid stock investor in retirement, his obituary notes.

The Berrien family had a home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one of the most affluent areas of New York City, and a summer home in Quogue on Long Island, a “popular resort community for the wealthy” since the 1890s, notes one realtor, where “the pace of life “is quieter and more measured than in other parts of the Hamptons.”

Bill was an active member of the Quogue Field Club, an exclusive members club founded in 1887 which includes a private 9-hole golf course, tennis courts, and clubhouse with dining and event space, as the realtor described it.

This was a very clubby man. Berrien was also a member of the Quogue Beach Club, Surf Club, Yacht Club, and Quogue Club, the obit noted. “Deeply committed to his community, Bill served on the Quogue Public Library Board, including as its President, and the Quogue Village Planning Board, including as its Chairman, and was honored as Quogue Association’s ‘Man of the Year’ in 2007,” the obit noted.

The Berriens had just two children and sent their son Bill to the best private schools. He attended St. David’s School on the Upper East Side of  Manhattan, where the current tuition is about $64,000 per year and then went to high school at Trinity School on the Upper West Side, where tuition is currently around $69,000. In today’s dollars the total cost of that education would be $788,000.

From there it was on to the Ivy League. Bill attended Princeton University, just 80 minutes away by train, where he got a degree in politics and added to the proper resume by serving as captain of the university’s water polo team.

That seemingly insular life ended abruptly when Berrien was able to join the notoriously tough Navy SEALs and served as a Team Officer and Platoon Commander, graduating from the Naval Officer Candidate School as a Distinguished Naval Graduate and receiving the ‘Fire In The Gut’ Award from their Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training class, as one description notes.

He then went back to school, getting a masters in international economics at John Hopkins University (1999-2001) and an MBA at Harvard University (2000-2002). By then he was in his mid-30s and still hadn’t decided what his career would be. His LinkedIn profile shows no job or schooling for two years after the Harvard degree.

Berrien told WISN he moved to Wisconsin 23 years ago, but that would have been when he was attending Harvard. The first LinkedIn item that could place him in Wisconsin is as a Global Product Manager at GE Health Care (which has offices in Chicago and Milwaukee) in 2004-2005, followed by a job as chief operating officer at Liberty Dialysis Center, then listed with a home office in Washington state but with centers across the country. Then came a job as managing director for Artisan Partners in Milwaukee.

But no Milwaukee area address shows up online until he purchased (in 2009) his Lake Dr. home in Whitefish Bay, with five bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms, for $625,000. He has called himself a “Southeast Wisconsin community leader, including 12 years of volunteer-parent-coaching his two sons in youth and high school lacrosse and serving on the boards of multiple charities.”

In 2012, Berrien purchased the small New Berlin-based manufacturing business Pindel Global Precision Inc. and made himself the chief executive officer. The purchase price is unknown but one estimate put its annual revenue at $16 million and another analysis estimated it had 75 employees. Given Berrien’s short career in business, just eight years up to that point, it seems likely the money to buy the company came from his father.

Berrien also calls himself the CEO of Liberty Precision Manufacturing, which was a division of Pindel that has spun off from it. Information on both companies is sketchy. The publication Collegiate Water Polo Association wrote a story quoting Paul Jelacic, vice president of commercial banking at Old National Bank, who said “Bill has grown a world-class team of advanced manufacturing professionals. Pindel actively recruits and hires veterans, and several leaders throughout the company are veterans.”

A less enthusiastic review can be found at Indeed.com, where workers at the company gave its management a below-average rating of 3.2 on a 5-point scale.

As a candidate Berrien has made some claims that raise questions. He touted his fundraising prowess and the $1.2 million he has raised to reporter Matt Smith. Berrien credited the “relationships that I’ve sort of historically had going back… It’s friends and donors in the state.”

But 83% of that — $1 million — came from the out-of-state donors, the Winklevoss twins, fellow Harvard grads famed for their legal dispute with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, as Anna Kleiber reported.

Berrien also told Smith he was a consistent supporter of Trump. “To sort of set the record straight, since 2016, my wife and I have supported Donald Trump in every election — 2016, 2020, 2024,” Berrien said. “Voted for him and financially supported.”

But in a 2020 interview with Fox Business, Berrien said he hadn’t decided whether to back Trump, criticizing what he said was Trump’s “anti-science approach” to the pandemic. And in 2024 he supported Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, giving her $33,200, far more than he later gave Trump, as Dan Bice reported.

All of which suggests the life story — and candidacy — of Bill Berrien is not quite the simple tale he has been telling voters.