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 begun his career. His first job after this may have been the result of his Navy Seal training: His LinkedIn profile shows he was a “Lean Six Sigma Black Belt” two years for GE Health Care. After this he became a global product manager for the company for two years.

His next job was chief operating officer (COO) for the Liberty Dialysis Center from 2005-2008, then listed with a home office on Mercer Island, Washington. But Preya Samsunder says Berrien and his wife Elizabeth had by then bought a home on Santa Monica Blvd in Whitefish Bay, purchased in 2002, and Berrien worked from home as COO for Liberty Dialysis.

No Milwaukee area address shows up online with Berrien’s name 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.”

Berrien’s next job after Liberty Dialysis was as a partner with Artisan Partners based in Milwaukee from 2008-2010.

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 up to that point, it’s worth asking: did the money to buy the company came from his father?

No, says Samsunder. “Bill purchased Pindel using equity gains from prior companies he led and his parents did not give ANY assistance in that purchase.” When asked what those companies were Samsunder mentions one, his job as COO for Liberty Dialysis.

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. It’s an odd way to begin your fundraising: “The Winklevoss choice for governor” isn’t a winning campaign meme.

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 in the general election, 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.

Correction/Clarification: This story was changed to reflect corrections from Berrien’s spokesperson: that Berrien moved to Milwaukee in 2002, not 2009, that he did not have a two-year gap in his career, but started with GE Medical right after graduating from Harvard Business School, and that he purchased Pindel Global Precision with his own money, with no assistance from his parents.