On June 9, 1851, Charles Joseph Bonaparte was born in Baltimore, Maryland. A brilliant lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law College, Bonaparte would eventually rise to the highest levels of American government, serving under President Theodore Roosevelt as the 46th U.S. Attorney General and championing aggressive, progressive legal reforms.
Bonaparte possessed a fascinating family lineage as the direct grand-nephew of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Despite his royal European blood, Charles was a fiercely dedicated American public servant who used his ancestral knack for organization to tackle domestic corruption. In 1908, frustrated that his department had to borrow secret service agents from other branches to investigate crimes, he bypassed Congress to quietly assemble a permanent team of special investigators within the Department of Justice—a small agency called the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) that would eventually grow to become the modern FBI.
