When Jay Greenberg took over the FBI's St. Louis field office in May 2022, the country was just emerging from the omicron wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I got to be the first special agent in charge here after the pandemic effects were largely behind us,” he said Monday at a media availability to reflect on his time leading the office as he prepares to leave. “I got to then reaffirm and rebuild our focus on external partnerships and our focus on working with communities and people when we didn't have fear about gatherings anymore.”
Those partnerships with local and state law enforcement, academic institutions and the private sector have yielded results, Greenberg said. Violent crime has trended down in St. Louis over the past few years, and the St. Louis office has the second-most carjacking investigations.
Greenberg said he was never deterred by Missouri's Second Amendment Preservation Act, which threatened local law enforcement officers with legal action if they helped enforce federal gun laws. But he said it created a lot of confusion.
“Early in my tenure, we spent a tremendous amount of time talking about what is the risk? What is the reward? What's the exposure, which department is willing to work with us, in spite of this law?” he said.
A federal judge struck down the law last year. The state appealed, and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the case in February.
While the bureau’s work on violent crime is the most visible, Greenberg said other units in St. Louis have also had successes. For example, agents helped disrupt a scheme in which North Korea used IT workers by hiding their identities and having U.S. companies, including some in St. Louis, unknowingly hire them. Those workers then stole those companies’ intellectual property, data and money to use toward weapons in North Korea.
“That is the type of national security work that the men and women of FBI St. Louis are doing every single day behind the scenes that nobody else gets exposure to,” he said.
Greenberg had been on the job for five months when a former student opened fire at the campus shared by Central Visual and Performing Arts and Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience. Two people were killed and seven injured.
The shooting took place on Oct. 24, 2022. Just three weeks before, the St. Louis field office had conducted an exercise that outlined how it would respond to a crisis.
“People like to think that they will rise to the occasion in crisis, but you generally fall to the highest level of your training,” Greenberg said. “It's important for us to prioritize training in all that we do.”
Greenberg’s last day as the special agent in charge of the St. Louis field office is April 19. His new job takes him back to Washington, D.C., where he’ll be in charge of the FBI division that oversees internal investigations and oversight compliance.
