8 files on the desk from Waukesha, Wisconsin. 8 carry a net-worth figure.
Criminal defense attorney; partner · Waukesha, Wisconsin
Waukesha-raised criminal defense partner at Kuchler & Cotton; Super Lawyers.
$2 million+
Tony Cotton is a Waukesha-raised criminal defense lawyer whose high-profile Wisconsin cases keep him on local news. A partner at Kuchler & Cotton S.C.—the firm his mother, Donna Kuchler, leads—he practices from Wauwatosa and Waukesha offices and takes appointments statewide and in federal court.
Born and raised in Waukesha, he attended Catholic Memorial High School, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Marquette University Law School (J.D. 2005). While in law school he investigated Eritrean war claims for a Yale professor, clerked for the Federal Defender's Office, and helped prepare arguments connected to United States v. Booker.
He has represented Morgan Geyser in the Slender Man stabbing case and later Maxwell Anderson in the Sade Robinson homicide case, among many other felony and federal matters. A past president of the Wisconsin Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and a National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers board member, he has been named a Super Lawyer every year since 2014 after Rising Star honors from 2008–2013.
Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin
Longtime Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, born Waukesha (not later Wisconsin politicians sharing similar names)
$12,300
Daniel Webster Hoan Jr. was Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor from 1916 to 1940—twenty-four years and ten citywide wins, the longest continuous Socialist mayoralty in American history. Waukesha produced him; Milwaukee got the sewers.
He was born in Waukesha on March 12, 1881, the son of the town blacksmith and resident radical. When his father died, teenage Dan quit school, cooked in resort and fraternity kitchens, and entered the University of Wisconsin in 1901 as an adult special student who had never finished high school. He tested whether his father’s socialism was a mistake, decided it was not, and helped found a four-person Socialist Club. As counsel to the State Federation of Labor he drafted Wisconsin’s first successful workmen’s compensation law in 1909, then rode the 1910 Socialist sweep into the city attorney’s office.
As mayor he practiced what came to be called sewer socialism: Garden Homes, a modern sewage plant that sold Milorganite, harbor improvements, and graft scrubbing, often without a Socialist council majority. During World War I he broke with the national Socialist anti-war line, ran draft registration, and co-chaired the Milwaukee County Council of Defense. Time put him on the cover in 1936; a 1993 Melvin Holli survey of scholars ranked him among the ten best American big-city mayors from 1820 to 1993. The Hoan Bridge still spans the harbor he championed.
Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin
Campbell’s SpaghettiOs creator from Waukesha (not other Goerkes tied to historic Goerke’s Corners)
$1.5 million+
Donald Edward Goerke was the Campbell Soup Company product developer later nicknamed the Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs, the canned pasta that put O’s in American pantries for generations. Waukesha raised him; New Jersey is where he died.
He was born in Waukesha on August 8, 1926. At Waukesha High he played on the 1944 Wisconsin state championship basketball team, then served in the Army Air Force in World War II. At Carroll College (now Carroll University) in Waukesha he majored in mathematics, met June Marie Uthus (music), and later earned a Wisconsin MBA with a statistics focus. A Blatz market-research job came next before Campbell’s Franco-American division.
In the early 1960s he was told to invent a canned pasta kids would eat without turning the kitchen into a mess. The team tried baseballs, cowboys, spacemen, and stars, then settled on the O because it survived canning, reheated cleanly, and was spoonable. They skipped a test market and shipped national with Jimmie Rodgers singing about “the neat, round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon.” Over a long career he helped create roughly a hundred Campbell products and spent decades as the company’s goodwill ambassador, signing cans, appearing on What’s My Line?, and meeting Ronald Reagan and Martha Stewart. He died of heart failure in Delran, New Jersey, in 2010.
Founder/Director, football kicking camps; NFL kicking consultant · Waukesha, Wisconsin
Founder/director of Kohl's Professional / Kohl's Kicking Camps; former Waukesha Catholic Memorial and Iowa State kicker. Not Herb Kohl.
$3 million+
Jamie Kohl turned a Waukesha kicking career into the country's best-known specialist camps. A first-team all-state kicker from Wisconsin and a four-year starter at Iowa State—44 straight games, 217 points, still among Cyclones scoring leaders—he signed with the Seattle Seahawks in 1999 and appeared in three NFL preseason games.
In 2000 he founded Kohl's Professional Camps with his father John and brother Andy. The Waukesha-headquartered business now runs roughly 150 events nationwide, ranks high school specialists for ESPN, and says 75 of 96 starting NFL specialists in the 2025 season had been coached by Kohl's staff. Kohl has consulted for the Chicago Bears and Carolina Panthers and was hired as Miami Dolphins kicking consultant for the 2026 season.
Company materials put headquarters in Waukesha. FOX6 has profiled him as a former Waukesha Catholic Memorial standout. He and his wife Charlene have four children.
Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin
Guitarist, inventor, and solid-body electric pioneer; born in Waukesha on June 9, 1915
$5 million
Lester William “Les” Paul was the Waukesha kid who rewired popular music. Before the Gibson that bears his name, and before the Capitol hits with Mary Ford, he was a redhead wiring phonograph needles to guitars so the crowds at Beekman’s Bar-B-Q could hear him over the clatter.
He was born in Waukesha on June 9, 1915, as Lester Polsfuss. He never legally changed the Prussian family name; the stage names Red Hot Red, Rhubarb Red, and finally Les Paul were enough. As a teenager he built a disc-cutting lathe from a Cadillac flywheel, a dentist’s rubber belt, and aluminum disks so his mother could capture his radio shows. The solid-body “Log,” multitrack overdubbing, and the eight-track “Octopus” followed. After a near-fatal 1948 car crash on Route 66, surgeons set his shattered right elbow permanently at roughly a right angle so he could still cradle and pick a guitar.
When pneumonia took him in White Plains in 2009, they brought him home to Prairie Home Cemetery. The county museum keeps a permanent Les Paul Experience, GuitarTown still puts public art on the streets, and the band shell in Cutler Park wears his name. For a town that once sold spring water as medicine, he is the other miracle: a hometown kid who taught the world to stack sound.
Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin
NASA astrophysicist and science communicator; born and raised in Waukesha
$183,500
Michelle Lynn Thaller is the Waukesha-raised NASA astrophysicist who became one of the country's most familiar explainers of deep space. Some kids wanted ponies; she wanted the sky. Her mother says there was never a time she was not pointing at stars. Carl Sagan's Cosmos arrived when she was about ten and never left her Waukesha South High School locker. Her father taught geography at the local college and drove her to Yerkes Observatory, home to the world's largest refracting telescope, and she haunted the Milwaukee Public Museum until it felt like a second house; her tenth birthday party was held there.
She graduated from Waukesha South in 1988, studied astrophysics at Harvard, and earned a Ph.D. at Georgia State on colliding winds in massive binary stars. Spitzer education and outreach work at Caltech and JPL followed. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center she served as assistant director for science communication, tasked with helping four science divisions speak clearly to the public and to one another. She became a patient, funny presence on How the Universe Works, the rare NASA scientist who can make dark matter feel like a dinner-table story.
The Waukesha claim is birth, childhood, and high school. She has told Milwaukee television crews that she still feels deep gratitude for growing up there, and she continues to call the town home in interviews.
Former President/CEO of The Onion; media executive and investor · Waukesha, Wisconsin
Former Onion/Gizmodo-group president; hometown Waukesha. Not Brendan Lee McAvoy (Waukesha attorney), not Michael J. McAvoy DO (Appleton ENT), not Eau Claire/McDonough sales Mike McAvoy.
$3 million+
Mike McAvoy grew up in Waukesha and went on to run one of America's best-known satire brands. After early finance work at TCF Bank and Capella Education in Minneapolis, he joined The Onion as controller in the mid-2000s, rose to CFO and COO, and became president—and later CEO—of Onion, Inc.
Under his watch the company leaned hard into digital products and video as print advertising faded, culminating in the decision to end the print edition. When Univision sold Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion into what became G/O Media, McAvoy continued leading commercial and Onion operations until he departed in July 2019.
Since then he has worked as a Chicago-area self-employed executive and investor, including involvement in comedy and entertainment assets such as the 2022 UCB Theatre acquisition and a 2023 stake in Abso Lutely Productions. Waukesha remains the Wisconsin hometown he has publicly claimed.
Fintech founder; former MayStreet CEO; energy-tech founder · Waukesha, Wisconsin
MayStreet co-founder and former CEO (market-data / low-latency trading tech), later LSEG head of low latency and direct feeds, now Ground Floor Energy founder. Not Patrick S. Flannery (ex-AMSC Pewaukee / UW–Madison ECE). Not Kentucky Rep. Patrick Flannery.
$20 million+
Patrick Flannery built MayStreet into a specialist market-data and low-latency trading-technology firm that banks, hedge funds, and regulators came to rely on. He co-founded the New York company in 2012 with Michael Lehr after engineering roles at proprietary shops including Volant Trading and Sumo Capital, expanding from feed-handler libraries into pristine packet-capture historical data.
London Stock Exchange Group agreed to buy MayStreet in 2022. Flannery stayed on as global head of LSEG's low-latency and direct-feed business, then launched Ground Floor Energy, a climate-tech and project-finance venture combining batteries, renewables, and software. He studied computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder and long worked from the greater New York markets orbit.
Waukesha is the Wisconsin city on his page. Public professional footprints put him in New York markets and later London rather than a published Waukesha residence.