James Dixon, a retired FBI agent who played a key role in the recruitment of Richard ‘White Boy Rick’ Wershe, Jr. as the Bureau’s youngest paid undercover drug informant passed away Tuesday, October 9, 2018. He was 70.
Dixon, who lived in Southfield, Michigan, had been battling cancer for some time. Funeral arrangements are being handled by the Swanson Funeral home in Detroit. There will be a public viewing on Thursday, October 18th from 3 pm to 7 pm at the funeral home chapel at 14751 W. McNichols.
Funeral services will be the following day, Friday, October 19th at Greater Shield of Faith, 1330 Crane St. in Detroit. There will be a private family hour at 10 am followed by the funeral service at 11 am. Dixon is survived by his wife, Carol, and a brother, Donell Miles.
A Fateful Encounter with a Kid
In 1984 Dixon had been assigned to investigate drug cases as part of the FBI’s newly acquired joint jurisdiction with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) over illegal narcotics. Dixon frequently teamed up with another agent named Al Finch.
A third FBI agent, Don Tisaby spent much of his time working undercover gathering intelligence about Detroit’s burgeoning drug trade. One of Tisaby’s investigative targets was the Curry Brothers gang on Detroit’s east side. Tisaby had developed information that a young white kid was a frequent visitor at the Curry home. The Currys are black.
In late spring of 1984, Richard Wershe Senior, Rick’s father, called the Detroit FBI office seeking help finding Dawn Wershe, his drug-addicted daughter. Jim Dixon and Al Finch paid a visit to Wershe at home. They knew Wershe from his time as a clerk at a Detroit gun shop.
Dixon and Finch showed the elder Wershe a series of surveillance photos of some black men as his 14-year old son looked on from a doorway. Wershe Senior didn’t know any of the men in the photos but he said his son might. Rick Wershe was called to the table and asked if he knew any of the men in the photos. He correctly identified the members of the Curry drug gang by their street names.
The agents decided then and there to make an informant recruitment. They recruited Richard Wershe, Senior as an on-the-record paid informant, but the agents and both Wershes knew it was Rick Wershe, the kid, who had the info the FBI wanted and was willing to pay for.
The young boy snitch work began slowly. Richard Wershe Senior and Junior would meet Dixon at random fast food joints on the opposite side of town. Young Wershe would spew drug intel while his father sat and listened—and signed for the FBI informant cash.
I interviewed Dixon for my book, Prisoner of War: The Story of White Boy Rick and the War on Drugs. We talked about the recruitment of the boy now known to the world as White Boy Rick.
“For a fourteen-year old kid, he had so much information,” Dixon told me. “It was unbelievable what he had been involved in at that particular time. He started rattling off stuff and you’d go, ‘How does this 14-year old kid know all this?’ But he was a street guy. He knew all these guys. He ran with them.”
The last time I spoke with Jim Dixon was late last spring. I called to ask him about the story line Hollywood was peddling in advance of the ‘White Boy Rick’ film that FBI agents had coerced young Rick Wershe in to becoming an informant in order to save his father from a gun charge. In the movie an FBI agent shows their teen snitch a photo of a murder victim who had been killed with a .40 caliber bullet traced to a gun Wershe Senior had sold. Gun buffs must have guffawed when they heard that line in the film, because the .40 caliber round hadn’t been invented in 1984.
Dixon guffawed too, but not about Hollywood’s sloppy, laughable use of ammunition lingo. He chuckled at the notion that a gun incident was used to pressure young Rick Wershe in to becoming an FBI snitch. That was a pure Hollywood invention intended to enhance the fiction that Rick and his father had a father-son bond and the kid reluctantly became an informant to protect his dad. In truth, they didn’t have much of a relationship at all and the one they had was mostly estranged.
“It was all about the money,” Dixon said. Richard Wershe Senior essentially pimped his son to the FBI to engage in dangerous undercover work because he craved the informant cash. Putting his teen son in harm’s way and under tremendous life-and-death stress didn’t seem to bother Richard Wershe, Senior in the least.
Pushed Aside
Dixon’s work with White Boy Rick Wershe came to an abrupt halt around April, 1985 when the young informant told him the Curry gang was going to Las Vegas for a prize fight between Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns of Detroit. Wershe told him the Currys intended to meet with some Detroit city officials in Las Vegas to discuss ways of concealing the movement of drugs around town.
Dixon recalled Bob Reutter, one of the Assistant Special Agents in Charge (ASAC) of the Detroit office became quite interested in this intel. This moved the investigation up the food chain from a dope case to a case of possible public corruption AND drugs. The next thing Dixon knew, he was off the case. It was re-assigned to another agent, Herman Groman.
Some of Dixon’s fellow black FBI agents suspected there was a racial motive at play. According to this theory, the Detroit FBI’s white management didn’t trust black agents to handle a public corruption case involving a black city administration.
John Anthony, a retired agent and legal advisor for the Detroit office at that time, told me he thought management wanted to bring in an agent with public corruption investigative experience.
It was a time of racial tension throughout the FBI. The agency’s leaders had embarked on a campaign to hire black, female and minority agents and many white agents in the organization openly resented the dilution of the previously all-white-male law enforcement agency.
Life After the FBI
Dixon eventually left the FBI. He and his wife opened a series of full-service beauty salons. His friends remember he was an avid ping-pong player and rose to become one of the top players in the nation.
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