His criminal record dates to 1978 and includes more than a dozen convictions. He has been in the penitentiary four times and is wanted in four states. His parole officer once called him "a menace to society." A federal prosecutor wrote he was "a pathological liar… not worthy of this court's trust."
Indeed, Tommy Dye lies about almost everything, even his own name. He has a dozen aliases, court and police records show, and he uses them liberally, usually when he is arrested. William Zonka, Thomas O'Neil, Sean P. Kelly, Tommy Welch, Thomas Moriarty—Dye is the man behind each of the names. Selling cocaine, he used the moniker Big Daddy Woo Woo.
Even under oath, Dye lies. He once told a judge he was the valedictorian at St. Michael's High School in Chicago, but he did not even finish high school. He told a federal grand jury that he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. That, too, was a lie. He took some correspondence classes in prison and has worked as a waiter.
Big Daddy Woo Woo and Crazy Jimmy belong to a long and ever-growing list of informants featured in media coverage, academic research, television and cinema. Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, created the Snitching Blog. PBS's Frontline dedicated a program to informants in drug cases. Kurt Eichenwald wrote "The Informant," a book about a compromised whistleblower at agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland, which became the movie, The Informant!, starring Matt Damon. Sarah Stillman wrote a heartrending piece for the New Yorker on young informants subjected to risks that sometimes become fatal. David Simon, creator of The Wire, based one of his characters, a police informant named "Bubbles," on a real-life informant, known as "Possum." And newspaper reporters, such as Joseph Neff at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, have written devastating stories about capital cases built upon sketchy informants.James Allen Anderson goes by many names.
Police in Grant County knew him as "The Plate." This was a clever play on words: Anderson has a steel plate concealed in his lower leg, but police used the name to conceal Anderson's identity as a confidential drug informant.
Others in Grant County knew Anderson by other names: "Crazy Jimmy." "Shaky Jimmy." "Jimmy the Weasel." The Anderson they knew couldn't differentiate fact from fantasy.
In an interview with the Seattle Times, Anderson said he solved the Oklahoma City bombing, the JonBenet Ramsey murder and countless other crimes—all before they happened. Asked how, he pointed to his head.
"This," he said. "You think with your mind, you put the cases together, and you put it down on paper."
Anderson said he received assignments directly from Presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, that he had a Marine Corps command at Camp Pendleton and that he's worked as a government secret agent for 44 years.
Anderson is 51 years old.
By almost anybody's standards, Joshua Allan Jackson is bad news.
A felon with a lengthy history of violence against women, Jackson was sentenced to 10 years in prison April 13 for sexually abusing an 18-year-old woman and holding her against her will for days inside a cheap South Seattle motel last year. The woman told investigators Jackson forced her to audition for a porn film and at one point choked her so hard she almost lost consciousness.
As part of the case, Jackson also admitted to criminal impersonation on various occasions when he told the victim and seven other people that he was a federal agent or a police officer.
During a fight with an alleged drug dealer at another Seattle motel, Jackson told the manager he was a federal agent. The incident would have been almost comical had it not resulted in a citywide "help the officer" call, one of the Police Department's most urgent alerts. Officers from throughout the city rushed to the motel, only to discover the heavily-tattooed Jackson was not a federal agent.
For all of this, the 34-year-old Jackson would be just another habitual criminal except for one startling fact: He was working the entire time as a paid informant for the Seattle office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The agency made Jackson an informant even though he had come out of prison early last year with a documented reputation as a violent, mentally unstable inmate who had been arrested in nearly every state and posed a serious threat to law-enforcement officers.