The Hero Among Us

Jim Ingram is to the FBI what Elliot Ness was to the Treasury Department-a larger-than-life symbol of American justice, a Klan-busting crime fighter who was involved with some of the highest profile FBI cases of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. In his memoir Ingram provides insider information about those cases.

Jim Ingram was the primary source in journalist Jack Nelson's 1993 bestselling book, "Terror in the Night: The Klan's Campaign Against the Jews," which focused on the FBI's infiltration of the Klan in an effort to protect Mississippi Jews.

Jim Ingram passed away in August 2009 of cancer, but worked on this memoir with co-author James L. Dickerson right up until his death. Following his death, the FBI supplied Dickerson with more than 1,400 pages of previously classified documents. Interestingly, after nearly 30 years with the FBI, Ingram was brought out of retirement in the 2000s as a cold-case investigator of Mississippi civil rights-era murders, casting him into his fifth decade of crime fighting.

In this memoir, Jim Ingram provides insider information on the above high-profile cases and others, along with a personal perspective on his nearly 30-year career of law enforcement. During that career, he headed up the FBI offices in New York and Chicago, and was in charge of the violent crimes civil rights desk in Mississippi in the 1960s, and served in the 1970s as deputy assistant FBI director in Washington, DC. In the later years of his career, he became the FBI's top expert on terrorism. This book discloses, for the first time, how he secretly trained U. S. Army and U. S. Air Force personnel on terrorism.

After his retirement from the FBI, Ingram served as Public Safety Commissioner for the State of Mississippi, which put him in charge of the Highway Patrol.had been heavily infiltrated by the KKK while he was head of the civil rights desk in Mississippi. Appointed by Governor Kirk Fordice, a conservative Republican with a penchant for abrasiveness, Ingram became good friends with the man despite their political differences. Ingram's memories of the governor's tempestuous marital conflicts add spice to a book that revolves around the major crimes of the past century.