Why Did Dixon Do What He Did? : Crime: The Newport Beach employee who embezzled $1.82 million says he doesn’t know what drove him to steal and spend compulsively, but he offers some speculation from his jail cell.

In retrospect, Robert J. Dixon says, it seems as if he has been on the lam forever.

First he ran from the dark childhood memories of being excessively controlled by his parents. Later, he tried to put behind him the public disgrace of having been caught stealing $87,000 from Georgetown University.

Then, for 10 years as a trusted and well-liked employee for Newport Beach, he plundered the city’s treasury--all the while fearing that his past and present would one day collide.

And now that they have, the former director of the city’s Utilities Department says he is relieved--although scared--and ready to face his four years in prison in the hope that paying for his deeds will atone for his transgressions.

What the future holds, “I don’t know yet because there are still a lot of answers about myself and my problems that I need to deal with,” Dixon said. “The only problem is the answers come in the form of puzzles.”

So began an interview at the Orange County Jail, where the seemingly relaxed 48-year-old man smiled often, frequently mulled over his answers and controlled himself visibly whenever he became, as he put it, “maudlin.”

Last April, Dixon waived a preliminary hearing and pleaded guilty to embezzling $1.82 million from Newport Beach. A Superior Court judge last week sentenced him to four years in state prison; with good-time credit, he could be free in less than two years.

Dixon, who had worked for the city for 17 years, told police that he had begun the stealing as far back as 1982 and that until his arrest Jan. 13, had lived every day fearing that he would be caught, yet paradoxically wishing that he would be.

He used the embezzled money, Dixon said, to finance the lavish kind of life he believed would earn him affection and respect from his friends.

“I was lonely, but I wouldn’t admit that before,” he said. “I wanted acceptance and thought the only way I could get it was by being someone that others would admire--you know, the guy who’s well-dressed or with the nice car or the great art collection.

“Funny,” he added, gesturing to his bare surroundings, “even in here, I don’t miss any of those things I used to have.”

Dixon said he spent the money on extravagant domestic and international trips, his trilevel Huntington Beach condominium, a 1990 BMW, the hundreds of black-and-white photographs that graced the walls of his home, a time-share vacation home in Jamaica, clothes and jewelry.

Police said they found 200 sweaters, 60 wool scarves, 20 umbrellas, 15 pairs of gloves and six drawers of ties in his home. Court records say he spent about $250,000 on clothes, and that his many pairs of gold cuff links alone were worth about $120,000.

“Did they tell you I had several hundred bars of soap in my bathroom?” he asked. “And the cuff links--I probably only wore one pair without ever touching the rest.”

It wasn’t greed or even vanity that prompted him to spend so much on things he didn’t need, Dixon said. Unfortunately, he said, he still doesn’t know what drove his compulsion.

“I almost have to go back to age 4 to start over in finding out why I did what I did,” he said.

Wesley Maram, a psychologist who evaluated Dixon in the past several months, stated in his evaluation that Dixon suffered from feelings of inadequacies. Maram traced Dixon’s problems back to age 4, when he moved into his mother’s bedroom and continued to share the room with her until he was 12. The psychologist suggested in his report that Dixon’s father, who had moved into a room of his own, may have molested the young boy.

For Dixon, these pent-up feelings of inadequacy were expressed in an overwhelming compulsion to steal money and spend it, Maram said in his report.

Dixon was born and reared in Glenview, Ill. A devout Catholic, he said that as a high school student he had wanted to be a priest. He didn’t pursue the priesthood, however, because his parents didn’t approve, he said. Instead, he went to Georgetown University, where he majored in government.

His first major transgression, he said, was in 1972, when he stole $87,000 from Georgetown University, where he had worked as student activities director after receiving a master’s degree at George Washington University. He pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was sentenced to five years’ probation. He was also ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment, which ended in 1973 when he left Washington to come to Orange County to take care of his ailing parents.

According to court documents, Dixon’s psychologist in 1972 had also theorized that his parents, however indirectly, were responsible for his troubled feelings. The psychologist told him “the best thing I could do was to stay away” from his parents, Dixon said.

“I didn’t listen, and it was a mistake, because once I was near them, the feelings of having no self-worth came back,” he said. He added that the doubts did not go away even after his parents died several years later.

By then, he was employed as a warehouse worker with the city of Newport Beach. With his second chance at respectability came a seed of “opportunity” that was planted subconsciously, he said. That seed grew into a scheme when he was transferred in 1981 to the Utilities Department, where his job often put him in contact with the Finance Department.

“When the opportunity came,” Dixon said, “I didn’t avoid it; I don’t know if I had another choice.”

He used the same methods he had used at Georgetown to steal from the city: He submitted phony purchase orders for fictitious department services, wrote and cut checks for names that he thought could not be traced back to him, forged signatures and deposited the money in his many checking and credit card accounts.

The scam continued when he was promoted to utilities director in 1985. It fell apart last January when a credit-card company discovered that he was using city checks to make payments on one of his accounts.

News of the embezzlement sent shock waves through the community and angered the city workers, who felt betrayed by a man they had trusted. To those people--”the finest people I’ve ever known”--Dixon said, all he could do is ask their forgiveness.

“I’ve caused them so much hurt, but right now, what I have to do is heal myself so that I can rightfully repay to them what I’ve taken,” he said.

Dixon has already signed over to the city all of his assets. Most of those assets were sold recently at a public auction, netting about $400,000 for the city. Two years from now, when he gets out of prison, he’ll be penniless, he said.

“I think maybe I’ll have some shirts and a pair of shoes that they didn’t sell, that’s all,” he said.

Dixon said he knows he won’t be working in jobs that entail large amounts of money.

“Like an alcoholic who has hit bottom, I won’t be anywhere near the source of my problem,” he said.

Will he have a problem with not living the “good life”?

“I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s what I find fascinating: I don’t miss money. It was only something superficial to get what I thought would please people. Will I miss it later? I don’t think I will, but I might. . . . I’m not missing it now.”