'White Boy Rick' seeks parole after 25 years behind bars

[The Streets Don't Love You Back]

Street icon 'White Boy Rick' seeks parole after 25 years behind bars
Published: Sunday, May 27, 2012

Richard Wershe in a recent prison photo holding up some drawings ­— his hobby ­— he did for the Susan G. Koman Breast Cancer Awareness Foundation.

The name Richard “White Boy Rick” Wershe is a local pop culture touchstone, associated with the rough and rugged streets of Detroit in the 1980s, an era marked by massive bloodshed as a result of the burgeoning cocaine trade.

Most people are unaware, however, that the notorious Wershe, a teenage prodigy in the cutthroat Motor City underworld and a gangland headline-grabber with few, if any, equals, in the storied annals of our state’s history, resided in posh Oakland County during his final year of freedom from age 17 to 18.

Wershe is now 42 and serving a life sentence for drug dealing. He lived in a house on Berkshire Drive in Southfield, on the corner of 11 Mile and Evergreen, for more than 13 months before his high-profile conviction in Wayne County Recorder’s Court on January 14, 1988, for possession with intent to distribute eight kilos of cocaine.

The 25-year anniversary of Wershe’s arrest is this month. He was arrested three months shy of his 18th birthday outside his family’s home on Hampshire Street on the east side of Detroit, following a routine traffic stop on May 22, 1987.

Police found the eight kilos hidden close to two blocks away, buried underground in a neighbor’s back yard. None of his fingerprints were discovered on either the package of drugs or the box in which they were buried. Wershe was convicted based primarily on the testimony of two people who said they witnessed him bury the drugs in the commotion following the traffic stop. In the years after the conviction, David Golly, one of those who testified to that account, signed an affidavit recanting his testimony. He claimed he was physically intimidated by members of the Detroit Police Department into lying on the stand and that he never saw Wershe with any narcotics in his possession that day.

The case’s complexities only get more intriguing.

Seeing his media profile around the Metro Detroit area soar to astronomical heights by the time he was 16 — mostly because of the novelty of a Caucasian adolescent’s rapid ascent in an adult, African-American dominated criminal landscape — Wershe was an almost-guaranteed nightly mention on local television and radio broadcasts during the mid- to late-1980s, transfixing the public with his flashy persona and magnetic flair.

According to him, it was partially a government-inspired ruse.

Wershe asserts that he was recruited into the role of drug lord by a federal narcotics task force, comprising officers of the DPD, the FBI and the DEA, when he was only 14. He further says he was encouraged to drop out of school and paid close to $50,000 for his services over a 2 1/2-year period.

These allegations, which came to light in only the past five years, are substantiated by a number of credible sources. Former DPD narcotics officer Kevin Greene and current FBI agent Greg Schwartz have both written letters to the Michigan Parole Board confirming Wershe’s shocking assertions. Continued...

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“I just want the truth to finally come out,” Wershe said in an exclusive phone interview with The Oakland Press from the Oaks Correctional Facility in Manistee, the first time he’s spoken with a local newspaper in more than two decades.

Wershe admits to embracing a life of crime and becoming a nonsanctioned drug dealer when the task force decided to cut ties with him in late 1986.

The FBI and DPD vigorously deny Wershe’s allegations.

What the federal government will admit to however, is that Wershe did extensive work for them while he was behind bars from the early-1990s to the mid-2000s. Weshe helped convict dozens of felons, including significantly aiding a widespread police corruption bust in 1992 that led to the arrests and convictions of Willie Volson, Mayor Coleman E. Young’s brother-in-law, and James Harris, the mayor’s one-time head of security.

Harris, a longtime member of the DPD, was pardoned by President George W. Bush in 2009 and released from prison after serving 16 years of a 30-year sentence.

During his final year of freedom, Wershe was dating the mayor’s niece, Cathy Volson, Willie Volson’s daughter and a woman who was six years his senior, not to mention the wife of Eastside drug kingpin Johnny Curry — the main figure Wershe’s alleged undercover work helped put in jail.

In his last days on the streets, according to federal records, Wershe was the target of multiple unsuccessful murder attempts on contracts called in from prison by Curry in retribution for his betrayal.

It might not have been the first time Curry had tried to kill him, either. When he was 15, Wershe was shot in the stomach and almost died. According to federal documents, several informants told members of law enforcement that the hit contract came from Curry, with whom Wershe had started to develop a close relationship. Curry suspected he was an informant.

The Wershe family wound up filing an insurance claim, claiming the gunshot wound was accidental. Wershe, however, says it was a decision prompted by his handlers in the federal task force, who worried if the real nature of the incident were unveiled, liability could be assessed to the government and his cover would be blown.

Wershe remains incarcerated, with no maximum release date, even as streams of gang leaders from the 1980s filtered out of prison — most of them convicted on far more sinister and wide-reaching charges, and many of whom never offered cooperation of any kind. Curry, for instance, has been free since 1999. Continued...

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“What has happened to this man is a travesty of justice of monumental proportions,” said Wershe’s St. Clair Shores-based attorney, Ralph Musilli.

“From the time he was a small boy, only 14 years old, he’s been exploited and prostituted by the United States government, and when the feds squeezed everything they could possibly get out of him, they threw him a way like a piece of garbage. A light needs to be shined on this catastrophic injustice and maybe, one day sooner than later, he can get the chance to get his life back after 25 years wasting away in a cage.”

Like Wershe, many high-profile drug lords who plied their trade in Detroit proper moved to the more ritzy Oakland County once they made enough money.

Curry was living in Farmington Hills when he was arrested in 1987. Early-1980s heroin kingpin Milton “Butch” Jones, founder and leader of the innovative and murderous Young Boys Inc. organization, moved to Oak Park and then Troy before going to prison in 1983.

Wershe’s longstanding impact on local pop culture is undeniable.

Platinum-selling recording artist Kid Rock has admitted to using Wershe’s street persona as inspiration for his early public image. The musician has been known to frequently come on stage in concert in long mink coats, a one-time Wershe trademark.

Appearing and speaking at Wershe’s parole hearing in 2003, Kid Rock famously dropped Wershe’s name in a 1993 song called, “Back From The Dead.”

Eminem was in negotiations to play Wershe in a feature film back in the 2000s. Bloomfield Hills crime novelist Elmore Leonard used Wershe’s moniker as inspiration for a character in one of his novels, 1995’s “Out of Sight,” which was became a popular movie in 1998, starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.

The one blemish on Wershe’s prison record is an arrest behind bars in 2005 for a minor role in a car-theft ring.

At the time, he was imprisoned in the federal witness protection unit of a Florida correctional institute. Continued...

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Having been denied parole twice, his next parole hearing is this year. Wayne County has strongly opposed Wershe’s parole since he first became eligible in 2003.

“I take full responsibility for what I did and the harm I caused to the city of Detroit, but the government should also take responsibility for what they did too,” Wershe said.

“I was just a kid when they pulled me out of high school in the ninth grade and had me out to three in the morning every night trying to get them information on a bunch of criminals. It was actually pretty smart on their part when you think of it, because who would suspect a little 14-year old boy of working with the cops?

“Hopefully the truth is starting to come out, and after 25 years, I might finally have a light at the end of my tunnel and get a chance to get back to my family,” said Wershe, who has three grown children and several grandchildren living in the area. “I don’t want people to just take my word for all this either, it’s all there in black and white.”

Scott M. Burnstein is a local true-crime author, expert and historian, who is also a frequent contributor to The Oakland Press. Parts of his upcoming book Detroit True Noir: Chronicles of Murder & Mayhem in the Motor City (August 2012) deal with “White Boy Rick's” story. Burnstein’s 2007 book Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in Detroit was a regional best-seller