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Richard Wershe Jr. (born July 18, 1969), known as "White Boy Rick", is an American former drug trafficker and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant. The youngest known informant in the history of the FBI, Wershe became a confidential informant when he was 14 to 16 years old.
- Richard Wershe Jr. Becomes An Informant
- White Boy Rick Is Born
- A 15-Year-Old Exposes Widespread Police Corruption in Detroit
- The Hit on White Boy Rick
- A 16-Year-Old Drug Lord
- 17-Year-Old Richard Wershe Jr. Goes on Trial
- A 48-Year-Old Up For Parole
“I was brought into this life by law enforcement,” Richard Wershe Jr. reported to Vice, “I was taught it, they left me alone, and a year later I’m busted and put in jail for life.” The law enforcement to which he’s referring are the FBI agents who came to his door for his father in 1984. White Boy Rick’s father, Richard Wershe Sr., wasn’t a man who...
Richard Wershe Jr. was good at what he did. He went above and beyond what the FBI asked him to do. He took up with the Curry Gang, the foremost drug slingers in Detroit at the time, and made friends with dangerous criminals so that he could get better information. The FBI, in turn, began to train the young Wershe Jr. on how to be a gangster. They t...
White Boy Rick, though, was a little bit too good. Pretty soon he uncovered a conspiracy that ran through the whole city. Rick Wershe Jr. began to see the corruption when a 13-year-old boy was shot by the Curry Gang and the Detroit police did nothing about it. Their chief of homicide, Inspector Gilbert Hill, deliberately diverted the investigation ...
The case had grown exponentially. The FBI was now involved in mayoral corruption. But they worried that if they took action on their findings, the agency would get wind of their all-too-young informant. So the FBI left Richard Wershe Jr. to fend for himself. He was forced to find a way to navigate the streets and make ends meet without the FBI’s pr...
In Detroit in the ’80s, everyone knew when White Boy Rick was around. He might have been a pimple-faced teenager who struggled to pull off a mustache but he came out in style. Rick went out in mink coats wrapped up with a belt made of solid gold and a diamond-encrusted Rolex on his wrist. He’d roll up in a white jeep he was too young to legally dri...
White Boy Rick was still a few days shy of his 18th birthday when the Detroit police broke down his front door. They caught him with 17 pounds of cocaine. The police took White Boy Rick right to the media. The baby-faced teenager, the news said, wasn’t just a drug dealer. He was a kingpin. They put up pictures of a criminal hierarchy, and each one ...
It took 30 years for Richard Wershe Jr. to win his freedom. While the people he’d exposed were sent free, Wershe stayed behind bars and spent the bulk of his life in a jail cell. It was journalism that saved him. In 2014, freelance writer Evan Hughes read Wershe’s outlandish claims about a conspiracy that had put him behind bars and started to look...
- 4 min
Jul 20, 2018 · The real White Boy Rick did conspire with major players in the local Detroit drug trade. Most were black and at least a decade older than him. "I became addicted to the lifestyle," says the real Richard Wershe Jr.
Jul 29, 2021 · Rick Wershe Jr., "White Boy Rick" made history recruited by law enforcement to be an informant at the age of 14 and later to become the youngest non-violent offender to serve more than 30 years...
Jul 21, 2021 · Richard Wershe Jr has filed a $100m (£73m) lawsuit against former FBI agents and prosecutors, alleging child abuse in connection with his time as an informant. Wershe, now 52, spent three decades...
Jul 31, 2021 · Voice quavering, Rick Wershe Jr., who as a teen in 1980s Detroit was painted as a murderous drug kingpin, dabbed his eyes recalling one of the last conversations he had with his father, who...
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Jul 28, 2021 · Two men who grew up on the same street on Detroit's east side and whose lives took different paths. Meet the real 'White Boy Rick.'Detroit news, weather, tra...
- 11 min
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- FOX 2 Detroit
