Richard Wershe Jr.

Richard Wershe Jr. (born July 18, 1969), White Boy Rick, was a Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) informant while 14 to 16 years old. When he was 15 Wershe told the FBI that a major drug dealer had spoken of paying a bribe to Detroit detective inspector and subsequent city council president and mayoral candidate Gil Hill in order to quash the investigation into a 13 year old boy's murder. At the age of 17 Wershe was arrested for possession of cocaine and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2017 justice campaigners publicised Wershe's case and he was paroled, but directly to a prison in Florida to serve another five years for a behind-bars auto theft conviction from 2008. Campaigners for Wershe have suggested to reporters that the length of his incarceration may not have been completely unconnected to him having provided the FBI with information leading to the arrest of family members and associates of former Detroit mayor Coleman A. Young, as well as the allegation about Young's political ally Hill. In 2016 a notorious former Detroit hitman alleged Gil Hill had once tried to commission the murder of Wershe. Life: Wershe and his lower middle-class family lived in a neighborhood on the east side of Detroit about seven miles from downtown. They lived there during a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Detroit and many other major American cities were gaining widespread reputations for crime and violence, largely due to an influx of cocaine and the emergence of the crack cocaine epidemic. Wershe's father was also an FBI informant and first reported to the police and the federal agency alongside him before going solo. The name "White Boy Rick" was not a street name that Wershe used himself, nor was it one he was ever called by those with whom he associated. The name was instead given to him by reporters who covered his case. When Wershe was 16 the FBI, having secured 20 convictions through his infiltration of a violent drug gang, ceased to employ him as an informant. In 1987, at 17 years of age, Wershe was arrested for possessing cocaine in excess of eight kilograms (17.6 pounds). He was sentenced to life in prison in Michigan under the state's 650-Lifer Law, a drug statute that penalized those found in possession of more than 650 grams (22.92 oz) of cocaine or heroin with life imprisonment without parole. The law was overturned 15 years later, but he was repeatedly turned down by the Michigan parole board until publicity about his case in 2017, when w after spending nearly three decades behind bars in Michigan as a nonviolent drug offender whose offence was committed when he was 17, he was paroled to US Marshals who took him to begin serving five years in Florida State Prison on a 2008 car theft ring conviction In 2019, his application was denied by the Florida clemency board. He is scheduled for release on July 20, 2020. Film: A film based on his life, titled White Boy Rick, was released in September 14, 2018. The documentary chronicling the case of Richard Wershe Jr., White Boy, won the 2017 FREEP Film Festival Audience Choice Award. It was released in 2017 and began airing on the Starz network in 2019.