Did you enjoy your 4th of July holiday
weekend? Did you have fun? Did you attend a picnic? Did you kick back with a
barbecue and some cold beer with family and friends? Did you go to the beach or
the lake for a little R&R? When the sun went down did you put a blanket on
the lawn of the local park and watch the fireworks display?
Rick Wershe didn’t do any of that. He couldn’t. For him,
Independence Day was just another day of his life prison sentence for dealing
drugs. Over the years he’s helped the FBI send drug dealers to jail, he’s
helped thwart a Mafia murder plot and he helped put a dozen corrupt cops in
prison, but somehow that doesn’t count in Michigan’s politicized parole system.
Wershe informed on politically-connected people, so he’s been in prison far
longer than major drug dealers and hitmen. There is a vendetta against him,
plain and simple.
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| Richard J. Wershe, Jr. - MDOC Photo |
For Rick Wershe, Fourth of July recreation was limited
time in “the yard” with other inmates at the Oaks Correctional Facility in
Manistee, Michigan. For Inmate 192034 the Fourth of July was just another day
in prison—he’s been behind bars his entire adult life.
Since March this blog has been exploring the legend of “White
Boy Rick”, the media’s favorite alias for Richard J. Wershe, Jr. This week’s
post will take a “holiday” view of his tragic case.
First, let’s review yet again.
At age 14, Rick Wershe was recruited by the Detroit FBI
to spy on the Johnny Curry drug gang on the city’s east side. Rick’s late always-on-the-edge
father was a paid FBI informant. Through Richard J. Wershe Sr. the FBI found
out Richard J. Wershe Jr. was known and trusted by the Curry brothers and their
henchmen because he was just Ricky, a white kid from the racially mixed ‘hood.
The FBI wanted to bring down the Curry organization
because Johnny Curry was married to Cathy Volsan, the favorite niece of
then-mayor Coleman Young, a perennial FBI target of investigation. The hope was
that if he was facing long prison time, Johnny Curry might rat out the mayor
about…something.
So a federal drug task force of agents from the FBI, DEA
and a small detail of Detroit police officers taught young Rick Wershe the ways
of dope dealing. Yep. Law enforcement taught him how to be a drug dealer. The
Detroit cops, always in a buy-bust mind frame, had Rick Wershe Jr. make
numerous drug buys with law enforcement money. While there wasn’t any FBI rule
or regulation back then about using juveniles as informants in criminal cases,
the agents knew it was a highly questionable thing to do, so they put informant
information from Richard Wershe Jr. in the informant file for Richard Wershe
Sr. They had the same names except for senior and junior, a very convenient cover
for info from a kid they were paying to be a mole in a drug gang.
Ricky, as he was known to the Currys, proved valuable in
the early stages of the Curry drug case. He provided good information. His most
important tip was that he was at a meeting in which the Curry gang discussed
how to finesse their role in the accidental murder of a 13-year old boy. The Curry
group shot up a house to intimidate the owner over money he owed them. The man’s
nephews were in the house at the time and one of them caught a bullet in his
chest and died.
The Currys feared homicide investigators would question
them. There was nothing to fear. Someone high up in the Detroit Police
Department pushed the investigation away from the Currys and toward an innocent
man. Sending an innocent man to prison for murder was less important to the
police department than protecting the mayor’s niece because her husband’s drug
gang had killed a little boy.
When the FBI got authorization to use wiretaps against
the Currys Rick Wershe’s info became less important. After putting Rick in the
criminal underworld, they dropped him. If anyone in the U.S. Attorney’s office,
the Detroit FBI, the Detroit DEA or the Detroit Police Department ever gave any
thought to helping or getting counseling for the kid they lured in to a life of
crime to help them make a big case, there’s no evidence of it.
Rick Wershe Jr. came from a dysfunctional family and
mostly raised himself. He had nowhere to turn, no one to guide him back to the
life of an average teenager. He had dropped out of school. He did the only thing
he knew how to do, the life the cops had taught him to live—he tried to become
a dope dealer.
He failed. Oh, sure, he managed to act as a middleman cocaine
wholesaler for a while but a team of DEA agents and Detroit cops, wallowing in
the media glory of being the “No Crack Crew”, teamed with the Detroit Police
gang squad to bust Richard Wershe, Jr. who came to be known as White Boy Rick
for his youth and the color of his skin in a mostly-black criminal underworld.
Gullible and/or lazy Detroit reporters were only too happy to call him a “drug
lord” and a “kingpin” without ever asking for the evidence to support such a
reputation. No one in the media ever stopped to ask how a freckle-faced white
kid who was not yet 18 could possibly be a top-echelon drug trafficker in a
mostly black, mostly adult racket. But hey. It made for great headlines.
Here’s the truth based on extensive review of official
paperwork: there is NO evidence, NONE, to support the claim that Richard J.
Wershe, Jr. was ever a major dope dealer. Prosecutors, judges, uniformed city
officials and political hacks on the Michigan Parole Board can huff and puff
about Rick Wershe all they wish. There is NO evidence to support the
accusations that Wershe was ever a major drug dealer.
He’s doing life because
he ratted on the wrong people—a politically-connected drug dealer and cops who
were on the take from drug pushers, including one cop who was a local celebrity
because he had been in a movie with Eddie Murphy. The Detroit political and
criminal justice establishment has vowed to keep Rick Wershe in prison until he
dies for telling the FBI the truth about some of their own.
It is commonplace for cops to go to bat for their
informants because without them they wouldn’t make many cases. This includes
the FBI. The criminal justice system relies on informants and “cooperating
witnesses” far more than the public knows.
Intercession by law enforcement for someone who helped
them didn’t happen in Rick Wershe’s case. The Feds let him twist in the wind in
his local drug case. To do otherwise, to help their teen informant when he got
in a jam, would be to admit they had recruited a 14-year old as a paid
informant against a violent drug gang. Instead, they sat on their hands, they
kept their mouths shut and they let Richard Wershe Jr. get convicted. In 1988,
it was a life prison sentence under Michigan law.
The Michigan Supreme Court eventually struck down the law
Wershe was convicted under as cruel and unusual punishment. Since then all of
the drug dealers convicted under that law have been released from prison. All
except one. Richard J. Wershe Jr.
One idiot who has fought against parole for Rick Wershe
makes the claim that Wershe’s friends are all criminals. Well, duh! You dimwit!
He’s been in prison he entire adult life. With few exceptions the only people he
knows are other criminals. Since age 18 he’s never had the chance to mingle
with anyone other than convicted criminals.
It is this kind of breathtaking stupidity that makes the
Wershe case so frustrating. It’s true he’s done some dumb things, things that
are against his own self-interest. But he’s paid the price for his bad
decisions for years and years. They say justice delayed is justice denied.
Richard J. Wershe, Jr. has been denied justice for a long, long time.
If you enjoyed your Independence Day festivities,
congratulations. Rick Wershe didn’t have the chance to do that.
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