Quick Take: From incidents that never happened to a discussion of a gun that hadn’t been invented yet, ‘White Boy Rick’ takes liberties with facts and the truth. The result is a movie that leaves many viewers confused and many critics critical. My review will feature insights and facts you won’t find anywhere else.
Over the last few years I’ve worked hard to acquire a reputation as an expert on the story of Richard J. Wershe, Jr., more commonly known as White Boy Rick. The highly anticipated and highly hyped movie about him is now in theaters.
The Real Story Summary
To recap the real story: Rick Wershe, Jr. was a Detroit kid from a dysfunctional family living in a racially mixed neighborhood. Rick didn’t have any parental guidance to speak of and he roamed the streets freely, getting to know assorted low-lifes, criminals and dope dealers. His father was a business hustler, always looking for a quick buck, the big score. He was, among other things, a licensed neighborhood gun dealer.
The FBI and a federal task force were investigating a politically-connected black drug gang known as the Curry Brothers when they noticed a young white kid was hanging around the Curry house a lot. It was Rick Wershe.
The FBI recruited Rick—at age 14—along with his father as paid informants. The father was the informant on record, but the kid had all the information. The boy’s father agreed to put his son in a dangerous undercover role because he wanted the FBI informant cash. FBI agents falsified their own files to make it look like the information from the teen was coming from the father. The gang leader, Johnny Curry, was engaged to and later married the niece of Detroit’s powerful mayor, the late Coleman Young.
Rick’s snitching arrangement went bad, the feds dropped the kid as an informant, he decided to become a dope dealer, got caught, and was sentenced to life in prison. He was finally paroled in 2017.
Untruths Based On A True Story
As I have noted previously here and elsewhere, the first problem with the film is the writers and producers were determined from the outset to invent a father-and-son-against-the-world story where none existed. This required a lot of screen time to convince the audience this lower-class loser father was really a loving parent at heart. This didn’t leave time to develop some important scenes. As a result, the movie suffered. Several scenes and comments didn’t make sense.
In my book, Prisoner of War: The Story of White Boy Rick and the War on Drugs, I detailed what a terrible father Richard Wershe, Senior was in real life. I didn’t spend a lot of time on him in my book because he wasn’t that much of a presence in Rick’s life. Rick’s father was seldom around, but when he was he was abusive and violent. He beat his wife. He beat his kids. He beat his grand kids. He was arrested for domestic violence several times including incidents where he choked his grandson and punched his granddaughter.
Here are some quotes from the book:
- “I really didn’t have any parental supervision at the time. I was basically raising myself.”—Rick Wershe, Jr. testifying at a 2003 parole hearing.
- “Richard thought the world revolved around Richard and what Richard wanted. His kids didn’t matter.”—Bev Srbich, former neighbor of the Wershe family
- “Rick’s father was never home for Dawn or Rick. He was never there. Rick and Dawn grew up without parents.”—Wayne LeCouffe, Rick Wershe’s cousin
Compare those quotes from real people with lines from White Boy Rick spoken by Matthew McConaughey as Richard Wershe, Senior:
- “I’m just a dad trying to do right by his kids.”
- “I know how you feel about Dawn. It’s tearing me up, too.”
- “I’m better than alright. Seein’ you and Dawn tonight with Ma and Pa, hell, I’m damned near perfect.”
- “It’s fragile. This thing. Family. I don’t want it to come apart. I don’t wanna break it, again.”
In truth, over the years Rick realized his father was largely responsible for having to spend his entire adult life in prison. If his father had truly been a loving, concerned father, he would have told the FBI agents to get lost and Rick would not have become involved in secret federal informant work. There is no evidence Rick ever tried to convinced his father to join him in slinging dope, as the movie suggests. But Wershe Senior craved the FBI informant cash his son would generate. Rick and his father were estranged for years. They finally reconciled at the urging of Ralph Musilli, Rick’s lawyer, when the elder Wershe was near death, dying of cancer.
It’s hard to figure out some of the bone-headed mistakes made by supposedly sophisticated film professionals. In one of the movie trailers which saturated the airwaves before the film was released, there’s a scene at a black night spot where a character loudly announces to one and all: “It’s Ricky. He’s white!”
Gee! Ya don’t say! They wisely snipped this incredibly stupid statement-of-the-obvious from the final print of the film. We can pity the black actor who had to say this line.
In the film, in a made-up scene where two FBI agents and a Detroit narc are trying to coerce Rick to become an informant, they show him some photos of murder victims. This is the scene Matthew McConaughey kept promoting in interview after interview, suggesting Ricky reluctantly became an informant to protect his dad from a gun charge. This scenario is a total fabrication. In the scene the cops tell Rick one victim was shot twice in the back of the head. FBI agent Alex Snyder is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. In fact, there were no female feds or police officers involved in Rick’s activities. Nevertheless, “Agent Snyder” tells Rick:
“We haven’t found the killer yet, but we did find the weapon. .40 caliber. This particular weapon was purchased at a gun show earlier this year…by a licensed dealer.” The implication is that Rick’s father sold the killer the murder weapon.
This is quite a feat. .40 caliber ammunition and handguns didn’t hit the market until 1990. Rick was recruited by the FBI—in 1984. The .40 caliber round was invented as a direct result of the FBI’s need for more powerful handgun ammunition after a deadly shoot-out with bank robbers in Miami—in 1986. If the film was factual Rick might well have asked: “What’s a .40 caliber?”
In truth, the recruitment of Rick Wershe Jr. had nothing to do with guns, dead bodies or implied threats that his father might get jammed with a weapons charge. Rick told me he and his dad were recruited at the same time at the same meeting. “It was all about the money,” Jim Dixon told me. He was one of the two FBI agents who recruited Rick and his father to be paid informants. The only issue was how much the feds were willing to pay for Rick’s snitching. The safety of the 14-year old informant was never a concern.
This brings up another truth issue. Rick’s value to the feds was as a snitch, not as just another street mope going in crack houses with police money to buy rocks of cocaine so the police could get a search warrant and kick in the door. We never see Rick listening to conversations by the Currys. Not once. We never see him passing the info along to the FBI. Not once.
One major incident happened, but not in the way it was portrayed on film. The movie would have you believe drug gang leader Johnny Curry had Rick shot because he suspected Rick snitched about the inadvertent killing of a 13-year old boy, Damion Lucas, by the Curry gang.
In truth, Rick was shot in the stomach by a guy he knew in November, 1984, when he had barely begun his informant work against the Curry gang. Rick told me he’s still not sure if Johnny Curry ordered the shooting or whether it was related to another dispute. In any event, Rick Wershe says getting shot gave him enormous “street cred.” The fact he was shot, survived and didn’t snitch impressed “the street.” In fact, it can be argued it helped him burrow in deeper in the Curry organization.
Damion Lucas was killed in late April, 1985, nearly five months after Rick was shot. Factually, the shooting of Rick and the shooting of the little boy don’t line up, but events were shuffled for Hollywood storytelling purposes. The film has the killing making the local news, in a story filled with a lot of detail. Fact: the Damion Lucas homicide didn’t make the news. It wasn’t even a “brief” in the local papers.
The little boy was killed when members of the Curry gang shot up his uncle’s house while the kid was there, alone, with his brother. The boy’s uncle, Leon Lucas, owed the Currys some money for drugs. Lucas had a cousin, Robert Walton, who had a dispute with the Currys over obtaining tickets to the Marvin Hagler-Tommy Hearns fight in Las Vegas a few days before Damion Lucas was killed.
The script writers libeled Leon Lucas by creating a scene where it appears Leon Lucas scammed the Curry group over tickets to the fight. It’s not true. There was a dispute over fight tickets, but it was with Robert Walton, Lucas’s cousin. Hollywood took a time-saving shortcut and falsely accused Leon Lucas of scamming the Currys.
While we’re on the subject of the trip to Las Vegas for the fight, there’s no mention in the film—none—of the fact the FBI paid for Rick Wershe’s trip. As I explained in my book, the feds wanted to know if Johnny Curry met with any Detroit city officials while he was in Las Vegas. That would tie public corruption to Curry’s drug dealing. That would be a major criminal case. It’s never mentioned in the film.
White Boy Rick would have you believe law enforcement persuaded young Rick Wershe to start selling drugs as well as buying them for the police.
Police Narc Jackson: “A new jack like you ass is buying but not pushin’, the word gets around.”
Rick: “First y’all got me buyin’, now you got me sellin?”
Audiences will view this law enforcement encouragement of dope dealing with amazement, as well they should. In real life it was Rick who told the narcs he had to sell drugs as well as buy them to avoid suspicion that he was a police snitch.
In the screwed-up War on Drugs, law enforcement alternated between being the good guys and the bad guys. So did Rick. At one point, Rick’s dad warns him:
“You’re going to get in too deep. And then, they’re not gonna let you out.”
Rick: “Who dad? The Currys or the cops?”
There were some other good lines in White Boy Rick. Early in the film Rick is at a roller-skating rink popular with the black drug crowd. He sees some black men in suits. He asks who they are. He’s told they’re Detroit cops and one of them is the bodyguard of Cathy Volsan, the mayor’s niece and drug boss Johnny Curry’s fiancé. Rick asks if Johnny knows there are cops in the crowd. One of the Curry gang tells Rick: “Listen, this (is) Detroit, boy. You ain’t on the take, you get your ass took.”
I don’t know if anyone ever said that, but it rings true about Detroit.
Parts of the movie are just ridiculous. When major drug dealer Johnny Curry marries the mayor’s niece, Cathy Volsan, the wedding reception is portrayed as occurring at the Manoogian Mansion, the official riverfront residence of the mayor of Detroit. In the film it was a dope dealers’ ball on the banks of the Detroit River and it is moronic.
We are supposed to believe Detroit’s top-level drug racketeers are at the mayor’s residence for a party. The real mayor Coleman Young may have been a lot of things but stupid isn’t one of them. Young would NEVER allow such a thing. The front yard would be trampled with photographers from the FBI, DEA, U.S. Customs and Michigan State Police jostling for camera position with videographers from Detroit’s TV stations and photogs from the newspapers. The mayor’s security detail would NEVER agree to a dope dealers’ ball that would attract that kind of law enforcement and media attention. Young was fully aware the FBI had been after him for years. Hosting a wedding reception featuring the Who’s Who of Detroit’s drug underworld defies common sense.
Other scenes in the movie trailer disappeared in the theater print.
This scene features Matthew McConaughey’s father-figure living it up on the private jet of one of Rick’s key suppliers and mentors, presumably on the way to Miami. This doesn’t square with the final version of the story, which features Richard Wershe, Senior adamantly telling Rick he cannot go along with earning money by selling drugs.
Another scene in the trailers that shows a party on a yacht in Miami vanished in the theater version, too.
Unintended Mysteries
As a viewer, you will encounter plot mysteries in White Boy Rick. Reference is made several times to someone named “Gil Hill.” Unless you pay extremely close attention you will miss the mention of the fact Hill is the inspector in charge of the Detroit Police Homicide section. Why is he important? It’s up to you to divine that he is a corrupt cop on the take. In real life, Hill was a key character in the local law enforcement vendetta to keep Rick Wershe in prison for life. On two occasions Rick Wershe put Hill on the FBI’s radar for possible corruption prosecution. Much of the real story of Rick Wershe, Jr. revolves around the corruption of Gil Hill, who, ironically, played Eddie Murphy’s cop boss in the Beverly Hills Cop movies.
Toward the end of the film, after Rick has been busted with eight kilos of cocaine and he is awaiting trial, FBI agents Snyder and Byrd are in a motel room with Rick and his father. They offer Rick a deal: they will go to bat for Rick with his trial judge if Rick will introduce an undercover FBI agent to…someone. Who? The Currys have already been indicted and arrested. Agent Snyder: “We’d like to get an agent in on the inside. If you can do that, we can get some convictions, maybe we can return the favor.”
Get an agent on the inside of what? Get some convictions against whom? Our only clue is they want Rick to reach out to Cathy Volsan Curry because “her father is close to Gil Hill, not to mention the mayor.” Rick goes to Cathy’s condo and does what the feds asked him to do.
Here again, the film doesn’t line up with the truth. This episode happened, but it was about two years after Rick had gone to prison. Rick’s longtime FBI “handler”, agent Herman Groman, visited Rick in Marquette State Prison and asked him to contact Cathy to meet an undercover agent posing as one of Rick’s Miami “connects.” If the sting was successful, the feds would move Rick from a bleak state prison to a much nicer federal prison for important informants. Rick kept his end of the arrangement and the feds kept theirs. About a dozen corrupt cops were indicted and went to prison. One of the defendants was Willie Volsan, Cathy’s father and the mayor’s niece. This is part of what prompted a local law enforcement vendetta to keep Rick behind bars for life. He told on the wrong people. Corrupt people with political power.
Missed Storytelling Opportunity
Through all of this, though, the film never explores the shame of law enforcement’s repeated exploitation of Rick Wershe without going to bat for him when he got in serious trouble.
The shabby treatment of everyone in the War on Drugs, the police and prosecution corruption that doesn’t necessarily involve payoffs but is reprehensible nonetheless, these are themes that would make a good movie. Alas, they are not to be found in White Boy Rick.
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