Johnny Curry

Johnny Curry was a drug dealer in the 1980s on Detroit’s east side. By his own admission in interviews, Curry claims he lasted longer than most major dope slingers because he was cautious and he bribed the police. Curry and his gang were indicted by a federal grand jury in the summer of 1987. The Curry gang pleaded guilty and received prison sentences of various lengths.

Curry had been on the Detroit FBI’s investigative radar because he was engaged to, and later married to, Cathy Volsan, the favorite niece of Detroit’s politically powerful mayor, Coleman Young.

Detroit’s highly politicized Police Department knew the mayor’s family was to be treated with kid gloves. They didn’t have to obey the laws other citizens had to follow.

Some top-level police commanders, perhaps seeking to have Cathy Volsan put in a good word with her uncle, would provide her with confidential police narcotics files relating to her husband’s drug operation. This was both illegal and unethical, but those things took a back seat to the power of Coleman Young in Detroit and his insistence that his family was above the law.

One police official corrupted by Johnny and Cathy Curry was Homicide Inspector Gilbert “Gil” Hill.

Johnny Curry told FBI agents in two separate interviews that he paid a $10-thousand-dollar bribe to Hill to ensure a homicide investigation didn’t implicate his drug gang, even though members of the organization admitted to White Boy Rick Wershe, the FBI’s paid confidential informant in the Curry drug investigation, their involvement in the inadvertent killing of 13-year old Damion Lucas of Detroit. Lucas was killed when members of the Curry gang used automatic weapons to shoot up the front of the house of Leon Lucas, an admitted dope dealer who was involved in a money dispute with the Currys.

In recent interviews Curry has states White Boy Rick Wershe was never a big drug dealer. By comparison, Curry said if he was a 10, Wershe was—maybe—a 2.