White Boy Rick, the film, is scheduled to be one of 21 world premieres at this year’s 43rd Toronto International Film Festival. The film extravaganza runs from September 6th through the 16th.
Vanity Fair magazine published the list today, and got the facts wrong about Richard J. Wershe, Jr. – aka – White Boy Rick. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence in the media stories about Wershe.
The magazine piece, undoubtedly recycling info provided by the Toronto International Film festival (TIFF), calls the film a “fact-based drama about a 1980’s-era petty hustler who became a drug boss, then FBI informant, before the age of 16.”
This is totally wrong. As my book, Prisoner of War: The Story of White Boy Rick and the War on Drugs make clear, Richard Wershe, Jr. was recruited by the FBI at age 14, and he was abandoned by the government when things got sticky. At that point he tried to become a cocaine wholesaler. He never made it.
Ex-FBI agents who worked with Wershe and knew him back in the day, insist he was never a drug boss, kingpin, drug lord or anything close to it. At worst he was a wannabe.
Nate Craft, an admitted Detroit drug hit man who says he murdered “about 30” people once tried to kill White Boy Rick because his gang of killers suspected the kid was snitching to the police. But Craft says he wasn’t a big shot in the Detroit cocaine underworld. I quoted Craft in my book about White Boy Rick Wershe: “He wasn’t no big-time drug dealer. He wasn’t no big-time anything.”
This hasn’t stopped the news media—and it hasn’t stopped Hollywood—from falsely portraying Rick Wershe, Jr. as something he never was. Wershe told me he’s convinced the false smears, repeated over and over, added years to his time in prison.
The White Boy Rick movie will be one of the last to debut at The Toronto International Film Festival It is scheduled to open in theaters nationwide in the United States on September 14th.
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