The movie trailer for White Boy Rick, a film inspired by the bizarre life story of Richard J. Wershe, Jr., was released this week by Sony Pictures. It can be viewed on YouTube.
The film stars Matthew McConaughey as Richard Wershe, Sr., Rick’s father. A newcomer with no previous acting experience, Richie Merritt of Baltimore, plays the part of Rick.
Richard “White Boy Rick” Wershe, Jr. was recruited by the FBI at age 14 to become the youngest paid informant in the War on Drugs.
Wershe grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood with no parental supervision. He was street savvy and became acquainted with the wrong people. He knew gangsters, criminals and drug dealers.
Young Wershe infiltrated the Johnny Curry drug gang at the direction of the FBI. Johnny Curry was married to Cathy Volsan, the attractive niece of Detroit’s powerful mayor of the era, Coleman Young.
While other kids his age were going to movies and riding bikes, Rick Wershe was jet-setting to Las Vegas with the Curry Brothers with travel expenses paid by the FBI. Things went awry and the FBI dropped Wershe as a Bureau informant.
Cast adrift, the kid eventually known in the media as White Boy Rick turned to dealing drugs himself. He got caught and was sentenced to life in prison at age 18. He was finally paroled in the summer of 2017. Below is the poster for the movie.
- Order Prisoner of War: The Story of White Boy Rick and The War on Drugs
The book, both as Paperback and eBook are now available.
Click Here to order the Paperback or eBook on Amazon.com
White Boy Rick became the Detroit FBI’s most productive drug informant of the ‘80s, but as the book explains, things went awry amid FBI misdeeds. Rick tried to become a cocaine wholesaler, got caught and has spent 30 years behind bars. He became a Prisoner of War: The War on Drugs. Rick Wershe is the central character in a wide-ranging exploration of the nearly half-century trillion-dollar policy failure known as the War on Drugs. It explains “testilying”, the widespread perjury felony committed by the police in pursuit of drug felonies, it examines CIA pressure to get charges dropped in a Detroit drug case and it shows how a basketball star’s drug death led to mass incarceration.
Leave a Reply