Richard Wershe Jr. was arrested in his home in 1988 with 17 pounds of cocaine. At the time, the media and law enforcement dubbed the 17-years-old as the “leader” of a drug cartel. The baby-faced Wershe, the police claimed, was a dangerous cocaine godfather known to his underlings as “White Boy Rick.” But what started out as a streetwise 14-year-old FBI informant being used and cut-loose by the authorities would later unveil municipal corruption from the police on up to City Hall – to the office of Detroit’s Mayor Coleman Young. Rick’s infiltration of the Curry Gang garnered information that incriminated chief of homicide, Inspector Gilbert Hill, for taking bribes from gang leader John Curry to divert a murder investigation away from Curry. Elsewhere Rick also discovered that family relations had linked Curry directly to Mayor Coleman Young. In no time, Rick became the boy who knew too much, earning a hit on his life by none other than Detroit’s chief of homicide, Inspector Gilbert Hill, as reported by known hitman Nate Boone Craft, whom Hill had supposedly given the contract to kill the teenager. White Boy Rick’s story was just made into a movie of the same name.
“White Boy Rick” – The Teen “Godfather”
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