Category: Michigan

Prisoner of War: The Story of White Boy Rick and the War on Drugs by  Vince Wade – What authoritative voices are saying about Prisoner of War: The Story of White Boy Rick and the War on Drugs: “Meticulously researched and brutally honest. It tells the true story of White Boy Rick.” The tale of a Detroit boy recruited by the FBI—at age 14—to be a paid informant against a politically-connected drug gang is so amazing it inspired a Hollywood film—White Boy Rick—starring Matthew McConaughey as the teen’s father. What kind of father would take FBI cash to let his youngest child be an undercover operative in the murderous drug underworld? This book answers the question.

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. See also VinceWade.com

“White Boy Rick” and Crime in Detroit by Scott M. Burnstein – The years between the late 1970s and the final decade of the 20th century on the streets of Detroit represent one of the most violent eras of crime in American history.

The death toll in those years has been placed at well over 1,000 drug-related homicides. Besides the violence of that era, it was a time known for its decadence.

The men who made their names in this period lived their lives lavishly with media-friendly charisma and panache. This was the era of Young Boys, Inc., better known as YBI, representing a new wave in the Detroit drug scene. Kingpins with memorable names entered that scene, including Milton “Butch” Jones, Raymond “Baby Ray” Peoples, Dwayne “Wonderful Wayne” Davis and Mark “Block” Marshall.

The Trials of White Boy Rick by Evan Hughes – It was the spring of 1987, and crack cocaine had turned whole swaths of Detroit into veritable combat zones. The city thought it had seen everything—until one evening that May, when the police arrested a 17-year-old kid named Rick Wershe. They called him White Boy Rick. In a city known for its fraught racial divide, Wershe had somehow joined the ranks of the drug kingpins on the predominantly black East Side before he was old enough to shave. He flew in kilos of cocaine from Miami and drove a white Jeep with THE SNOWMAN emblazoned across the back. An incredulous judge once compared him to the gangster “Baby Face” Nelson. He seemed more an urban legend than a real person—and then his story got even stranger. Years later, while he was in prison for cocaine possession, Wershe claimed he had been working with the FBI since he was 14. Was one of Detroit’s most notorious criminals also one of the feds’ most valuable informants in the city?