White Boy Rick’s Parole Hearing and Drug War Lessons Unlearned

This article originally appeared on this site.

Earlier this month, in Jackson, Michigan, two officers led Richard Wershe, Jr., into a one-story building at the G. Robert Cotton Correctional Facility. Media and supporters of Wershe from around the country fell silent as he entered and shuffled toward his seat, wearing leg irons, handcuffs, and a belly chain. It would be Wershe’s first parole hearing in more than fourteen years. A movie based on his life, starring Matthew McConaughey as his father, was shooting in Las Vegas the night before.

Wershe is more widely known as White Boy Rick. He rose to prominence as a teen-age cocaine trafficker in nineteen-eighties Detroit, where he mixed with major names in the local drug trade who were almost uniformly black and at least a decade older. Wershe’s arrest, in 1987, for possession of more than eight kilos of cocaine, brought an end to his career as a dealer; he was seventeen years old. He will be forty-eight next month, and he is still imprisoned for that crime. His hearing opened a window onto an earlier time in criminal justice, one that feels like the distant past but is lately being invoked and resurrected in Washington.

What Detroit did not know during Wershe’s rise and fall is that he also served as a valuable off-the-books confidential informant for the F.B.I. and the police beginning at age fourteen, according to F.B.I. records and former agents and officers who have since come forward. (I wrote about his connection to the F.B.I. for the Atavist magazine, in 2014.) While Wershe was befriending Johnny Curry—“the cocaine king of the East Side,” as the Detroit Free Press called him—and getting close to Curry’s criminal organization, he was simultaneously playing a pivotal role in their eventual downfall, feeding the authorities intelligence on their drug houses and their alleged acts of violence, including the murder of a thirteen-year-old boy. Later, from prison, Wershe again coöperated with the F.B.I., in an elaborate sting targeting public corruption, vouching for an undercover agent who posed as Wershe’s trusted former drug connection. The operation resulted in the arrest of sixteen people and the conviction of high-ranking Detroit police.

Wershe’s activities as an informant were not disclosed at his trial, where he was sentenced to life in prison. The Detroit law-enforcement community, which he has repeatedly exposed and embarrassed, has vociferously fought his previous bids for release.

Even before this month’s hearing began, it was apparent that, with interest in Wershe sharply on the rise, this was no ordinary proceeding. The hearing began at 9 A.M. but a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections, Chris Gautz, was on site doing live TV interviews, in a dawn-colored glare, before seven that morning. The audience filled the largest room available in the state system (Wershe had been transported more than two hundred miles from the prison where he is held), and a video feed was made available outside. I happened to be seated next to the wife of the parole-board chairman, and she told me it was the first hearing she has attended for her own curiosity.

Wershe wore a blue prison uniform with orange piping and stencilled lettering so faded as to be illegible. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a shaved head, he scanned the crowd with a neutral expression as he entered the room and moved toward his seat. He sat with his back to the audience, facing state officials and a court reporter, and he swore to tell the truth.

In aggressive questioning that lasted for three hours, an assistant state attorney general, Scott Rothermel, led Wershe through not only the crime for which he is incarcerated but the entire dramatic story of his time on the streets and his involvement, from behind bars, in a stolen-car ring. “I’m going to have a lot of questions for you, Mr. Wershe,” Rothermel said near the outset, “so settle in.” The effect was similar to watching a particularly adversarial journalistic interview. “Can I ask you a question?” Wershe said at one point. “No,” Rothermel replied.

Rothermel had done his homework and challenged Wershe on apparent discrepancies between his testimony in the hearing and earlier accounts (including mine). At times, Rothermel seemed more motivated by fascination than by the job at hand, as he delved into minor details and used street slang: “popped” for arrested, “cred” for credibility, “weight man” for a cocaine wholesaler. Some observers had anticipated a rote and dull proceeding, but the audience heard about Wershe’s big-league Miami suppliers, an F.B.I.-funded trip to Las Vegas to gather intelligence on Johnny Curry, a whiskey box full of cocaine, and corrupt Detroit police. Wershe said that on the night of his arrest officers seized thirty-four thousand dollars of his cash; when Rothermel asked why the police report indicated that they had confiscated less than thirty thousand dollars, Wershe replied, “You’d have to ask D.P.D. that.”

Wershe has an excellent memory and is open about his crimes, and the intense back-and-forth brought his teen-age involvement in the drug world vividly to life. It almost seemed as though the two men were discussing recent events. But, of course, they were talking about the Reagan years.

Wershe’s time in the drug trade, the mid-to-late eighties, was the era of the crack epidemic, of Len Bias’s fatal overdose, of the Central Park jogger, and of crime rates in American cities reaching heights that have not been matched since, with Detroit often at the top of the list. A climate of fear pervaded city life, and the brutal Willie Horton attack ad against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 Presidential campaign warned every politician never to be seen as soft on crime. Drugs were frequently portrayed as the root of all urban ills. Wershe was never charged with a violent crime, but a judge called him “worse than a mass murderer” from the bench, before the teen-ager had even faced trial.

The very fact that Wershe is still incarcerated makes him a vestige of that era. Wershe was sentenced under arguably the most merciless drug statute ever conceived in the nation, Michigan’s so-called 650-Lifer Law, which, at the time, mandated a term of life without parole for possession of more than six hundred and fifty grams of cocaine or heroin. (Not even the Rockefeller laws ruled out parole for a one-time drug offense.) The Michigan statute was amended in 1998, to give judges some leeway and to retroactively allow for the possibility of parole. But, in Wershe’s time, the thinking that gave rise to the original law carried the day. Politicians did not know, of course, that the crime rate was going to decline dramatically in the decades ahead, and they were terrified of the opposite. Throwing away the key was the panic-button response.

The 650-Lifer Law has become a symbol of the worst excesses of the drug war and is widely regarded as a failure. The governor who signed it into law, William G. Milliken, a Republican, has since called it the worst mistake of his career.

Since the statute was rolled back in 1998, making those already serving time parole-eligible, nearly all have been released, leaving Wershe increasingly alone. (Johnny Curry, for his part, was sentenced the same year as Wershe, but in federal court; he was freed eighteen years ago.) A movement away from brutal sentences and mandatory minimums, especially for drug offenses, has gained real traction, on both the left and the right. The Michigan Department of Corrections now touts its recent record of reducing the inmate population (despite the “perverse incentive,” as Gautz put it to me, that success means laying off your own staff). Wershe’s backers have reason to hope that he will finally be granted parole when the board announces its decision, next month.

It’s strange, then, that in Washington, D.C., the winds are blowing the other way. Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants no mercy for nonviolent offenders. Sessions has sparked an outcry by reversing reform efforts with bipartisan support, instructing federal prosecutors in a memo last month to always pursue the charges that carry the maximum sentences. Together, Sessions and President Trump seem mired in a nineteen-eighties world view, haunted by the spectre of urban mayhem, fixating on the role of narcotics, hanging onto ideas about the drug war that have been widely abandoned. Crime is nowhere close to what it was in Wershe’s day—in New York City, murder is down eighty-five per cent since 1990—but Sessions and Trump are still hitting the panic button, still living in a time when Rick Wershe was just a kid.

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