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Chuck Bryant
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Kerry Brownstein
Hey, Portlandia fans.
Fred Armisen
Kerry Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.
Kerry Brownstein
The dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.
Fred Armisen
We're launching Podlandia AO Rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made.
Kerry Brownstein
And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life, guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Krisel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more.
Fred Armisen
Kyle is going for it. Here you fully improvised, not just words, but a song about.
Chuck Bryant
Well, I thought you were all going to write a song.
Fred Armisen
I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia AO rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jake Brennan
I'm Jake Brennan, and on my podcast Disgraceland, I tell the stories behind music's biggest names, the moments that changed music history. Sonic Youth was cool, but was the band cooler than the couple on the COVID of their album Goo? Cool enough to escape the glare of the international paparazzi, cool enough to escape murder. Disgraceland is part of the Exactly Right network. Listen to new episodes every Tuesday, bonus episodes Thursday, and rewinds on Sunday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chelsea Handler
This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell who. Whoever's responsible, you're the problem.
Yamaneika Saunders
Do you know I just found out who Sydney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamaneka and I'm out. Listen to youo're the Problem with yamaneika on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Fred Armisen
Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartrad.
Josh Clark
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here, too. And this is stuff you should know. Our ongoing fascination with Detroit Edition.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, that's right. This is very Detroit. I was gonna say adjacent, but it's like firmly in Detroit. It's not even adjacent.
Josh Clark
Centered even.
Chuck Bryant
Because we're talking about White Boy Rick, who, if you have not seen the movie starring. Oh, God, what's the guy's name who played him?
Josh Clark
Matthew McConaughey.
Chuck Bryant
No, he played the dad. Oh, Matthew McConaughey.
Josh Clark
That makes a little more sense.
Chuck Bryant
Older than we are.
Josh Clark
I know. I was like, did they dress him up like a teenager?
Chelsea Handler
Yeah.
Chuck Bryant
How did he play a 14 year old? I can't remember the kid's name, but I have not seen that movie. There's also a bunch of documentaries, but in particular one that's pretty good about this kid in the 80s, Rick Wersch, who was an FBI informant at the age of 14. In secret.
Josh Clark
Yes. And this is completely 100% true. Like, this has been vetted, thoroughly researched. And his claims, although they seem like, okay, this is just some guy talking, you know, who's in prison, just keeping himself from getting bored. Nope. Like, basically everything he's ever said about his time as an FBI informant and a teenage drug runner has been. Has been confirmed. So this is an amazing true story. And it's also a sad true story in a lot of ways too, because this guy lost a significant portion of his life to really stupid drug laws at the height of the war on drugs, when everybody was so gung ho about just lock them up, lock the drug dealers up and go ahead and lock up the drug users while you do it too. And it was a bad time to be caught with kilos of coke, I can tell you that.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. After he had been almost induced into this lifestyle by the FBI as an informant. And then when that was, as you'll see when that was taken away, I think it's hard for a kid to give up that lifestyle. Cause that's his life at that point.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Chuck Bryant
And then, you know, turned on him and there was cover ups and it was Detroit. Detroit.
Josh Clark
Yeah. So I think to describe how the FBI induced him to do it, you can kind of say that they put a bunch of cash in his hand.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
Josh Clark
Popped his collar, turned him around by the shoulders, and shoved him out onto the street. That's basically how they induced him to essentially become a member of the east Detroit drug scene. Like, drug supply scene. He was rolling with, like, as big as you get essentially at the time.
Chuck Bryant
All right, so let's go back, I guess to his birth in 1969. He's close couple of years older than me. And like you said, this was the east side of Detroit when he was 6. This is Rick Wirsch Jr. His parents separated, his mom moved out to the burbs. And then generally he and his sister dawn lived with their dad, Matthew McConaughey, Richard Wirsch Sr. And it was a time where the auto industry was Disappearing in Detroit. You know, the kind of familiar story of Detroit is that it fell into sort of violence and drugs and crack came along and white flight happened in a big, big way. So Rick and Dawn and their father were a bit of an anomaly as a white family that kind of stayed where they were on the Detroit's east side at the time.
Josh Clark
Yeah. And one reason why is because this was their neighborhood. White boy Rick's grandparents lived directly across the street from him. So, like, these were his dad's parents. It was like a family community. There were other people who were sticking around, but, yeah, they were. They were definitely outnumbered by the people who were moving to town to essentially take over Detroit. And there was a market just ripe for being taken over. And it was. There was this one group called the Chamber Brothers. They moved from Arkansas and became some of the biggest dealers in town. So much so that at one point they controlled a formerly opulent apartment building. It was their stronghold, headquarters that they sold crack out of, manufacture crack out of. It was a big, big operation. And it was just right there in the middle of Detroit. Because this is one of the most lawless times in the history of that city, entire history. Not only was it the drug people, the cops were about as dirty as they come at the time, too.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. So Rick's dad was a kind of a schemer, had, you know, various get rich or make a little bit of money quick scams going on here and there. He worked as a manager of a gun store as well and bought and sold guns out of his house, including, like, taking his son to gun shows when he was just a kid. But the result of that was is that his dad knew and was, you know, had FBI guys, like, as his customers. He had agents that he was friendly with because they would buy guns from him. And so he ended up, like this was sort of the. The entree into what would end up being his son's work with the FBI is that he just knew these guys as customers.
Josh Clark
Yeah. And one thing I saw in there was an Atavist article that was really, really good. But they basically said that. That Richard Wirsch senior, he was a hustler and he had a fascination with money. That was his big focus in life, was to make money. And his son Rick definitely adopted that from him. Like, he definitely got that from his dad. So he didn't have a lot of options to make money at the time, aside from the drug trade. But he didn't really get into that, at least not at first. But he Was still doing things like breaking into houses and making money that way. So, I mean, like, he, he was definitely a street smart kid, but he just wasn't involved in drug trafficking at the time.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, his sister dawn took up a crack habit and started dating a guy named Terrence Bell. And Terrence took. And as you'll see, a lot of people took white boy Rick under their wing. I think he was, you know, I've seen interviews. He seems like he was a pretty affable, likable guy because it seems like he made friends everywhere he went and like, had these sort of older, you know, these are rough guys, obviously, but older guys taking him under the wing and sort of saying like, hey, here's how you rob a house, here's how you do this. And so that's what. Terrence Bell, he was kind of the first guy to do that. Taught him how to rob houses, taught him how to bus cars. There was this one story where someone stole their family car and they went after them. And Rick, at 14, like, used his sister's.22 that she kept in her purse to shoot at these guys. Didn't hit anybody. But it was, you know, he was like in the mix at this point for sure.
Josh Clark
I can tell you that at 14, I had not ever shot at anybody.
Chuck Bryant
I had not. I had shot a gun because we had a friend who was a cop who had a cabin in the mountains, and so he would take us up there to like, shoot target practice occasionally. But that was my only gunplay as a child.
Josh Clark
Right. You never turned it on the guy?
Chuck Bryant
No, no, no.
Josh Clark
Okay, yeah, same here.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
Josh Clark
So let's see. Spring of 1984, Rick Jr. Is 14 at the time. And the FBI, I guess, who were friends with senior Richard Senior were like, you know, this guy is living in east Detroit. East Detroit is a hotbed of this new crack epidemic. Let's go see if this guy can give us some info because we're friendly with him. So they showed up at the Worsh house in east Detroit and sat down with Worsh senior Richard Senior, and basically said, we just want any information you can have. We have a bunch of pictures here. Can you ID any of these people that we've been following but don't know who they are? And Richard Warsh was like, I, I don't know who those people are. I'm sorry, I can't help you. But Rick Jr. Piped up and he's like, oh, well, this guy is Johnny Curry, or that guy's big man Curry. And Just started pointing people out. And the FBI suddenly was like, well, how much does this kid know? Let's find out what he can tell us. And that's kind of where the whole thing kicked off.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. They were interested in the Curry twins. Johnny was Little man, and I think you mentioned Big man, that was Leo. The two brothers, even though they were twins, I guess one might have been a little bigger than the other. I'm not sure.
Josh Clark
I guess I couldn't make heads or tails of that either.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, but they were the main drug guys on the east side of Detroit at the time. And they were also interested the FBI in the Curry gang because Johnny Curry, who was Little man, was married to Kathy Volson now Kathy Vulcan Curry, or then who happened to be the niece of the mayor of Detroit at the time, Coleman Young. And so, you know, we have a situation building here where there's clear kind of COVID ups and corruption already happening because the niece of the mayor is dating like a known drug guy and the feds are like, you know, we don't have any allegiance to these guys, so we want to bust them.
Josh Clark
Sure, exactly. They wanted to take down the crooked cops. Right. So that, that connection between City hall and the police department and the East Detroit drug trade all ran right. Directly through Kathy Olson. Right. She was the thing that connected him. But after that, you know, that initial connection, the other kind of tethers started to, to form between those two groups. And before you know it, I mean, City hall was in the police department, were in bed with the drug trade in Detroit pretty quickly. One of the guys who is a major player in this, his name was Gil Hill. Yeah, he was the homicide commander, the guy in charge of all homicides in Detroit. And this was a time when Detroit had something like 700 homicides a year. Now it's like 165. Like that is a mind boggling number of, of murders in Detroit, considering also that its population had plummeted too. Right?
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
Josh Clark
This guy's in charge of all of those. His name's Gil Hill. And he also popped up elsewhere too, right?
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, I mean, strange but true. He was, if you've ever seen Eddie Murphy's great, great film Beverly Hills cop from 1984, he was the Inspector Todd. He was the one that was always yelling at Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. And you might think, oh, that's pretty cool. And it is pretty cool. But Gil Hill was not a good dude, as we'll see. He took payoffs and tried to put hits out on this Kid. And yeah, so he was in on the bad stuff big time.
Josh Clark
Big time. And he also seems to have been an operative for the mayor from what I can tell, although I believe the mayor, nothing ever stuck with him. I don't even think he was ever indicted. He seems to have been well aware of all this, especially because the person who the cops in city hall and the criminals connected through was his niece who apparently he raised like a daughter.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
Josh Clark
So at the time, this kid, he's just Richard Worsh Jr. Ricky I think everybody called him, he's 14 and the FBI is sitting in his living room and they're starting to show him pictures now. Not his dad, his dad just kind of like, okay son, well have a seat and show these guys what you want or what you know. And so being 14, Rick said that he was, he was like, wow, these really important authority figures are paying attention to me. Yeah, let's see what I can do. And he just started pointing people out. And the FBI said we're going to do something a little unorthodox. I'm sure that's how they put it. And made scare quotes and rolled their eyes at the time.
Chuck Bryant
I think they said wacky, right?
Josh Clark
Exactly. I've just got the wackiest idea. Idea, yeah. But what if you, 14 year old Rick became a federal informant for us, the FBI, what do you think? Would you like to do that? And Rick's dad, being the amazing father figure that he was, was like, I don't know son, it's up to you. You're 14. Do you want to be a federal informant and put your life on the line every time you walk outside of the house? And Rick Jr. Said yes, yes I do. And he actually became an off the books informant for the FBI in 1984, age 14.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, he was a CI. He was not legally allowed to do something like that obviously. So the FBI, like you said, he kept it off the books. He was never listed as the informant, but they had to have something listed. So they said, well, can we use you dad? Can we use your name and have everything kind of flow through you? And he said, sure, that sounds good to me. So Richard Sr. Was approved in June 1984 technically as the informant, but it was really his son. And pretty soon. Cause I said Rick was a likable kid and made friends easily. He made friends with a guy named Rudel Curry who was the little brother of the twins, Johnny and Leo. Little Boo was 23 years old and they became buddies. He was a 23 year old with a, with a 14 year old friend who, like, you know, it was kind of like, hey, Spike.
Kerry Brownstein
Hey, Spike.
Chuck Bryant
Like one of those deals, he had this kid following around and like, they loved cars and they loved motorcycles and they loved kind of that lifestyle. And so before you know it, they were fast friends. And Boo invited Rick to hang out, hang out with him. Like, ride around in the, in the car, go to the roller rink. And apparently the Johnny, one of the twins is a guy who came up with the name White Boy Rick.
Kerry Brownstein
Yeah.
Josh Clark
One of the things that I gathered about a White Boy Rick was that even at 14, 15, 16, he could hang with older people and ultimately eventually be treated kind of like an equal.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
Josh Clark
I mean, which again, like, just stop and think about that. Like, that's just crazy in and of itself, let alone the fact that this kid is actually a federal informant. Right. That was his role. That was his purpose for making friends with Boo Curry and hanging out with the Curry gang was to get information to give to the FBI. That's why he showed up. And he, like you said, he was so affable and could hang that they, they opened him, they opened their organization up to him. And he would be in some really high level meetings. Like, he knew a lot of stuff that he, he kind of gathered over the next three, four years, for sure.
Chuck Bryant
Maybe that's a good time to take a break. What a setup.
Josh Clark
Yeah, I think so.
Chuck Bryant
Especially if you never heard about this story. Like, can you imagine hearing this for the first time?
Josh Clark
I know, I envy those people.
Chuck Bryant
All right, so we'll be right back after this and talk about where it's headed next. Learning things. When you can judge the stuff, you should know.
Ari Chambers
What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.
Sam J
Hey, what's up, y'?
Ari Chambers
All?
Sam J
It's your girl, Sam J.
Ari Chambers
And we're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together. And I heart women's sports because, let's
Sam J
be real, women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days.
Ari Chambers
So Kelsey Findler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii.
Sam J
My first thought is just like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we, what are we eating?
Ari Chambers
The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire, entire timeline.
Sam J
And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports.
Ari Chambers
Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalenka.
Sam J
Shout out to you.
Josh Clark
Naomi, you get the Palm.
Ari Chambers
Naomi, you get the Palm for that.
Sam J
Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's Sports on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Kerry Brownstein
Hey, Portlandia fans.
Fred Armisen
Kerry Brownstein and Fred Armisen here, you
Kerry Brownstein
know us, or rather, you know them. Tony and Candace, Nina and Lance, Spike and yes, the chicken.
Fred Armisen
We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia. Ao rewatch our brand new podcast.
Kerry Brownstein
Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process.
Fred Armisen
How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it.
Kerry Brownstein
And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Krisel, the mayor himself, Kyle MacLachlan, legendary musician Amy Mann, and and many more.
Fred Armisen
Kyle is going for it. Here you fully improvised. Not just words, but a song, a melody.
Chuck Bryant
Well, I thought he was gonna write. I thought you were all gonna write a song.
Fred Armisen
I remember you thinking that.
Kerry Brownstein
Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chelsea Handler
This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week the news gets worse, the world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem.
Yamaneika Saunders
If you come over here to play games, I' ma check you, okay? If you do some in the news that don't sound good, I'mma play you.
Chelsea Handler
Join Yamanika Saunders as she breaks down the week's most problematic stories on her new podcast. You're the Problem with Yamaneika.
Yamaneika Saunders
Do you know I just found out who Sydney Sweeney was.
Chelsea Handler
New episodes, weekly every Wednesday as part of my new network, the Dear Chelsea Network.
Yamaneika Saunders
If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men do better or do less so I don't have to do so much.
Chelsea Handler
So join Yamaneeka each episode as she answers one question. Who's the problem?
Yamaneika Saunders
I'm Yamaneika, and I'm out. Listen to youo're the Problem with Yamaneka on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chuck Bryant
All right, so little white boy Rick is hanging out with his older friends. They're doing bad stuff and he's, you know, he's feeding information to the FBI that they're using, like kind of on a smaller scale, some kind of, kind of lower level crimes. I wouldn't say petty crimes, probably above that level, but nothing huge. But over a couple of years, like they are feeding him money like you said in Act 1. I think they said over the first couple of years, they paid him about $30,000 off the books to use, to buy cocaine sometimes and to make sure he could kind of live that lifestyle. So before you know it, little 14 year old white boy Rick has got a fur coat and a Rolex and he has cars. Even though he's 14 years old and
Josh Clark
can't legally drive, but he still drove them. He had a white Jeep and the snowman was stenciled on the back.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, he's still into cars.
Josh Clark
Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, he has a thing for cars, it turns out. But yeah, he made like 30 grand over the next two years, which is almost 100 grand in today's dollars. Do you remember how much money you made between the ages of 14 and 16?
Chuck Bryant
I made 325 an hour as a busboy. Yeah, that was minimum wage, so probably 40 bucks a week or something.
Josh Clark
Okay, so I estimated I maybe made something like the neighborhood of $2,000 over those, those years.
Chuck Bryant
Oh, okay.
Josh Clark
This is like.
Chuck Bryant
So you were hustling too?
Josh Clark
No, I mean, I just had jobs here or there and I think if you put it all together, it would probably equal that over two years.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, probably.
Josh Clark
So a thousand.
Chuck Bryant
I mean, I think both of us liked having our own money as kids for sure. So we didn't. Like, my parents didn't give me money. I don't think your parents probably gave you money either, right?
Josh Clark
I had something of an allowance, but it dwindled as I got older. Like by the time I was 30, it was almost nothing.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, but like, I wanted to buy. I wanted to go to concerts for seven bucks and I wanted to buy records and you wanted to buy cigarettes.
Josh Clark
I wanted to buy cigarettes. I wanted to buy Slim Jims and Twix and Kingsbury non alcoholic beer.
Chuck Bryant
It's very empowering to make money as a kid. You know, I think that's not completely gone away, but I don't think teenagers have jobs these days like we did back then.
Josh Clark
No, but you just said A mouthful, Chuck. Just having whatever money you make. What'd you say, 40 bucks a week?
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, probably something like that. You know, when I was early on.
Josh Clark
Right, okay. And you were empowered by that, by walking, by, getting that paycheck, cashing it. I got 40 bucks. I'm 15 years old. Imagine having 10,000 bucks at the end of a week.
Chuck Bryant
I would have had a Rolex.
Josh Clark
And you're 15 years old. Yeah, but. And a snowman Jeep. That's how off the rails this kid's life suddenly got. Because the FBI had pushed him into this life and said, go, go. You know, here's some money. Go buy a mink coat. Go buy a Rolex. And this kid could do it. And, I mean, just the fact that he is still alive, wasn't killed back then and didn't manage to kill anybody or anything like that. Like, he kept it together enough that, like, it actually turned out about as good as it could. Although we'll see that it turned out really rotten. But I don't know. I'm not quite sure how to put what I'm saying. It just seems like this could have gone so wrong so many different ways. Just from feeling, like, emboldened and powerful and strong from all that money he had at that really tender age.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. And there was no one, as far as I could tell, in the FBI that was like, hey, maybe we maybe shouldn't let this kid do this. No, because he's a child.
Josh Clark
Exactly. Oh, and his dad wasn't saying that either. So I want to say the impression I have of his dad is that he was not a bad guy. And he does seem to regret a lot of the decisions he didn't make back at this time. So I don't think he was, like, just a bad dude who didn't care. He seems like he was pretty involved in his son's life. The problem was his son's life included, you know, driving a Jeep that said the snowman on back and selling cocaine for the FBI.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, I mean, I think the. What the takeaway is, is that ultimately his dad said, all right, all right, all right.
Josh Clark
That's right.
Chuck Bryant
I'm really curious to see this movie now. I wonder how McConaughey plays this dude.
Josh Clark
I'm sure exactly like you just said,
Chuck Bryant
because he not scream east side Detroit.
Josh Clark
No, he really doesn't.
Chuck Bryant
All right, so you said something about him avoiding getting killed, which is fairly remarkable. But he did get shot at least once. In November of 84, he was shot in the stomach by a curry Gang member who said it was an accident. But Rick was like. Initially was like, hey, they found out who I am. That's why I got shot. The girlfriend of the guy who shot him called 911, and before the ambulance could get there, there were some other gang members who showed up, put him in the backseat of the car. And he didn't know, like, are they taking me to a hospital? Are they gonna take me out and dump me in the woods? Like, what's going on? And perhaps so had it not been for that ambulance showing up and blocking the driveway and saying, like, give that kid to us now.
Josh Clark
Yeah, he. I guess that had a really, like a big chilling effect. And he was ready to quit. And the FBI showed up at his hospital room and said, just keep going. They would have killed you if they actually did know.
Chuck Bryant
Right.
Josh Clark
They wouldn't have let you go in an ambulance. You would be dead already. So just keep going. And I guess he was like, I don't know. And they're like, got 10 grand right here. And he's like, all right, you guys, you know me so well. And he got back to it.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. And not only that, they said, you can actually use this Rick.
Josh Clark
Right?
Chuck Bryant
Like, you got street cred now. And not many people, especially your age, have been shot and lived to tell about it. So, like, you're kind of a cool kid now in that gang. And he kind of was. I mean, it worked out that way.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Chuck Bryant
I think in February of 85, after he'd been doing this a little while, is when they got their first, like really big raid, almost at sting. But he had, you know, Rick gave him information that led to about 200 grand in cash when they raided a house, some video equipment, obviously a lot of cocaine and guns, like all the things you would expect to find.
Josh Clark
I saw they just had two punch bowls full of cocaine just sitting out on the table.
Chuck Bryant
Nice. Punch bowls are big.
Josh Clark
That kind of house.
Chuck Bryant
That's a lot of cocaine.
Josh Clark
It really is. Yeah. There was an FBI agent named John Anthony who said that that Rick was the most productive informant the agency had in Detroit at the time. The whole city, not just east Detroit. This is a 15 year old kid. I mean, that's a huge bus to get 200 grand in $1985 and punch bowls of cocaine. So he becomes such an amazing asset, Chuck, that at one point, the Curry gang, bunch of other big drug dealers from Detroit were going to see the Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hearns fight. Because Hearns was the pride of Detroit. And this is a Title middleweight fight, I believe in 1985. The Hitman. Right. So all these Detroit drug dealers were going to watch the match and they invited white boy Rick and the FBI got him like a high quality fake ID and paid to send him to Vegas, paid for his plane ticket, paid for his hotel, gave him some walking around money and said go 15 year old, go to Las Vegas with a group of high level drug dealers and just find out what you can. And he did.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, yeah, it's kids in Vegas at the Tommy Hearns fight. Yeah, yeah. I mean the story just gets crazier after he gets back from Vegas. Part of the Curry gang engaged in a drive by shooting, accidentally killed a 13 year old boy named Damian Lucas. And the cops basically made this investigation go away. And Rick was like it was starting to kind of dawn on him because of this personal tie that the Currys had with the mayor that like, wait a minute, like this is now getting covered up on a large scale. Cause they've killed this kid, this 13 year old, a couple of years younger than me. And Johnny Curry gave Beverly hills cop guy 10 grand as a bribe to cover it up. And Rick found out about this.
Josh Clark
Yeah, he was riding around in a car with Johnny Curry who had Gil Hill, Commander Gil Hill, on. Oh, what is it called when you have it on speaker? He had him on speaker and they were talking about covering it up for the Curry gang and he did like that was a big, big turning point in this whole story. The murder of Damian Lucas.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. So the FBI, you know, things are getting pretty hairy. They cut ties with him just before he turned 16. Richard Sr. Was now off the books as the, I guess fake informant in June of 1986. And you know, it seems pretty clear that they're probably worried like, hey, this has gone far enough. If this gets out that we've done this, it's not going to look great for us as feds. And this is when I kind of remarked earlier about how well now this kid is in this lifestyle and he's having the cord pulled on him, like the rug pulled out from under him. And so Rick does what a kid that age and that, you know, not quite yet fully formed brain would do, which is, hey, I'm gonna keep doing this stuff. So he got into the real drug trade after the FBI dropped him.
Josh Clark
Yeah, that is, it's disputed whether that happened after or before they dropped him. So like during as he was an FBI informant. And it seems like it's probably, there's a really good chance that it actually had happened. And that one of the reasons the FBI dropped him was because his actual drug career was taking off quite nicely. And they were like, we just. This kid's getting too hot. Rather than being like, we're going to bring you in from the cold, kid. Like, we're going to move you somewhere because we did this to you. We need to give you, set you up with a normal life. They just walked away, like, dusting their hands off and left him to this life in East Detroit as a. He eventually became a very prominent drug dealer.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. And, you know, all the connections he made were valuable connections. As, you know, his. I don't want to say legit, but I guess he was a legit drug dealer.
Josh Clark
Yeah.
Chuck Bryant
One of the guys, the main guys who kind of got him involved was a friend he made through those connections with the Currys was a wholesale cocaine guy named Art Derrick. He was a suburban dude who was operating some drug planes that were coming up into Miami. And Rick became friends with him and his son. And the kid, 16 years old at this point, starts buying as much as like, 50 kilos at a time. As a cocaine wholesaler himself is what they call a weight man. Like, he's not operating a ring of, like, dealers or anything like that, but he's bringing in the large amounts and selling that stuff.
Josh Clark
Right. Which just by that, by virtue of that, he automatically made less money. I saw FBI agent estimate he was probably making $5,000 off a key, but he was selling tons and tons of keys. So he was making, like, really significant money. But you could also take a single key and turned it into a million dollars broken down into, like. And converted into $5 hits of crack if you were willing to do all that. That's what the Chamber brothers did. Those guys who took over the apartment building, they made an estimated $55 million a year doing that. But, I mean, like, White Boy Rick was later implicated as being one of the people who supplied the Chamber brothers with their cocaine. Like, he became a wholesale coke dealer. That's not necessarily true, but he definitely did supply plenty of people with their cocaine as a wholesale coke dealer. And one of the things that he didn't do this to me really stands out. He hung with the Currys, but he never became a Curry soldier. He never became a Curry drug dealer. He had his own operation essentially going on where he sold keys to other people. And he was just basically an associate of the Currys, which I thought was super cool. Like, he just kept his own identity rather than just being Absorbed into the Curry gang.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. Well, he ended up getting some of the Curry brothers in trouble just from all the information they had fed, you know, the FBI. Over the years, they were starting to make arrest. I think in 87, they indicted at least the twins and some other people in their organization, and they pleaded guilty at the time to drugs and racketeering. Obviously, they kept it quiet about the city government at that point. They were still, like, not selling out the mayor and the corrupt cops, and the city was like, great, we need to keep it this way. And I think that's when we found out about Gil Hill, Beverly Hills Cop. Gil Hill trying to get this guy, Nate Boone Kraft to assassinate little white boy Rick. I think he offered him 125 grand, and he tried to kill him a couple of times.
Josh Clark
Yeah. You know that you've arrived if you're 16 years old and you're not going to be murdered, you're going to be assassinated. That means, you know a lot.
Chuck Bryant
And the guy from Beverly Hills Cop was the one making the call, right?
Josh Clark
Yeah. It's like, who would ever believe this, Right?
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
Josh Clark
So, yeah. Nate Boonecraft later admitted to trying on two different occasions to. To carry out that hit.
Chuck Bryant
So Rick is trying to capitalize on the Currys now suddenly being. Not completely out of the picture, but at least some of the main guys being rounded up and kind of filled the void, the drug void that was left by them. And he starts dating Kathy vlsen. She was 24, he was 17. He was making about 30 grand a month, and has three kids at this point.
Josh Clark
Yeah, I don't know if they were all with her. I don't think they were, but I think his firstborn, Keisha was. And the fact that Kathy Wilson started dating him, you said that, you know, he was a legit drug dealer as. As legit as a drug dealer can be. She helped legitimize him. Like, she is a. And she was, especially at this time, a big, big deal in East Detroit. And all of a sudden, like this, essentially, like, East Detroit royalty, like criminal royalty, comes down and is like, I'm gonna start dating you now, white boy Rick. And she. She essentially, like, just put that seal of approval on him. That. That just kind of really gave him a certain luster in that area.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. And. And presumably did not get arrested herself for, you know, having sex with an underage kid.
Josh Clark
No, no. I think they had other things in mind. But even still, she. She would not have gotten arrested because she had Detroit PD keeping tabs on her as Protection because the mayor had ordered the DPD to constantly surveil her to make sure she was okay, not to catch her with anything. In fact, to look the other way on it so she could essentially do anything she wanted to and it would have been fine for her for sure.
Chuck Bryant
All right, well, let's take our second break and we'll finish up with the saga of White Boy Rick right after this.
Josh Clark
Okay, Chuck. So the party ends on May 22, 1987. The Detroit Police decide that Rick needs to go down. If Nate Boonecraft can't kill him, we're just going to do it the old fashioned way and arrest him and just lock him up. And they found 30 grand in cash in his car. They also found eight keys of cocaine that was stashed under a neighbor's porch that Rick said, yeah, that's mine. Yeah, he was 17, so he's still a juvenile. And he got arrested with eight keys and 30, 30 grand in cash. He made bail and then a few months later in October, he was arrested again, this time with 5 kilos of cocaine and guns, drug paraphernalia, the whole thing. Even worse, some of the stuff was found in his dad's house and his grandparents house, which means they could have gone to prison, lost their houses. Like they, they really had him. If they didn't have him in May, they really had him in October. Right. And so around about this time, the name White Boy Rick becomes much more widely known. Not just in East Detroit, but in Detroit as a whole and then very quickly across the nation. Because it was such a crazy novelty.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
Josh Clark
That there was this 17 year old white kid who was essentially the only white kid in East Detroit's drug trade and seemed to be pretty powerful. And in fact the media in particular, Chris Hansen, really. What's the word I'm looking for?
Chuck Bryant
I don't know.
Josh Clark
Fraudulently inflated the importance of White Boy Rick, like right out of the gate just because it was so novel.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's the media and that's what the media does. So they. Yeah, it was very sensationalized. You know, this stuff obviously happened, but it's like, hey, let's run, you know, another sort of injustice basically was like, hey, let's run with this story. Cause this is a kid and it'll, you know, there weren't clicks at the time, but like it'll get views or whatever on our station and in our newspaper. So it was a big sort of sensational trial when he finally was brought forward the following January. And at the beginning, the feds met with Rick, and his dad and his mom are like, hey, if you want to testify and turn state's evidence against this, everybody, basically, you can do that. And we're going to, you know, we can help you out. And he was like, dude, I would get killed so fast your head would spin. So, no, thank you.
Josh Clark
Right? Yeah. So he passed on that. He was like, I'm going to see what I can do with the jury. He actually felt pretty good about his chances because they hadn't found the eight keys on him. They found it under a neighbor's porch. Like, there were all sorts of extenuating circumstances. The problem was he had the full force and weight of Detroit City hall and the Detroit Police Department against him in every back channel you can imagine in the city at that time. They were working to get him convicted as badly as he could be convicted. The media wasn't helping somebody. I think Chris Hansen, again, he started in Detroit. He would go on to be the To Catch a Predator guy. They showed an org chart which showed all of the city's biggest drug dealers, and guess who was at the very top, the kingpin they portrayed as the guy who supplied all of the big drug dealers in Detroit. Why no, other than white boy Rick? Because, remember, they were trying to really kind of make this even more sensational than it already was. So they. They just said, well, this guy's actually the guy. Can you believe that? And that did not help his chances either, because he started to be seen as if there's a crack epidemic in Detroit. This guy is ground zero for the problem.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. They did not disclose in the trial at any point that he was a federal informant, that he was a CIA. He said later, like, you know, Rick's talked a lot about this over the years, but he later claimed that he was. That the lawyers that they assigned him, the public defenders, were connected to the mayor, who obviously was kind of trying to make all this go away and cover up for everything on his family side and was like, hey, lock this kid away, basically, and make sure these lawyers make sure that happened. One of those. That hasn't been proven, but this is what Rick said makes a lot of sense. And one of those lawyers that was on his team went on to fight his parole in 2003. So that kind of says it all.
Josh Clark
It really does. Yeah, that's not. That's not good defense right there. The judge who convicted him said that he was worse than a mass murderer during his sentencing, I believe. And even if the Judge hadn't wanted to do this. She had no choice. He was given life in prison without parole at age 17. And the reason why the judge had no choice is because about 10 years earlier, Michigan had passed a law called the 650 lifer law, where if you were caught with 650 grams or more of cocaine, which is about one and a half pounds or a little under half of a kilo, you got a life sentence without parole, no questions asked. If you were convicted of that, you went to prison for life. And this kid was 17 and got that sentence and was told that he was worse than a mass murderer. So things were not looking very good for him when he was sentenced. After he was convicted, yeah, for sure.
Chuck Bryant
It was a period in our country where mandatory minimums were kind of popping up all over the place. For what it's worth, the governor who signed that one said it was the greatest mistake of his career, probably to make Rick feel much better. But after the trial, Matthew McConaughey is giving interviews, and he's basically saying, like, hey, we were federal informants. My son, at 14, was a federal informant. But at this point, this wasn't disclosed in the trial or anything. So everyone thinks it's just this dad kind of ranting this crazy talk. No one's taking him seriously. They didn't have any kind of credibility. And in 1991, in prison, Rick starts working for the Feds again from prison in an operation called Operation Backbone.
Josh Clark
Right. One of the FBI agents who had worked with him before, I think he was the first one who turned Rick into an informant at age 14. His name was Greg Schwartz. He came to him years later for this Operation Backbone and said, we've been listening in to the Currys for years now, and we are. It's quite clear that they are in bed with the Detroit Police Department and City hall, and it's time for us to take them down. We need your help. So he and Kathy Volson were. They'd broken up, but they remained friendly, and she would visit him in prison pretty regularly. So because she was the thing that everything centered on, he basically used her to infect the. The drug and City hall connection with a DEA agent, or, I'm sorry, FBI agent who went undercover and carried out, like, this highly successful Operation Backbone.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, it was a big. They got 11 cops. Other people obviously were arrested, but they got, you know, 11 crooked cops out of that. One of them was. Or, I mean, several of them were, like, kind of in the Mayor Young's inner circle. I think his Favorite bodyguard was implicated. His brother in law, who was Kathy Olson's father, was implicated and she was even implicated at first and initially charged, but the charges on her were dropped.
Josh Clark
Yeah, for sure. One of the things I saw, Chuck, that one of the cops, the Detroit cops did was asked to do as part of this sting was to carry an assault rifle around airport security so that it could be taken aboard a plane to be used in a hit in Chicago. And he did it like that's how dirty the cops were. And the FBI was the one. They were the ones setting him up. Because this undercover agent has totally infiltrated this group because White Boy Rick vouched for him over and over again and introduced him to Kathy Wilson Curry, who kind of tacitly vouched for him too. It was about as great of an operation as you could hope for if you're an FBI person. The mayor almost came very, he came very close to going down too. He didn't. And yet despite all this cooperation, despite all the stuff he had done for the FBI up to this point, he could not get paroled to save his life.
Chuck Bryant
No, I think, you know, you said it was about. It went about as well as it could. I think it quite didn't because or didn't quite because they would have loved to have gotten the mayor and they would have loved to have gotten the higher ups in the police department. They ended up getting, you know, rank and file cops. They didn't get Gil Hill. They had a, literally like Rick testified, like, hey, I heard a phone call. Where Beverly, that guy from Beverly Hills copy. Agreed to cover up that kid's killing from the drive by shooting. And he was never charged. So, you know, they didn't get the big fish, but they certainly got enough people. I think this was not too long after the Marion Barry scandal. Smoking crack as a mayor, like a high profile mayor. And I think there was a lot of just like, hey, we don't need another scandal of another high profile mayor in this country like doing the wrong thing, right?
Josh Clark
So Greg Schwartz actually he, he showed up, he said, okay, you helped us out. It was, it was good enough for us to reward you. So we're going to move you to a medium security prison in Florida and we're going to basically put you under witness protection under an assumed name. And while he was there in Florida, this was, I think up to the 2000s. So he was in Florida for a while. He was just doing his thing. And remember we talked about how much he loved cars. Well, he was caught running or at least participating in a car theft ring, a stolen car ring from prison. He was helping coordinate the whole thing. And that's tough to do and not get caught because eventually your conversation is going to be overheard or listened to and you're going to get in trouble. And that's exactly what happened. They got him on racketeering charges in 2005.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. So that lands him back in Michigan in prison. And this whole time, White Boy Rick is in prison for decades at this point. And everyone else that he had been associating with was getting out. Johnny Curry got out in 99. That hitman that tried to kill him twice and admitted to murdering 30 people did 17 years and then cooperated with the cops. That mandatory minimum that sent him the 650 lifer that was overturned by the Michigan Supreme Court in 1998. And everyone else that had been impacted by that law ended up free within six years. But Rick stayed in prison. He just kept getting denied parole. I think the first One was in 2003. He asked some of the feds that he was working with to help him out and they wouldn't do it. One of the guys that he had worked with, a guy named Herman Groman, basically was like, all right, I'll tell him about Operation Backbone. And he helped us out with that. But not the stuff from when you were 14.
Josh Clark
Yeah. The problem is none of that was ever going to help because White Boy Rick had broken a really big rule by ratting out on cops. He was smart enough to not rat out his drug dealer friends, but he definitely ratted out on the cops. And the cops went to great lengths to make sure he stayed in prison, to, to make an example out of him and to punish him too. And so in a really unusual move, a bunch of Detroit police officers went to his 2003 parole hearing and basically just lied, lied, lied about what a horrible criminal he was, like, what a terrible effect he had on Detroit and how he really needed to stay in prison. And he got denied, got denied again in 2008 and he got denied again in 2012 too.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, that Greg Schwartz, the fed this time actually wrote a letter saying, like, hey, he did a lot of stuff with us. Actually it wasn't just Operation Backbone, that Damian Lucas murder. He tried to help us out with that, that 13 year old kid who got killed. And he said, we never disclosed this stuff because he was a kid and we would have been exposed and embarrassed that the federal government was working with a kid in this capacity. They rejected that one too Even though he finally had someone willing to vouch for him. And until 2013, there wasn't a lot of. I mean, aside from just the earlier time when he actually got sent to prison, it had really quieted down about White Boy Rick. Like, no one kind of knew who he was. And then in 2013, that there was a guy named Seth Ferranti, who was an incarcerated journalist. He wrote a column at the Fix that reported a lot of this stuff. And then that was picked up by Evan Hughes, who wrote that ATAVUS article in 2015 that you were talking about that we read. And that was it. All of a sudden it was fully out there. Like, he didn't even get to go to his dad's funeral. His dad died while he was in prison and he has like six grandchildren at this point, in his 40s, which is remarkable. And he's like, not met these kids at this point.
Josh Clark
No. So one thing that makes it like really kind of gets across how just under the thumb of the Detroit Police Department, this kid was still decades on. Judge Dana Hathaway, I think she was the original judge in his. In his trial, she threw out the life sentence as a judge. Right. This wasn't something she did in her leisure time. Like, she officially threw out his life sentence. And prosecutors appealed and won. So he had his life sentence, like, was upheld, what, 30 years later. And Hathaway even went on the record saying that this whole thing was very fishy. Finally, two years later, he's granted parole. This is 13 years after the last person who was given a life sentence under that Michigan 650 lifer law had already been let out. He was the only one. And his. His incarceration continued for 13 more years. He got out in 2017, age 47. And you would think that would be the end of the story, Chuck, but it was not, was it?
Chuck Bryant
No. He gets that parole and probably, or at least maybe had something to do with those movies that we were talking about, the documentary and the Matthew McConaughey movie, because certainly high profile enough to bring his name back into the forefront. And then people start asking questions and stuff like that of the feds. But he had to stay or I guess got re sentenced from the prison sentence in Florida for that stolen car stuff. So he's back in jail in Florida. He was bouncing back and forth. Finally released from there in July of 2020. I think he was 51 at the time, and was like, I need some money. I need some restitution. He sued the feds, of course, and he didn't get anything?
Josh Clark
No. The judge said the statute of limitations had run out in 2006. And he's like, well, I couldn't really say anything while I was in jail because I would have gotten beaten up on a daily basis by the guards. And they said, sorry, pal, like, none of your very legitimate suits against the federal government are going to be able to be tried. So. Yeah, apparently he's working on his own documentary project about his life, too, with hip hop director Hype Williams.
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, I worked with Hype back in the day.
Josh Clark
Oh, yeah? Is he related to Freedom Williams?
Chuck Bryant
I have no idea. But Hype was one of the biggest names in the game back then.
Josh Clark
Oh, yeah.
Chuck Bryant
And I'll tell you off mic.
Josh Clark
Okay, some other stuff. I can't wait to hear this. Okay, well, since I want to hurry up and end this episode because I want to hear what Chuck has to say about Hype Williams, I think it's time for listener mail.
Chuck Bryant
Instead of listener mail, we're going to give issue one last. Well, not one last, but another reminder about our voyage. Our Stuff at Sea voyage aboard the Valiant lady of Virgin Cruises, which will take place October 2nd through 7th.
Josh Clark
Where are we going?
Chuck Bryant
We're going from New York City to Bermuda and we're going to be doing our live show and we're going to be with our buddies from Stuff they don't want you to know and Stuff mom never told you. And we're going to be doing, like, other events on board. It's going to be a lot of fun.
Josh Clark
Yeah. You can go to virginvoyages.com stuff at sea and start booking Passage today. That's what they call it on the high seas, Booking Passage. And come float around with us for five days. It'll be fun.
Chuck Bryant
That's right. Can't wait.
Josh Clark
Can't wait. And we also can't wait to hear from you via email, which you can send to stuffpodcastheartradio.com
Fred Armisen
Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite show.
Chuck Bryant
This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.
This gripping episode dives into the real-life story of "White Boy Rick," aka Rick Wershe Jr., the Detroit teenager who became an FBI informant at just 14 and later a notorious figure in Detroit’s drug underworld during the 1980s. Josh and Chuck trace Rick’s transformation from a street-smart kid to a critical informant, and eventually a casualty of America’s War on Drugs and an unjust criminal justice system. The episode covers the context of Detroit at the time, Rick’s family background, the corrupt intersection of police, politics, and organized crime, and the lasting consequences of Rick’s involvement, including his controversial imprisonment.
| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |--------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:07–04:42 | Introduction to White Boy Rick & Detroit’s context | | 06:29–08:47 | Wershe Sr.’s gun business; Rick’s early exposure to crime | | 09:10–14:29 | Rick becomes the FBI’s youngest informant | | 15:21–16:38 | Integration with Curry gang, earning the label “White Boy Rick” | | 20:27–23:06 | The FBI bankrolls Rick’s street persona | | 24:54–26:09 | Rick gets shot—uses it to his advantage | | 28:04–29:16 | FBI ends relationship; Rick left on his own | | 31:34–32:51 | Rick’s wholesale drug career | | 36:23–38:56 | Arrest, media coverage, and the start of sensationalism | | 41:00–42:05 | Harsh sentencing under Michigan drug law | | 43:51–44:20 | Operation Backbone; busting corrupt officials | | 47:06–50:16 | Parole denials and ongoing injustice | | 51:23–52:46 | Final release, lawsuits, and the cultural legacy |
True to the "Stuff You Should Know" style, Josh and Chuck maintain a conversational and slightly irreverent, yet always empathetic tone throughout the episode. Their storytelling is peppered with thoughtful asides and incredulous humor, highlighting the absurdity and tragedy of the systemic failings in Rick’s life.
Closing Reflection:
“This is an amazing true story. And it’s also a sad true story in a lot of ways too, because this guy lost a significant portion of his life to really stupid drug laws at the height of the war on drugs…” — Josh Clark (03:03–03:54)
This episode offers a comprehensive, nuanced look at the layers of institutional betrayal, personal survival, and lasting consequences that define the real story of White Boy Rick. Even if you think you know the tale from movies or media, Josh and Chuck’s deep dive exposes the mechanisms and motivations—of both criminals and law enforcement—that shaped a uniquely American tragedy.