July 16, 2026 • 49 mins
Would you believe that Detroit’s crack epidemic in the mid-80s was overseen by one 16 year-old white kid who supplied all the coke? No? Well, that’s not quite true, so okay. The actual story is even more nutso than that.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, that's right, this is very Detroit. I was gonna
say ad Jason, but it's like, firmly in Detroit's not
even a Jason centered even because we're talking about white
boy Rick who if you have not seen the movie
starring Oh god, what's the guy's.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Name who played him, Matthew McConaughey.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
No, he played the dad. Oh, Matthew McConaughey makes a
little more sense older than we are.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I know. I was like, did they dress him up
like a teenager?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yeah? How do you play a fourteen 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 eighties,
Rick worsh who was an FBI informant at the age
of fourteen in secret.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yes, and this is completely one hundred percent 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 confirmed.
(01:32):
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 it was a bad
(01:54):
time to be caught with kilos of coke. I can
tell you that.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
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 because that's his life at that point. Yeah, and
then you know, turned on him and there was cover
ups and Detroit, Detroit, and.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
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, Yeah,
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
(02:42):
with like as big as you get essentially at the time. Time.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
All right, so let's go back, I guess to his
birth in nineteen sixty nine. He's close a couple of
years older than me, And like you said, this was
the East side of Detroit when he was six. This
is Rick Wirsch Junior. His parents separated, his mom moved
out to the burbs, and then generally he and his
sister Don lived with their dad, Matthew McConaughey, Richard Wirsch Senior.
(03:09):
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 Don and
their father were a bit of an anomaly as a
white family that kind of stayed where they were on
(03:31):
the Detroit's East Side at the time.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
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.
(03:53):
And there was a market just right 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,
(04:14):
manufacturer 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.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
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 a son to gun shows
when he was just a kid. But the result of
(04:54):
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 entree into what would end up being
his son's work with the fbis that he just knew
these guys as customers.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, And one thing I saw in there was an
Atavist article that was really really good, but they basically
said that Richard Worsch 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
(05:35):
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 was definitely a street smart kid,
but he just wasn't involved in drug trafficking yet at
(05:57):
the time.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, his sister on 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
(06:20):
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 bust cars. There was
this one story where someone stole their family car and
they went after them, and Rick at fourteen, like used
(06:42):
his sisters twenty two that she kept under 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.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I can tell you that at fourteen, I had not
ever shot at anybody.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
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's
that was my only gun play.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
As a child, right, you never turned it on the guy?
Speaker 1 (07:10):
No?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
No, no, okay, yeah same here. Yeah. So let's see
spring of nineteen eighty four, Rick Junior is fourteen 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 hopbed
of this new crack epidemic. Let's go see if this
(07:33):
guy can give us some info because we're friendly with them.
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 Worsh was like, I
(07:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I guess I couldn't make heads or tails of that either.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
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 Volsen now
Kathy Vulson Curry or then who happened to be the
niece of the mayor of Detroit at the time, Coleman Young.
(08:54):
And so you know, we have a situation building here
where there there's clear kind of cover 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.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Sure exactly. They wanted to take down the crooked cops. Right,
So that connection between city Hall and the police Department
and the East Detroit drug trade all ran right directly
through Kathy Bohlsen, Right, she was the thing that connected him.
But after that, you know, that initial connection, the other
(09:35):
kind of tethers started to form between those two groups,
and before you know it, I mean, city Hall was
in the police department. We're in bed with the drug
trade in Detroit. Pretty quickly. One of the guys who
was a major player in this, his name was Gil Hilly.
He was the homicide commander, the guy in charge of
(09:55):
all homicides in Detroit. And this was a time when
Detroit had something like seven hundred homicides a year. Now
it's like one sixty five. Like that is a mind
boggling number of murders in Detroit, considering also that its
population had plummeted too. Right, Yeah, this guy's in charge
of all of those. His name's Gil Hill, and he
(10:15):
also popped up elsewhere too.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Right, Yeah, I mean strange but true. He was. If
you've ever seen Eddie Murphy's great, great film Beverly Hills
Cop from nineteen eighty four, 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
(10:38):
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 on the bad.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Stuff big time, big time. And he also seems to
have been inoperative 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
(11:11):
like a daughter.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
So at the time, this kid, he's just Richard worsh Junior, Ricky.
I think everybody called him. He's fourteen, and the FBI
is sitting in his living room and they're starting to
show him pictures now, not his dad. His Dad's just
kind of like, okay, so we'll have a seat and
show these guys what you want or what you know.
And so, being fourteen, Rick said that he was. He
(11:38):
was like, wow, these really important authority figures are paying
attention to be. 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 the right exactly, I've
just got the wackiest idea. But what if you, fourteen
(12:02):
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, well, I don't no, son, it's up to you.
You're fourteen. Do you want to be a federal informant
and put your life on the line every time you
(12:22):
walk outside of the house? And Rick Junior said, yes,
yes I do. And he actually became an off the
books informant for the FBI in nineteen eighty four, age fourteen.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
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
(12:54):
to me. So Richard Senior was approved in June nineteen
eighty four. Technic is the informant, but it was really
his son. And pretty soon, you know, because I said,
Rick was a likable kid and you know, made friends easily.
He made friends with a guy named Rudell Curry, who
was the little brother of the twins Johnny and Leo.
(13:15):
Little Boo was twenty three years old, and they they
became buddies. Like he was a twenty three year old
with a with a fourteen year old friend who like,
you know, it was kind of like hey Spike, Hey Spike,
like one of those deals. He had this kid following
around and like they love cars and they love motorcycles
and they loved kind of that lifestyle. And so before
you know it, they were fast friends. And bo invited
(13:37):
Rick to hang out hang out with him, like right
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. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
One of the things that I gathered about a White
Boy Rick was that even at fourteen, fifteen sixteen, he
could hang with older people and ultimately eventually betray he
did kind of like an equal Yeah. I mean, which again,
like just stop and think 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.
(14:13):
That was his purpose for making friends with Bu 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 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
(14:36):
that he kind of gathered over the next three four years.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
For sure. Uh, maybe that's a good time to take
a break. What a setup, Yeah, I think so, especially
if you never heard about the story, Like can you
imagine hearing this for the first time.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
I know, I envy those people.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
All right, So we'll be right back after this and
talk about where it's headed next stop. All right, So
(15:22):
little white boy Rick is hanging out with his his
older friends. They're doing bad stuff, and he's, you know,
he's speeding 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
(15:44):
said in Act one, Like I think they said, over
the first couple of years, they paid him about thirty
thousand dollars off the books to you know, to use
to buy cocaine sometimes and to you know, to make
sure he could kind of live that lifestyle. So before
you know it, little fourteen year old white boy Rick
is got a fur coat and a Rolex and he's
(16:06):
he has cars even though he's fourteen years old and
can't legally drive, but.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
He still drove him. He had a white Jeep and
the snowman was stintled on the back.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah he's still into cars.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, he has a thing for cars.
It turns out, but yeah, he made like thirty grand
over the next two years, which is almost one hundred
grand in today's dollars. Do you remember how much money
you made between the ages of fourteen and sixteen?
Speaker 1 (16:34):
I made three twenty five an hour as a bus boy. Yeah,
that was minimum wage. I probably forty bucks a week
or something.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Okay, so I estimated I maybe made something like the
neighborhood of two thousand dollars over those those years.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Oh okay, this is like you were hustling too.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
No, I mean I just had jobs here there, and
I think if you put it all together, it probably
be pulled that over two years.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Yeah, so a thousand. 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 the right.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I had something of an allowed, but it dwindled as
I got older, Like by the time I was thirty,
it was almost nothing.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
I wanted to buy cigarettes. I wanted to buy slim
gyms and twigs and Kingsbury non alcoholic pier.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
No, but you just said a mouthful chuck just having
whatever money you make. Would you say forty bucks a week?
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah, probably something like that, you know when I was
early on.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Right, okay, and you were empowered by that by walking
by getting that paycheck cash in it. I got forty bucks.
I'm fifteen years old. Imagine having ten thousand bucks at
the end of a week and you're fifteen years old. Yeah,
but that's how off the rails this kid's life suddenly
got because the FBI had pushed him into this life
(18:11):
and said, go go you know, you have some money,
go buy a mink coke, 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
(18:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Child, exactly, And his dad wasn't saying that either.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
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 carry seems like he was pretty involved in his
son's life. The problem was his son's life included, you know,
(19:26):
driving a jeep that said the Snowman on back and
selling cocaine for the FBI.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah. I mean, I think what the takeaway is is
that ultimately his dad said, I'll right, all right.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
All right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I'm really curious to see this movie now. I wonder
how mcconaughete plays this.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Dude, I'm sure exactly like you just.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Said, because he does not scream eastside Detroit.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
No, he really does.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
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 eighty four, he was shot
in the stomach by a 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 nine
(20:11):
one one, and before the ambulance could get there, there
were some other gang members who showed up put in
the backseat of the car, and he didn't know, like,
are they taking me to the hospital or again it
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.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Yeah, I guess that had a really like a big
chilling effect that 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 right. 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
(20:53):
they're like, got ten grand right here, and he's like,
all right, you guys, you know me so well. And
he got back to it.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Yeah. And not only that, they said you can actually
use this Rick right, 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 and that gang.
And he kind of was that. I mean it worked
out that way. Yeah. I think in February of eighty five,
after he had been doing this a little while, is
when they got their first like really big raid almost
(21:23):
at Sting, but he had, you know, Rick gave him
information that led to about two hundred 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.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
I saw they just had two punch bowls full of
cocaine just sitting out on the table.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Nice punch bowls are big.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
That kind of house, that's a lot of cocaine 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 teach Detroit. This is a fifteen
year old kid. I mean, that's a huge bus to
get two hundred grand and nineteen eighty five dollars and
(22:04):
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 nineteen eighty five, the hit man, right,
(22:28):
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,
paint for his hotel, gave him some walking around money,
(22:48):
and said, go, fifteen year old, go to Las Vegas
with a group of high level drug dealers and just
find out what you can. And he did.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
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 dry by shooting. It accidentally killed a thirteen year
old boy named Damian Lucas, and the cops basically made
(23:21):
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 because they've killed this kid, this
thirteen year old a couple of years younger than me,
and Johnny Curry gave Beverly Hills cop a guy ten
(23:44):
grand as a bribe to cover it up. And Rick
found out about this.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Yeah, he was riding around in the car with Johnny Curry,
who had the 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 that was a big,
big turning point in this whole story. The murder of
(24:09):
Damian Lucas.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Yeah, for sure. So that FBI, you know, things are
getting pretty hairy. They cut ties with him just before
he turned sixteen. Richard Senior was now off the books
as the I guess fake in formant in June of
nineteen eighty six, 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
(24:32):
gonna look great for us as speds. And this is when,
you know, I kind of remarked earlier about how well,
now this kid is in this lifestyle right and he's
having the cord pulled on him, like the rug pulled
out from under him. And so Rick, you know, does
what a kid that age and that you know, not
quite yet fully formed brain would do, which is, hey,
(24:53):
I'm going to keep doing this stuff. So he got
into the real drug trade after the FBI dropped him.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, that is It's disputed whether that happened after or
before they dropped him, so like during as he was
an FBI and foreman, 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,
(25:20):
and they were like, we just this kid's getting too hot.
Rather than being like we're gonna bring you in from
the cold, kid, like we're gonna move you somewhere, because
we 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 and East Detroit as a what he
eventually became a very prominent drug dealer.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, and you know, all the connections he had made
were valuable connections, as you know, his his I don't
won't to say legit, but I guess he was a
legit drug dealer. Yeah. One of the guys, the main
guys who kind of got him involved, was a friend
he made through those connections with the Curries was a
wholesale cocaine guy named Art Derek. He was a suburban
(26:02):
dude who was operating some drug planes that were coming
up into Miami, and Rick became friends with him and
his son, and he, you know, the kid sixteen years
old that at this point starts buying as much as
like fifty kilos at a time. As a cocaine wholesaler
himself is what they call a weight man. Like he's
(26:22):
not 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.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Right, which he just by that, by virtue of that,
he automatically made less money. I saw FBI agent estimate
he was probably making five thousand dollars 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 five
(26:52):
dollars 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
fifty five million dollars a year doing that. But I mean,
like wipe 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,
(27:15):
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 Curries, 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
(27:37):
associate of the Curries, which I thought was super cool,
like he just kept his own identity rather than just
being absorbed into the Curry gang.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
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 eighty seven they
indicted the 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
(28:11):
the city government at that point. They were still like
not selling out, like the mayor and the corrupt cops,
and the city was like great, We're like 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 Craft to
(28:32):
assassinate little white boy Rick. I think he offered him
one hundred and twenty five grand and he tried to
kill him a couple of times.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, you know that you've arrived. If you're sixteen years
old and you're not going to be murdered, you're going
to be assassinated. That means you know a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
And the guy from Beverly Hills cop was the one
making the call.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Right, Yeah, It's like, who would ever believe this? Right?
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (28:56):
So yeah, Nate Boonecraft later admitted to trying on two
different occasions to carry out that hit.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
So Rick is trying to capitalize on, you know, the
curries now suddenly being not completely out of the picture,
but at least some of the main guys being rounded
up and kind of feel devoid the drug void that
that was left by them. And he starts dating Kathy Volson.
She was twenty four, he was seventeen. He was making
(29:24):
about thirty grand a month and has three kids at
this point.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
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 Volson started dating him.
You said that, you know, he was a legit drug dealers,
as legit as a drug dealer can be. She helped
legitimize him like she is a and she was, especially
(29:51):
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. He comes down, 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.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah, and presumably did not get arrested herself for you know,
having sex with an underage kid.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
No, no, I think they had other things in mind.
But even still, she she would not have gotten arrested
because she had Detroit p D 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 can essentially do anything
(30:41):
she wanted to, and it would have been fine.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
For her for sure. All Right, Well, let's take our
second break and we'll finish up with the saga of
White Boy Rick.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Right after this, yes, okay, chuck, So the party ends.
(31:20):
On May twenty second, nineteen eighty seven, the Detroit police
decide that Rick needs to go down. If Nate Boonecraft
can't kill him, we're just gonna do it the old
fashioned way and arrest him and just block him up.
And they found thirty grand in cash in his car.
They also found eight keys of cocaine that was stashed
(31:43):
under a neighbor's porch that Rick said, yeah, that's mine. Yeah,
he was seventeen, so he's still a juvenile. And he
got arrested with eight keys and thirty grand in cash.
He made bail, and then a few months later, in October,
he was arrested again, this time with five kilos of
cocaine and guns, drug paraphernalia, the whole thing even worse.
(32:03):
Some of this 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 really had them.
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,
(32:25):
and then very quickly across the nation because it was
such a crazy novelty. Yeah, that there was this seventeen
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, I don't know,
(32:51):
fraudulently inflated the importance of white boy Rick, like right
out of the gate, just because it was so novel.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Yeah, I mean, you know, the 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 his story because 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 on
(33:20):
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 gonna,
(33:44):
you know, we can help you out. And he was like, dude,
I would get killed so fast, your head would spend
so no, thank.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
You, right, yeah, So he passed on that. He was like,
I'm gonna I'm gonna 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
(34:14):
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
(34:35):
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 just said, well, this guy's actually
(34:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yeah, for sure. They did not disclose in the trial
at any point that he was a federal informant that
he was a CI. He said later, like, you know,
Rix 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
(35:31):
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 happen one of
those And you know 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 quote unquote
team went on to fight his parole in two thousand
(35:53):
and three. So that kind of says it all.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It really does. Yeah, 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
(36:15):
parole at age seventeen. And the reason why the judge
had no choice is because about ten years earlier, Michigan
had passed a law called the six fifty Lifer Law,
where if you were caught with six hundred and fifty
grams or more of cocaine, which is about one and
a half pounds or a little under half of a kilo,
(36:37):
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 seventeen 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,
(36:59):
for sure.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
It was a period in a 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 didn't
make Rick feel much better. But after the trial, Matthew
McConaughey is giving interviews and he's basically saying, like, hey,
(37:20):
we were federal informants. My son at fourteen was a
federal informant. But at this point, like 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 nineteen ninety one, in prison, Rick starts working
(37:42):
for the FEDS again from prison in an operation called
Operation Backbone.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
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 fourteen's name is
Greg Schwartz. He came to him years later for this
Operation Backbone and said, we've been listening in to the
Curries for years now, and we are it's quite clear
that they are in bed with the Detroit Police Department
(38:09):
and City Hall and it's time for us to take
them down. We need your help. So he and Kathy
Vohlsen 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 drug and city hall connection
(38:36):
with a DEA agent I'm sorry, FBI agent who went
under cover and carried out like this highly successful operation Backbone.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Yeah, it was a big They got eleven cops. Other
people obviously were arrested, but they got, you know, eleven
crooked cops out of that. One of them was, 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 Bolson's father, was implicated,
(39:10):
and she was he been implicated at first and initially charged,
but the charges on her were dropped.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
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.
(39:38):
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 Wolson 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
(40:00):
going down to 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.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
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 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
(40:36):
phone call where Beverly that guy from Beverly Hills cop
agreed to cover up that kid's killing from the drive
by shooting and he was never charged, so you know,
they they didn't get the big fish, but they certainly
got enough people. I think this was not too long
after the Mary and Barry scandal smoking crack as a mayor,
(40:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
So Greg Schwartz actually he showed up. He said, Okay,
you helped us out. 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
(41:28):
think up to the two thousands, 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
(41:53):
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 two thousand and five.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Yeah, so that lands him back in Michigan in prison,
and this whole time, White boy Rick is in prison
for you know, decades. At this point, h and everyone
else that he was had been you know, associating with,
was getting out. Johnny Curry got out ninety nine, that
hitman that tried to kill him twice and admitted to
murdering thirty people, did seventeen years and then cooperated with
(42:25):
the cops. That mandatory minimum that sent him the six
fifty lifer that was overturned by the Michigan Supreme Court
in nineteen ninety eight, 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 two thousand and three.
(42:47):
He asked, like, you know, 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 back Bone, and
he helped us out with that, but not the stuff
from when you were fourteen.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Yeah, the problem is like 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 read out his drug dealer friends,
but he definitely read it out on the cops, and
the cops went to great links to make sure he
stayed in prison, to make an example out of him,
(43:24):
and to punish him too. And so, in a really
unusual move, a bunch of Detroit police officers went to
his two thousand and three parole hearing and basically just lied,
lied about what a horrible criminally was, like what a
terrible effect he had on Detroit, and how he really
needed to stay in prison, and he got denied, got
(43:44):
denied again in two thousand and eight, and he got
denied again in twenty twelve too.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
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 thirteen year old kid who got killed. And he said,
you know, we never disclosed this stuff because he was
(44:12):
a kid, and we would have been exposed and embarrassed
at the federal government was working with a kid in
this capacity. They rejected that one too, even though we
finally had someone willing to vouch for him. And until
twenty thirteen, there wasn't a lot of I mean, aside
from just you know, the earlier time when he actually
got sent to prison, it had really quieted down about
(44:33):
you know, white boy Rick, like no one kind of
knew who he was. And then in twenty thirteen 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 Adams article
in twenty fifteen that you were talking about that we
read and that was like that was it, all of
(44:55):
a sudden, it was fully out there. Like he didn't
even get k Goto's dad's funeral. His dad died while
he was in prison. And he has like six grandchildren
at this point in his forties, which is remarkable, and
he's like not met these kids at this point.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
No, so one thing that makes it like really kind
of gets across. How how just under the thumb of
the Detroit Police Department, this kid was still decades on.
A judge, Judge Dana Hathaway, I think she was the
original judge in his in his trial, she threw out
(45:33):
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 thirty
years later and Hathaway even went on the record saying
that this whole thing was very fishy. Finally, two years later,
(45:55):
he's granted parole. This is thirteen years after the last
person who was given a life sentence under that Michigan
six point fifty life for law had already been led out.
He was the only one, and his incarceration continued for
thirteen more years. He got out in twenty seventeen, age
forty seven. And you would think that would be the
end of the story, Chuck, But it was not.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Wasn't. 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 in the Matthew McConaughey movie,
because certainly high profile enough to like bring his name
back into the forefront and then people start asking questions
and stuff like that at FED but he had to
(46:39):
stay or I guess, got recentence from the prison sentence
in Florida for that stolen car stuff. So he's back
in jail in Florida. He was, you know, bouncing back
and forth. Finally released from there in July twenty twenty.
I think he was fifty one at the time, and
was like, I need some money, I need some restitution,
and he sued the Feds of he didn't get anything.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
No, the judge said the statute of limitations had run
out in two thousand and six, 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, Paal, like
none of your your very legitimate suits against the federal
government are going to be able to be tried. So yeah.
(47:21):
Apparently he's working on his own documentary project about his
life too. With the hip hop director Hype Williams.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Yeah, I worked with Hype back in the day.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
Oh yeah, is he related to Freedom Williams?
Speaker 1 (47:36):
I have no idea Bute was one of the biggest
names in the game back then. Oh yeah, I'll tell
you off, Mike.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Okay, I can't 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.
Speaker 1 (47:56):
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 second through seventh.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
Where are we going.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
We're going from New York City to Bermuda, and we're
gonna be doing our live show and we're gonna be
with our buddies from stuff they don't want you to
know and stuff Mom never told you, and we're gonna
be doing like other events on board. It's gonna be
a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Yeah, you can go to Virgin Voyages dot com slash
Stuff at Sea and start booking passage today. That's what
they call it on the high seats Booking passage and
come float around with us for five days. It'll be fun,
that's right.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
Can't wait, can't.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Wait, and we also can't wait to hear from you
via email, which you can send to Stuff podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite show
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, that's right, this is very Detroit. I was gonna
say ad Jason, but it's like, firmly in Detroit's not
even a Jason centered even because we're talking about white
boy Rick who if you have not seen the movie
starring Oh god, what's the guy's.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Name who played him, Matthew McConaughey.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
No, he played the dad. Oh, Matthew McConaughey makes a
little more sense older than we are.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
I know. I was like, did they dress him up
like a teenager?
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yeah? How do you play a fourteen 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 eighties,
Rick worsh who was an FBI informant at the age
of fourteen in secret.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Yes, and this is completely one hundred percent 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 confirmed.
(01:32):
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 it was a bad
(01:54):
time to be caught with kilos of coke. I can
tell you that.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
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 because that's his life at that point. Yeah, and
then you know, turned on him and there was cover
ups and Detroit, Detroit, and.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
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, Yeah,
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
(02:42):
with like as big as you get essentially at the time. Time.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
All right, so let's go back, I guess to his
birth in nineteen sixty nine. He's close a couple of
years older than me, And like you said, this was
the East side of Detroit when he was six. This
is Rick Wirsch Junior. His parents separated, his mom moved
out to the burbs, and then generally he and his
sister Don lived with their dad, Matthew McConaughey, Richard Wirsch Senior.
(03:09):
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 Don and
their father were a bit of an anomaly as a
white family that kind of stayed where they were on
(03:31):
the Detroit's East Side at the time.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
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.
(03:53):
And there was a market just right 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,
(04:14):
manufacturer 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.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
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 a son to gun shows
when he was just a kid. But the result of
(04:54):
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 entree into what would end up being
his son's work with the fbis that he just knew
these guys as customers.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, And one thing I saw in there was an
Atavist article that was really really good, but they basically
said that Richard Worsch 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
(05:35):
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 was definitely a street smart kid,
but he just wasn't involved in drug trafficking yet at
(05:57):
the time.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, his sister on 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
(06:20):
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 bust cars. There was
this one story where someone stole their family car and
they went after them, and Rick at fourteen, like used
(06:42):
his sisters twenty two that she kept under 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.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I can tell you that at fourteen, I had not
ever shot at anybody.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
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's
that was my only gun play.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
As a child, right, you never turned it on the guy?
Speaker 1 (07:10):
No?
Speaker 2 (07:10):
No, no, okay, yeah same here. Yeah. So let's see
spring of nineteen eighty four, Rick Junior is fourteen 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 hopbed
of this new crack epidemic. Let's go see if this
(07:33):
guy can give us some info because we're friendly with them.
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 Worsh was like, I
(07:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I guess I couldn't make heads or tails of that either.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
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 Volsen now
Kathy Vulson Curry or then who happened to be the
niece of the mayor of Detroit at the time, Coleman Young.
(08:54):
And so you know, we have a situation building here
where there there's clear kind of cover 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.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Sure exactly. They wanted to take down the crooked cops. Right,
So that connection between city Hall and the police Department
and the East Detroit drug trade all ran right directly
through Kathy Bohlsen, Right, she was the thing that connected him.
But after that, you know, that initial connection, the other
(09:35):
kind of tethers started to form between those two groups,
and before you know it, I mean, city Hall was
in the police department. We're in bed with the drug
trade in Detroit. Pretty quickly. One of the guys who
was a major player in this, his name was Gil Hilly.
He was the homicide commander, the guy in charge of
(09:55):
all homicides in Detroit. And this was a time when
Detroit had something like seven hundred homicides a year. Now
it's like one sixty five. Like that is a mind
boggling number of murders in Detroit, considering also that its
population had plummeted too. Right, Yeah, this guy's in charge
of all of those. His name's Gil Hill, and he
(10:15):
also popped up elsewhere too.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Right, Yeah, I mean strange but true. He was. If
you've ever seen Eddie Murphy's great, great film Beverly Hills
Cop from nineteen eighty four, 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
(10:38):
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 on the bad.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Stuff big time, big time. And he also seems to
have been inoperative 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
(11:11):
like a daughter.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
So at the time, this kid, he's just Richard worsh Junior, Ricky.
I think everybody called him. He's fourteen, and the FBI
is sitting in his living room and they're starting to
show him pictures now, not his dad. His Dad's just
kind of like, okay, so we'll have a seat and
show these guys what you want or what you know.
And so, being fourteen, Rick said that he was. He
(11:38):
was like, wow, these really important authority figures are paying
attention to be. 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 the right exactly, I've
just got the wackiest idea. But what if you, fourteen
(12:02):
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, well, I don't no, son, it's up to you.
You're fourteen. Do you want to be a federal informant
and put your life on the line every time you
(12:22):
walk outside of the house? And Rick Junior said, yes,
yes I do. And he actually became an off the
books informant for the FBI in nineteen eighty four, age fourteen.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
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
(12:54):
to me. So Richard Senior was approved in June nineteen
eighty four. Technic is the informant, but it was really
his son. And pretty soon, you know, because I said,
Rick was a likable kid and you know, made friends easily.
He made friends with a guy named Rudell Curry, who
was the little brother of the twins Johnny and Leo.
(13:15):
Little Boo was twenty three years old, and they they
became buddies. Like he was a twenty three year old
with a with a fourteen year old friend who like,
you know, it was kind of like hey Spike, Hey Spike,
like one of those deals. He had this kid following
around and like they love cars and they love motorcycles
and they loved kind of that lifestyle. And so before
you know it, they were fast friends. And bo invited
(13:37):
Rick to hang out hang out with him, like right
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. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
One of the things that I gathered about a White
Boy Rick was that even at fourteen, fifteen sixteen, he
could hang with older people and ultimately eventually betray he
did kind of like an equal Yeah. I mean, which again,
like just stop and think 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.
(14:13):
That was his purpose for making friends with Bu 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 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
(14:36):
that he kind of gathered over the next three four years.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
For sure. Uh, maybe that's a good time to take
a break. What a setup, Yeah, I think so, especially
if you never heard about the story, Like can you
imagine hearing this for the first time.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
I know, I envy those people.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
All right, So we'll be right back after this and
talk about where it's headed next stop. All right, So
(15:22):
little white boy Rick is hanging out with his his
older friends. They're doing bad stuff, and he's, you know,
he's speeding 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
(15:44):
said in Act one, Like I think they said, over
the first couple of years, they paid him about thirty
thousand dollars off the books to you know, to use
to buy cocaine sometimes and to you know, to make
sure he could kind of live that lifestyle. So before
you know it, little fourteen year old white boy Rick
is got a fur coat and a Rolex and he's
(16:06):
he has cars even though he's fourteen years old and
can't legally drive, but.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
He still drove him. He had a white Jeep and
the snowman was stintled on the back.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Yeah he's still into cars.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, he has a thing for cars.
It turns out, but yeah, he made like thirty grand
over the next two years, which is almost one hundred
grand in today's dollars. Do you remember how much money
you made between the ages of fourteen and sixteen?
Speaker 1 (16:34):
I made three twenty five an hour as a bus boy. Yeah,
that was minimum wage. I probably forty bucks a week
or something.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
Okay, so I estimated I maybe made something like the
neighborhood of two thousand dollars over those those years.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Oh okay, this is like you were hustling too.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
No, I mean I just had jobs here there, and
I think if you put it all together, it probably
be pulled that over two years.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Yeah, so a thousand. 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 the right.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
I had something of an allowed, but it dwindled as
I got older, Like by the time I was thirty,
it was almost nothing.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
I wanted to buy cigarettes. I wanted to buy slim
gyms and twigs and Kingsbury non alcoholic pier.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
No, but you just said a mouthful chuck just having
whatever money you make. Would you say forty bucks a week?
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah, probably something like that, you know when I was
early on.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Right, okay, and you were empowered by that by walking
by getting that paycheck cash in it. I got forty bucks.
I'm fifteen years old. Imagine having ten thousand bucks at
the end of a week and you're fifteen years old. Yeah,
but that's how off the rails this kid's life suddenly
got because the FBI had pushed him into this life
(18:11):
and said, go go you know, you have some money,
go buy a mink coke, 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
(18:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Child, exactly, And his dad wasn't saying that either.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
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 carry seems like he was pretty involved in his
son's life. The problem was his son's life included, you know,
(19:26):
driving a jeep that said the Snowman on back and
selling cocaine for the FBI.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah. I mean, I think what the takeaway is is
that ultimately his dad said, I'll right, all right.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
All right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I'm really curious to see this movie now. I wonder
how mcconaughete plays this.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Dude, I'm sure exactly like you just.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Said, because he does not scream eastside Detroit.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
No, he really does.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
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 eighty four, he was shot
in the stomach by a 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 nine
(20:11):
one one, and before the ambulance could get there, there
were some other gang members who showed up put in
the backseat of the car, and he didn't know, like,
are they taking me to the hospital or again it
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.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Yeah, I guess that had a really like a big
chilling effect that 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 right. 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
(20:53):
they're like, got ten grand right here, and he's like,
all right, you guys, you know me so well. And
he got back to it.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Yeah. And not only that, they said you can actually
use this Rick right, 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 and that gang.
And he kind of was that. I mean it worked
out that way. Yeah. I think in February of eighty five,
after he had been doing this a little while, is
when they got their first like really big raid almost
(21:23):
at Sting, but he had, you know, Rick gave him
information that led to about two hundred 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.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
I saw they just had two punch bowls full of
cocaine just sitting out on the table.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Nice punch bowls are big.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
That kind of house, that's a lot of cocaine 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 teach Detroit. This is a fifteen
year old kid. I mean, that's a huge bus to
get two hundred grand and nineteen eighty five dollars and
(22:04):
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 nineteen eighty five, the hit man, right,
(22:28):
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,
paint for his hotel, gave him some walking around money,
(22:48):
and said, go, fifteen year old, go to Las Vegas
with a group of high level drug dealers and just
find out what you can. And he did.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
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 dry by shooting. It accidentally killed a thirteen year
old boy named Damian Lucas, and the cops basically made
(23:21):
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 because they've killed this kid, this
thirteen year old a couple of years younger than me,
and Johnny Curry gave Beverly Hills cop a guy ten
(23:44):
grand as a bribe to cover it up. And Rick
found out about this.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Yeah, he was riding around in the car with Johnny Curry,
who had the 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 that was a big,
big turning point in this whole story. The murder of
(24:09):
Damian Lucas.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Yeah, for sure. So that FBI, you know, things are
getting pretty hairy. They cut ties with him just before
he turned sixteen. Richard Senior was now off the books
as the I guess fake in formant in June of
nineteen eighty six, 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
(24:32):
gonna look great for us as speds. And this is when,
you know, I kind of remarked earlier about how well,
now this kid is in this lifestyle right and he's
having the cord pulled on him, like the rug pulled
out from under him. And so Rick, you know, does
what a kid that age and that you know, not
quite yet fully formed brain would do, which is, hey,
(24:53):
I'm going to keep doing this stuff. So he got
into the real drug trade after the FBI dropped him.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, that is It's disputed whether that happened after or
before they dropped him, so like during as he was
an FBI and foreman, 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,
(25:20):
and they were like, we just this kid's getting too hot.
Rather than being like we're gonna bring you in from
the cold, kid, like we're gonna move you somewhere, because
we 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 and East Detroit as a what he
eventually became a very prominent drug dealer.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, and you know, all the connections he had made
were valuable connections, as you know, his his I don't
won't to say legit, but I guess he was a
legit drug dealer. Yeah. One of the guys, the main
guys who kind of got him involved, was a friend
he made through those connections with the Curries was a
wholesale cocaine guy named Art Derek. He was a suburban
(26:02):
dude who was operating some drug planes that were coming
up into Miami, and Rick became friends with him and
his son, and he, you know, the kid sixteen years
old that at this point starts buying as much as
like fifty kilos at a time. As a cocaine wholesaler
himself is what they call a weight man. Like he's
(26:22):
not 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.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Right, which he just by that, by virtue of that,
he automatically made less money. I saw FBI agent estimate
he was probably making five thousand dollars 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 five
(26:52):
dollars 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
fifty five million dollars a year doing that. But I mean,
like wipe 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,
(27:15):
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 Curries, 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
(27:37):
associate of the Curries, which I thought was super cool,
like he just kept his own identity rather than just
being absorbed into the Curry gang.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
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 eighty seven they
indicted the 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
(28:11):
the city government at that point. They were still like
not selling out, like the mayor and the corrupt cops,
and the city was like great, We're like 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 Craft to
(28:32):
assassinate little white boy Rick. I think he offered him
one hundred and twenty five grand and he tried to
kill him a couple of times.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, you know that you've arrived. If you're sixteen years
old and you're not going to be murdered, you're going
to be assassinated. That means you know a lot.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
And the guy from Beverly Hills cop was the one
making the call.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Right, Yeah, It's like, who would ever believe this? Right?
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (28:56):
So yeah, Nate Boonecraft later admitted to trying on two
different occasions to carry out that hit.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
So Rick is trying to capitalize on, you know, the
curries now suddenly being not completely out of the picture,
but at least some of the main guys being rounded
up and kind of feel devoid the drug void that
that was left by them. And he starts dating Kathy Volson.
She was twenty four, he was seventeen. He was making
(29:24):
about thirty grand a month and has three kids at
this point.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
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 Volson started dating him.
You said that, you know, he was a legit drug dealers,
as legit as a drug dealer can be. She helped
legitimize him like she is a and she was, especially
(29:51):
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. He comes down, 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.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah, and presumably did not get arrested herself for you know,
having sex with an underage kid.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
No, no, I think they had other things in mind.
But even still, she she would not have gotten arrested
because she had Detroit p D 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 can essentially do anything
(30:41):
she wanted to, and it would have been fine.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
For her for sure. All Right, Well, let's take our
second break and we'll finish up with the saga of
White Boy Rick.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Right after this, yes, okay, chuck, So the party ends.
(31:20):
On May twenty second, nineteen eighty seven, the Detroit police
decide that Rick needs to go down. If Nate Boonecraft
can't kill him, we're just gonna do it the old
fashioned way and arrest him and just block him up.
And they found thirty grand in cash in his car.
They also found eight keys of cocaine that was stashed
(31:43):
under a neighbor's porch that Rick said, yeah, that's mine. Yeah,
he was seventeen, so he's still a juvenile. And he
got arrested with eight keys and thirty grand in cash.
He made bail, and then a few months later, in October,
he was arrested again, this time with five kilos of
cocaine and guns, drug paraphernalia, the whole thing even worse.
(32:03):
Some of this 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 really had them.
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,
(32:25):
and then very quickly across the nation because it was
such a crazy novelty. Yeah, that there was this seventeen
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, I don't know,
(32:51):
fraudulently inflated the importance of white boy Rick, like right
out of the gate, just because it was so novel.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Yeah, I mean, you know, the 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 his story because 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 on
(33:20):
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 gonna,
(33:44):
you know, we can help you out. And he was like, dude,
I would get killed so fast, your head would spend
so no, thank.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
You, right, yeah, So he passed on that. He was like,
I'm gonna I'm gonna 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
(34:14):
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
(34:35):
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 just said, well, this guy's actually
(34:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Yeah, for sure. They did not disclose in the trial
at any point that he was a federal informant that
he was a CI. He said later, like, you know,
Rix 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
(35:31):
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 happen one of
those And you know 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 quote unquote
team went on to fight his parole in two thousand
(35:53):
and three. So that kind of says it all.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It really does. Yeah, 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
(36:15):
parole at age seventeen. And the reason why the judge
had no choice is because about ten years earlier, Michigan
had passed a law called the six fifty Lifer Law,
where if you were caught with six hundred and fifty
grams or more of cocaine, which is about one and
a half pounds or a little under half of a kilo,
(36:37):
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 seventeen 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,
(36:59):
for sure.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
It was a period in a 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 didn't
make Rick feel much better. But after the trial, Matthew
McConaughey is giving interviews and he's basically saying, like, hey,
(37:20):
we were federal informants. My son at fourteen was a
federal informant. But at this point, like 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 nineteen ninety one, in prison, Rick starts working
(37:42):
for the FEDS again from prison in an operation called
Operation Backbone.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
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 fourteen's name is
Greg Schwartz. He came to him years later for this
Operation Backbone and said, we've been listening in to the
Curries for years now, and we are it's quite clear
that they are in bed with the Detroit Police Department
(38:09):
and City Hall and it's time for us to take
them down. We need your help. So he and Kathy
Vohlsen 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 drug and city hall connection
(38:36):
with a DEA agent I'm sorry, FBI agent who went
under cover and carried out like this highly successful operation Backbone.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Yeah, it was a big They got eleven cops. Other
people obviously were arrested, but they got, you know, eleven
crooked cops out of that. One of them was, 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 Bolson's father, was implicated,
(39:10):
and she was he been implicated at first and initially charged,
but the charges on her were dropped.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
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.
(39:38):
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 Wolson 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
(40:00):
going down to 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.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
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 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
(40:36):
phone call where Beverly that guy from Beverly Hills cop
agreed to cover up that kid's killing from the drive
by shooting and he was never charged, so you know,
they they didn't get the big fish, but they certainly
got enough people. I think this was not too long
after the Mary and Barry scandal smoking crack as a mayor,
(40:57):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
So Greg Schwartz actually he showed up. He said, Okay,
you helped us out. 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
(41:28):
think up to the two thousands, 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
(41:53):
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 two thousand and five.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Yeah, so that lands him back in Michigan in prison,
and this whole time, White boy Rick is in prison
for you know, decades. At this point, h and everyone
else that he was had been you know, associating with,
was getting out. Johnny Curry got out ninety nine, that
hitman that tried to kill him twice and admitted to
murdering thirty people, did seventeen years and then cooperated with
(42:25):
the cops. That mandatory minimum that sent him the six
fifty lifer that was overturned by the Michigan Supreme Court
in nineteen ninety eight, 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 two thousand and three.
(42:47):
He asked, like, you know, 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 back Bone, and
he helped us out with that, but not the stuff
from when you were fourteen.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Yeah, the problem is like 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 read out his drug dealer friends,
but he definitely read it out on the cops, and
the cops went to great links to make sure he
stayed in prison, to make an example out of him,
(43:24):
and to punish him too. And so, in a really
unusual move, a bunch of Detroit police officers went to
his two thousand and three parole hearing and basically just lied,
lied about what a horrible criminally was, like what a
terrible effect he had on Detroit, and how he really
needed to stay in prison, and he got denied, got
(43:44):
denied again in two thousand and eight, and he got
denied again in twenty twelve too.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
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 thirteen year old kid who got killed. And he said,
you know, we never disclosed this stuff because he was
(44:12):
a kid, and we would have been exposed and embarrassed
at the federal government was working with a kid in
this capacity. They rejected that one too, even though we
finally had someone willing to vouch for him. And until
twenty thirteen, there wasn't a lot of I mean, aside
from just you know, the earlier time when he actually
got sent to prison, it had really quieted down about
(44:33):
you know, white boy Rick, like no one kind of
knew who he was. And then in twenty thirteen 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 Adams article
in twenty fifteen that you were talking about that we
read and that was like that was it, all of
(44:55):
a sudden, it was fully out there. Like he didn't
even get k Goto's dad's funeral. His dad died while
he was in prison. And he has like six grandchildren
at this point in his forties, which is remarkable, and
he's like not met these kids at this point.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
No, so one thing that makes it like really kind
of gets across. How how just under the thumb of
the Detroit Police Department, this kid was still decades on.
A judge, Judge Dana Hathaway, I think she was the
original judge in his in his trial, she threw out
(45:33):
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 thirty
years later and Hathaway even went on the record saying
that this whole thing was very fishy. Finally, two years later,
(45:55):
he's granted parole. This is thirteen years after the last
person who was given a life sentence under that Michigan
six point fifty life for law had already been led out.
He was the only one, and his incarceration continued for
thirteen more years. He got out in twenty seventeen, age
forty seven. And you would think that would be the
end of the story, Chuck, But it was not.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Wasn't. 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 in the Matthew McConaughey movie,
because certainly high profile enough to like bring his name
back into the forefront and then people start asking questions
and stuff like that at FED but he had to
(46:39):
stay or I guess, got recentence from the prison sentence
in Florida for that stolen car stuff. So he's back
in jail in Florida. He was, you know, bouncing back
and forth. Finally released from there in July twenty twenty.
I think he was fifty one at the time, and
was like, I need some money, I need some restitution,
and he sued the Feds of he didn't get anything.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
No, the judge said the statute of limitations had run
out in two thousand and six, 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, Paal, like
none of your your very legitimate suits against the federal
government are going to be able to be tried. So yeah.
(47:21):
Apparently he's working on his own documentary project about his
life too. With the hip hop director Hype Williams.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Yeah, I worked with Hype back in the day.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
Oh yeah, is he related to Freedom Williams?
Speaker 1 (47:36):
I have no idea Bute was one of the biggest
names in the game back then. Oh yeah, I'll tell
you off, Mike.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Okay, I can't 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.
Speaker 1 (47:56):
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 second through seventh.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
Where are we going.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
We're going from New York City to Bermuda, and we're
gonna be doing our live show and we're gonna be
with our buddies from stuff they don't want you to
know and stuff Mom never told you, and we're gonna
be doing like other events on board. It's gonna be
a lot of fun.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
Yeah, you can go to Virgin Voyages dot com slash
Stuff at Sea and start booking passage today. That's what
they call it on the high seats Booking passage and
come float around with us for five days. It'll be fun,
that's right.
Speaker 1 (48:38):
Can't wait, can't.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Wait, and we also can't wait to hear from you
via email, which you can send to Stuff podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite show
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