Richard Wershe Jr.

Richard Wershe Jr., White Boy Rick, became a Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) informant when he was 14 to 16 years old. When he was 15, Wershe told the FBI that a major drug dealer had spoken of paying a bribe to Detroit detective inspector and subsequent city council president and mayoral candidate Gil Hill in order to quash the investigation into a 13 year old boy's murder. At the age of 17 Wershe was arrested for possession of 8 kg of cocaine, and with no intervention from the FBI and U.S. Attorney to tell of him being an FBI informant at 14, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2017 justice campaigners publicized Wershe's case and he was paroled, but directly to a prison in Florida to serve another five years for an auto theft conviction from 2008. Campaigners for Wershe have suggested to reporters that the length of his incarceration may have been connected to him having provided the FBI with information leading to the arrest of family members and associates of former Detroit mayor Coleman A. Young, as well as the allegation about Young's political ally Hill. In 2016 a notorious former Detroit hitman alleged Gil Hill had once tried to commission the murder of Wershe.