White Boy Rick

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“Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I-Hart Radio.”

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 Federation. Yeah. That's right. This is very Detroit, but I was going to say a Jason, but it's like firmly in Detroit.

It's not even a Jason. Standard, even. Uh, because we're talking about white boy Rick, who, if you have not seen the movie, starring "Oh God, what's the guy's name who played him?" Matthew McConaughey.

No, he played the dad. Uh, Matthew McConaughey. Matthew McConaughey. That's a little more sense. Probably more than we are.

I know, I was like, did they dress them up like a teenager? Yeah, how do you play a 14-year-old? Uh, I can't remember the kids name, but I have not seen that movie. There's also a bunch of documentaries, but in particular, one that's pretty good about this kid in the 80s, Rick Worsh, who was an FBI informant at the age of 14 in secret.

Yes, and this is completely a hundred percent true. 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.

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 home about just lock them up, lock the drug dealers up, and go ahead and lock up the drug users while you do it, too. And it was a bad time to be caught with kilos of coke.

I can tell you that. 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 just life at that point. Yeah. And then, you know, turned on them, and there was cover ups, and it was Detroit Detroit. 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 over on by the shoulders, and shoved him out on the street.

That's basically how they induced him to essentially become a member of the East Detroit

drug scene, like drug supply scene. He was rolling with, like, as big as you get, essentially at the time. Yeah. All right. So let's go back to his birth in 1969.

He's close a couple of years older than me, and like he said, this was the East side of Detroit. When he was six, this is Rick Worst Jr. His parents separated his mom moved out to the burbs, and then, generally, he and a sister Don lived with her dad, Matthew McConaughey, Richard Worst Sr., and it was a time

where the auto industry was disappearing and 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

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 the Detroit's side at the time.”

Yeah. And one reason why is because this was their neighborhood, a white boy, Rick's grandparents lived directly across the street from them. So, like, these were his dad's parents. It was like a family community.

There were other people who were sticking around, but yeah, they were, they were definitely outnumbered by the people who were moving to town to essentially take over Detroit, and there was a market just ripe for being taken over, and it was. There was this one group called the Chamber Brothers, they moved from Arkansas, and became some of the biggest dealers in town, so much so that at one point, they controlled a formerly

opulent apartment building. It was their stronghold headquarters that they sold crack out of. Man, you facture crack out of it was a big big operation, and it was just right there in the middle of the Detroit, because this is one of the most balliest 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. 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 that was his dad knew and was, you know, had FBI guys like as his customers. He had agents that he was friendly with, because they would buy guns from him. And so he ended up, like, this was sort of the, the entree into what would end up being his son's work with the FBI, is that he just knew these guys as customers.

Yeah, and one thing I saw in, there was an activist article that was really, really good.

But they basically said that, um, that Richard Worsh senior, he was a hustler,

and he had a fascination with money. That was his big focus in life was to make money, and his son, Rick, definitely adopted that from him. Like, he definitely got that from his dad. So, he didn't have a lot of options to make money at the time.

Aside from the drug trade, but he didn't really get into that, at least not at first, but he was still doing things like breaking into houses and making money that way. So, I mean, like, he was definitely a street smart kid, but he just wasn't involved in drug trafficking at the time. Yeah, his sister Dawn took up a crack habit and started dating a guy named Terence Bell,

and Terence took, and as you'll see, a lot of people took white boy Rick under their wing. I think he was, you know, seen interviews. He seems like he was a pretty affable, likable guy, because it seems like he made friends everywhere he went, and like had these sort of older, you know, these are rough guys, obviously, but older guys taking him under the wing and sort of saying, like,

hey, here's how you rob a house. Here's how you do this.

“And so, that's what Terence Bell, he was kind of the first guy to do that,”

taught him how to rob houses, taught him how to bus cars. That was this one story where someone stole their family car, and they went after them and Rick at 14, like, used this sister's 22 that she kept in her purse to shoot at these guys. Didn't hit anybody, but it was, you know,

he was, like, in the mix at this point. For sure. I can tell you that at 14, I had not ever shot anybody. Uh, I had not, I had shot a gun because we had a friend who was a cop, who had a cab in in the mountains, and so he would take us up there to, like,

shoot target practice occasionally, but that's, that was my only gunplay as a child.

Right, you never turned it on the guy.

No, no. Okay. Yeah, same here. Yeah. So let's see, spring of 1984, uh, Rick Junior is 14 at the time.

And, um, the FBI, I guess, who were friends with, uh, Senior Richard Senior, were, like, you know, this guy is living in East Detroit. East Detroit is a hotbed of this new crack epidemic. Let's go see if this guy can give us some info because we're friendly with him. So they showed up at the Worse House, uh, in East Detroit,

and sat down with, uh, Worse 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 Worse, um, was like, I, I don't know who those people are. I'm sorry. I can't help you. But Rick Junior piped up, and he's like, oh, well, uh, this guy is, um, Johnny Curry, or that guy's big man Curry, um, 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. Yeah, for sure. Uh, they were interested in the Curry twins.

Um, Johnny was a little man, and I think you mentioned big man. That was Leo, the two brothers, uh, even though they were twins.

I'm not sure.

I guess I couldn't make heads or tails of that either.

Yeah, but they were the main drug, uh, guys on the east side of Detroit at the time. And they were also interested to FBI in the Curry gang because, um, Johnny Curry, who was a little man, was married to Kathy Bolson. Now, Kathy Bolson Curry, or then, who happened to be the niece of the mayor of Detroit at the time. Coleman Young.

And so, um, you know, we have a situation building here where there's clear kind of, uh, cover ups and corruption already happening because the niece of the mayor is dating like a known drug guy. Mm-hmm. And the feds are like, you know, we don't have any allegiance to these guys. So we want to bust them.

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 Bolson, right? She was the thing that connected them.

But after that, you know, that initial connection, the other kind of Tethers started to, to form between those two groups. And before you know it, I mean, City Hall was in the police department. We're in bed with the drug trade in Detroit pretty quickly. Uh, one of the guys who was a major player in this, his name was Gil Hill.

Yeah. The homicide commander, the guy in charge of all homicides in Detroit. And this was a time when Detroit had something like 700 homicides a year. Now it's like 165, like that is a mind boggling number of murders in Detroit.

“Considering also that it's population had plummeted too, right?”

Yeah. This guy's in charge of all of those. It seems Gil Hill. And he also popped up elsewhere too, right? Yeah. I mean, strange but true, he was, if you've ever seen Eddie Murphy's great great film.

Beverly Hills cop from 1984. Mm-hmm. He was the 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. That is pretty cool. But Gil Hill was not a good dude. Uh, as we'll see, he took payoffs and try to put hits out on this kid. And, um, yeah. So he was, he was, and on the, on the bad stuff.

Big time. Big time. And he also seems to have been an operative for the mayor from what I can tell. Although I believe the mayor, nothing ever stuck with him. I don't even think he was ever indicted. Um, he seems to have been well aware of all this, especially because the person

who the cops in City Hall and the criminals connected through was his niece, who apparently he raised like a daughter. Yeah. So, um, at the time this kid, he's just Richard Worsh Jr. Ricky, I think everybody called him. He's 14.

And the FBI is sitting in his living room. And they're starting to show him pictures now. Not as dad, as dad just kind of like, okay, so I don't want to have a seat and show these guys what you want or what you know. And so, um, being 14, Rick said that he was, um, he was like, wow,

some of these really important authority figures are paying attention to me. Yeah. Let's see what I can do. And he just started pointing people out. And the FBI said, we're going to do something a little unorthodox.

“I'm sure that's how they put it and made scare quotes and roll their eyes at the, at the time.”

I think they said wacky. Right, exactly. I just got the wackiest idea. Yeah. But what if you 14 year old Rick became a federal informant for us the FBI?

What do you think? What do you like to do that? And Rick's dad being the amazing father figure that he was. Was like, oh, no, so it's up to you. You're 14.

Do you want to be a federal informant and put your life on the line every time you walk outside of the house? And Rick Jr said, yes, yes, I do. And he actually became an off the books informant for the FBI in 1984, age 14. Yeah, he was a CI. He was not legally allowed to do something like that, obviously.

So the FBI, like he said, he kept it off the books.

He was never listed as the informant, but they had to have something listed.

So they said, well, can we use you, dad?

“Can we use your name and have everything kind of flow through you?”

And he said, sure, that sounds good to me. So Richard Sr. was approved in 1984 technically as the informant, but it was really a 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 Rudel Curry who is the little brother of the twins, Johnny and Leo.

Um, little boo was 23 years old. And they became buddies. Like he was a 23 year old with a, with a 14 year old friend who, like, you know, was kind of like, Hey, spike, spike, like one of those deals.

And so before you know it, they were fast friends and boo invited Rick to hang out, um, hang out with them 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, one of the things that I gathered about a white boy Rick was that even at 14, 15, 16.

He could hang with older people and ultimately eventually be treated kind of like an equal.

Yeah. I mean, it's again like just stop and think of that. Um, like it's just crazy in and of itself.

“Let alone the fact that this kid is actually a federal informant, right?”

That was his role. That was his purpose for making friends with boo Curry and hanging out with the curry gang. Was to get information to give to the FBI. That's why he showed up. And he, like you said, he was so affable and could hang that, um, they, they opened them.

They opened their organization up to him. And he would be in some really high level meetings. Like he knew a lot of stuff that he kind of gathered over the next three, four years. 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? I know I envy those people. All right. So we'll be right back after this and talk about where it's headed next. Hi.

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I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive. How to live forever on the "I Heart Radio App" "Apple Podcasts" or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So little white boy Rick is hanging out with his older friends.

They're doing bad stuff. And he's speeding information to the FBI that they're using kind of on a smaller scale. Some kind of lower level crimes. I wouldn't say petty crimes, probably above that level.

But over a couple of years, like they are feeding him money. Like he said in Act One.

Like I think they said over the first couple of years.

They paid him about $30,000 off the books to use to buy cocaine sometimes. And to make sure he could kind of live that lifestyle. So before you know it, little 14 year old white boy Rick is got a fur coat. A Rolex and he has cars, even though he's 14 years old and can't legally drive. But he's still drove him, he had a white Jeep.

And the snowman was stenciled on the back. Yeah, he's still in the cars. Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah, he has a thing for cars that turns out. But yeah, he made like 30 grand over the next two years, which is almost a hundred grand in today's dollars.

“Do you remember how much money you made between the ages of 14 and 16?”

Uh, I made 325 an hour as a bus boy. Yeah. That was minimum wage. So probably a 40 bucks a week or something. Okay.

So I estimated I maybe made something like the neighborhood of $2000 over those, those years.

Oh, okay. This is like zero hustling too. No, I mean, I just had jobs here there. And I think if you put it all together, it probably will that over two years. Yeah, probably so.

A thousand, I think both of us like having our own money is kids. For sure. So we didn't like my parents didn't give me money. I don't think your parents probably gave you money either, right? Uh, I had something of an allowance.

But to windowed the, as I got older, like by the time I was 30, it was almost nothing. 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.

I wanted to buy cigarettes. I wanted to buy slim gyms and twigs. And Kingsbury, non alcoholic beer. It's very empowering to make money as a kid. You know, I, I think that's not completely gone away, but I don't think teenagers have jobs these days.

Like we did back then. No, but you just said a mouthful chuck. Just having whatever money you make when you say 40 bucks a week. Yeah, probably something like that. Do you want to know when I was early on?

Right, okay. And you were empowered by that by walking by getting that paycheck cash in it. I got 40 bucks, I'm 15 years old. Imagine having 10,000 bucks at the end of a week. I would have had a role in your 15 years old.

Yeah. But in a snowman jeep.

“That's how, that's how off the rails this kids life suddenly got.”

Because the FBI had pushed him into this life and said, "Go, go. You know, get some money. Go buy a mint. Go buy a Rolex." And this kid could do it.

And I mean, just the fact that he is still alive. It's a kill back then. And didn't manage to kill anybody or anything like that. Like he kept it together enough that like it actually turned out about as good as it could. Although, we'll see that it turned out really rotten.

But I don't know. I'm not quite sure how to put what I'm saying. It just seems like this could have gone so wrong. So many different ways.

I'm feeling like emboldened and powerful and strong from all that money he had at that really tender age.

Yeah, for sure. And those no one, as far as I could tell in the FBI, that was like, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't let this kid do this." No. Exactly.

And his dad wasn't saying that either. Yeah. 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, driving a Jeep that said the snowman on back and in selling cocaine for the FBI. Yeah.

“I mean, I think the takeaway is that ultimately his dad said, "I'll ride all right."”

That's right. I'm really curious to see this movie now. I wonder how Macon hate places do. I'm sure exactly like you just said. Because he does not scream, he's side to treat.

No, he really does. All right. So you said something about him avoiding getting killed, which is fairly remarkable. But he did get shot at least once. In November of '84, he was shot in the stomach by a curry gang member.

He said it was an accident, but Rick was like initially it was like, "Hey, they found out who I am." That's why I got shot. The girlfriend of the guy who shot him called 911. And before the ambulance could get there, there were some other gang members who showed up. But in the back seat of the car, and he didn't know like, "Are they taking me to the hospital?"

Or again, it took me out and dumped 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, "Give that kid to us now." Yeah, I guess I had a really like a big chilling effect he was ready to quit.

They would have killed you if they actually did know.

“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, "Hi, I don't know." And they're like, "Got 10 grand right here." And he's like, "All right, you guys, you know me so well."

And he got back to it. 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 you're age, have been shot and lived to tell about it.

So like, you're kind of a cool kid now in that gang. And he kind of was. I mean, he worked out that way. Yeah.

“I think in February of 85 after he had been doing this little while as when they got their first, like, really big raid almost had staying.”

But he had, you know, Rick gave him information that led to about 200 grand in cash when they raided a house. The video equipment obviously a lot of cocaine and guns, like, all the things you would expect to find. I saw they just had two punch balls full of cocaine just sitting out on the table. Nice, punch balls are big. 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 Rick was the most productive informant that agency had in Detroit at the time. The whole city, not just these to Detroit. This is a 15-year-old kid.

I mean, that's a huge bus to get $200 grand in 1985 dollars and punch balls of cocaine.

So he would become such an amazing asset, Chuck.

That at one point the curry gang, a bunch of other big drug dealers from Detroit, we're going to see the, um, Marvin Haggler Tommy Hurns fight. Because Hurns was the pride of Detroit.

“And this is a title middle, middle, eight fight.”

I believe in 19 and hit man. The hit man, right? So all these Detroit drug dealers were going to watch the match. And they invited white boy Rick. And the FBI got him like a high quality fake ID and paid to send him to Vegas, paid for his plane ticket, paid for his hotel, gave him some walking around money.

And said go, 15-year-old, go to Las Vegas with a group of high-level drug dealers and just find out what you can. And he did. Yeah. Yeah, it's kids in Vegas at the Tommy Hurns fight. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the story just gets crazier. After he gets back from Vegas, part of the curry gang engaged in a drive-by shooting. Um, uh, accidentally killed a 13-year-old boy named Damian Lucas.

And the cops basically made this investigation go away.

And Rick was like, I, it was starting to kind of dawn on him. Um, because of this personal tied that the curry's 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 13-year-old. A couple years younger than me. And Johnny Curry gave Beverly Hills cop a guy 10 grand as a bribe to cover it up and Rick found out about this. Yeah, he was riding around in a car with Johnny Curry who had the who had Gil Hill commander Gil Hill on, um,

Oh, what does it call when you have it on speaker? He had a month 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 that murder of Damian Lucas. Yeah, for sure. Um, so that's the eye, you know, things are getting pretty hairy. They cut ties with them. Um, just before he turned 16, um, Richard senior was now off the books as the, um,

I guess fake informant and June of 1986. And, you know, it seems pretty clear that they're probably worried like, hey, this is gone far enough. Uh, if this gets out that we've done this, it's not going to 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.

Uh, and he's having the the cord pulled on him, like the rug pulled out from under him. And so Rick, you know, does what a kid that age in that, you know, not quite yet fully formed brain would do, which is, Hey, I'm going to keep doing this stuff. So he got into the real drug trade after the FBI dropped him. Yeah, that is, um, it's disputed whether that happened after or before they dropped him.

So like, during as he was an FBI informant and it seems like it's probably, there's a really good chance that it actually had happened. And that one of the reasons the FBI dropped him was because his actual drug career was taking off quite nicely. And they were like, we just, this kid's getting too hot. Rather than being like, we're going to bring in from the cold kid, like, we're going to move you somewhere because we did this to you. We need to give you set you up with a normal life.

They just walked away, like, dusting their hands off and left him to this life and he's Detroit as a, what he eventually became a very prominent drug dealer.

But I guess he was 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 Derrick. He was a suburban dude who was operating some drug planes that were coming up into Miami. And Rick became friends with him in his son. And he, you know, the kid 16 years old that at this point starts buying as much as like 50 kilos at a time.

As a cocaine wholesale or himself is what they call a weight man, like he's 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. Right. Which, um, he odd, just by that, by virtue of that, he automatically made less money. I saw FBI agent estimate he was probably making $5,000 off a key.

But he was selling tons and tons of keys. So he was making, like, really significant money. But you could also take a single key and turn it into a million dollars broken down into like and converted into five dollar hits of crack.

“If you were willing to do all that, that's what the chamber brothers did.”

Those guys who took over the apartment building. They made an estimated $55 million a year doing that. But I mean, like right, white boy Rick was later implicated as being one of the people who supply the chamber brothers with their cocaine. Like he became a wholesale coke dealer. That's not necessarily true.

But he definitely did supply plenty of people with their cocaine as a wholesale coke dealer. And one of the things that he didn't do, this to me really stands out.

He hung with the 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 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.

Yeah, well he ended up getting in some of the curry brothers in trouble just from all the information they had fed. You know, the FBI over the years, they were they were starting to make arrest.

“I think in 87, 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 a quiet about 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 like we need to keep it this way.

And I think that's when we found out about Gil Hill, Beverly Hills Cup, Gil Hill. I'm trying to get this guy, I'm Nate Boonecraft to assassinate Little White boy Rick. I think he offered him 125 grand and he tried to kill him a couple of times. Yeah, you know that you've arrived if you're 16 years old and you're not going to be murdered. You're going to be assassinated.

That means you know a lot. And the guy from Beverly Hills Cup was the one making the call. Right.

“Yeah, it's like, who would ever believe this, right?”

Yeah. So yeah, Nate Boonecraft later admitted to trying on two different occasions to carry out that hit. 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 filled the void, the drug void that was left by them. And he started to dating Kathy Bolson.

She was 24, he was 17, he was making about 30 grand a month and has three kids at this point. Yeah. I don't know if they were all with her. I don't think they were.

But I think it's first born Kisha was in the fact that Kathy Bolson started dating him.

You said that, you know, he was a legit drug dealer as legit as a drug dealer can be. He helped legitimize him like she is a and she was especially at this time a big big deal in East Detroit. And all of a sudden like this essentially like East Detroit royalty like criminal royalty comes down and is like, I'm going to start dating you now, white boy Rick and 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.

Yeah. And presumably did not get arrested herself for you know having sex with an underage kid. No, no. I think they had other things in mind, but even still she she would not have gotten arrested because she had Detroit PD keeping tabs on her as protection because the mayor had ordered the DPD to constantly surveil her to make sure she was okay. Not to catch her with anything.

In fact, to look the other way on it. So she can essentially do anything she wanted to and it would have been fine for her for sure.

We'll stick our second break and we'll finish up with the saga of white boy Rick right after this. [Music] Hi, it's Alec Baldwin this season on my podcast.

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Okay Chuck. So the party ends on May 22nd, 1987. The Detroit police decide that Rick needs to go down. If Nate Boomcraft can't kill him, we're just going to do it. The old fashioned way and arrest him and just block him up.

And they found 30 grand in cash in his car. They also found eight keys of cocaine that was stashed under a neighbor's porch. That Rick said, yeah, that's mine. Yeah. He was 17.

So he's still a juvenile. And he got arrested with eight keys in 30, 30 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, some of the stuff was found in his dad's house and his grandparents' house.

Which means they could have gone to prison. Loser houses like they really had him. If they didn't have him in May, they really had him in October. Right. And so around about this time, the name white boy Rick becomes much more widely known.

Not just in East Detroit, but in Detroit as a whole. And then very quickly across the nation because it was such a crazy novelty. Yeah. That there was this 17 year old white kid who was essentially the only white kid in East Detroit's drug trade.

And seemed to be pretty powerful.

And in fact, the media in particular, Chris Hansen, really, what's the word I'm looking for? I don't know. And fraudulently inflated the importance of white boy Rick right out of the gate just because it was so novel.

So they, yeah, it was very sensationalized. You know, this stuff obviously happened.

But it's like, hey, let's run another sort of injustice basically.

It was like, hey, let's run with this story because this is a kid. And it'll, you know, there weren't clicks at the time. Like, it'll get views or whatever on our, on our station and 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 in turn states evidence against this, everybody basically.”

You can do that and we're going to, you know, we can help you out and he was like, dude, I would get killed so fast your head would spend. So no, thank you. Right. Yeah. So he passed on that. He was like, I'm going to, I'm going to see what I can do with the jury.

He actually felt pretty good about his chances because they hadn't found the eight keys on him. They found it under a neighbor's porch. Like, there were all sorts of extenuating circumstances. The problem was he had the full force and weight of Detroit City Hall and the Detroit Police Department. Against him in every back channel you can imagine in the city at that time.

They were working to get him convicted as badly as he could be convicted. The media wasn't helping. Somebody, I think Chris Hansen again, he started in Detroit. He would go on to be the, to catch a predator guy. They showed an org chart, which showed all of the city's biggest drug dealers.

And guess who is at the very top, the kingpin, they portrayed as the guy who supplied all of the big drug dealers in Detroit. Why no other than white boy Rick. Because remember, they were trying to really kind of make this even more sensational than it already was. So they, they just said, well, this guy's actually the guy. Can you believe that?

And that did not help his chances either because he started to be seen as, if there's an crack epidemic in Detroit, this guy is ground zero for the problem. 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, Rick's talked a lot about this over the years,

but he later claimed that he was, that the lawyers that they assigned him, the public defenders were connected to the mayor, who obviously was kind of trying to make all this go away and cover up for everything on his family side.

And it was like, hey, block this kid away, basically.

And make sure these lawyers make sure that happen. One of those, I mean, 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 2003. So that kind of says it all.

It really does. Yeah, that's not, that's not good defense right there.

“The judge who convicted him said that he was worse than a mass murder during his sensing, I believe.”

And even if the judge hadn't won to do this, she had no choice. He was given life in prison without parole at age 17. And the reason why the judge had no choices because the, about 10 years earlier, Michigan had passed a law called the 650 life or law, where if you were caught with 650 grams or more of cocaine, which is about one and a half pounds or a little under half of a kilo, you got a life sentence without parole.

The no questions asked. If you were convicted of that, you went to prison for life. And this kid was 17 and got that sentence and was told that he was worse than a mass murderer. So things were not looking very good for him when he was sentenced after he was convicted. Yeah, for sure.

It was a period in our country where mandatory minimums were kind of popping up all over the place. For what it's worth the governor who signed that one said it was a greatest mistake of his career. Probably to make Rick feel much better. But after the trial, Matthew McConaughey is giving interviews.

And he's basically saying like, hey, we were federal informants.

My son at 14 was a federal informant. But at this point, this wasn't disclosed in the trial or anything. So everyone thinks it's just this dad kind of ranting this crazy talk. No one's taking him seriously. They didn't have any kind of credibility.

And in 1991, in prison, Rick starts working for the feds again from prison in an operation called Operation Backbone. Right. One of the FBI agents who had worked with him before.

“I think he was the first one who turned Rick into an informant at age 14.”

He was Greg Schwartz. He came to him years later for this operation backbone and said,

And we are, it's quite clear that they are in bed with the Detroit Police Department and City Hall. And it's time for us to take them down. We need your help. So he and Kathy Wolson were, they had 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 with the D.E.A.H.,

to know, I'm sorry, FBI agent who went undercover and carried out like this highly successful operation backbone. Yeah, it was a big, they got 11 cops. Other people obviously were arrested, but they got 11 crooked cops out of that. One of them was, or I mean, several of them were like kind of in the Mayor Young's inner circle.

“I think his favorite bodyguard was implicated.”

His brother-in-law, who was Kathy Wolson's father, was implicated. And she was even implicated at first and initially charged. But the charges on her were dropped. 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 in 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, they were the one setting them up.

Because this undercover agent is totally infiltrated this group because white boy Rick vouched for him over and over again, and introduced him to Kathy Wolson, 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 close to going down to.

He didn't. And yet, despite all this cooperation, despite all this stuff he had done for the FBI up to this point, he could not get parole to save his life.

“No, I think, you know, you said it was about it when it's about as well as it could.”

I think it quite didn't because it 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 phone call.

But we're barely, 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 didn't get the big fish, but they certainly got enough people. I think this was not too long after the Marion Berry scandal, smoking crack is a mayor. Like a high-profile mayor. And I think there was a lot of just, like, hey, we don't need another scandal of another high-profile mayor in this country, like doing the wrong thing.

Right. 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 think, up to the 2000s.”

So he was in Florida for a while. He was just doing his thing. And remember, we talked about how much he loved cars. Well, he was caught running, or at least participating in a car theft ring, and stolen car ring from prison.

He was helping coordinate the whole thing. And that's tough to do, and not get caught. Because, eventually, your conversation is going to be overheard or listened to. And you're going to get in trouble. And this exactly what happened.

They got him on racketeering charges in 2005. 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. And everyone else that he was, had been, you know, associating with was getting out. Johnny Curry got out 99 that hit man that tried to kill him twice and admitted to murdering 30 people.

It did 17 years, and then cooperated with the cops. That mandatory minimum that sent him the 650 life or that was overturned by the Michigan Supreme Court in 1998. And everyone else that had been impacted by that law ended up free within six years. But Rick stayed in prison. He just kept getting denied parole.

I think the first one was in 2003.

He asked, 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, it was like, all right, I'll tell him about Operation Backbone and he helped us out with that.

Yeah, the problem is it's like none of that was ever going to help because white boy Rick had broken a really big rule by

Riding 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 and to punish him too. And so, in a really unusual move, a bunch of Detroit police officers went to his 2003 parole hearing. And basically, just lied, lied 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 denied again in 2008. And he got denied again in 2012 too. Yeah, that Greg Schwartz, the Fed, this time actually wrote a letter saying like, hey, he did a lot of stuff with us actually. It wasn't just Operation Backbone that Damian Lucas murder.

He tried to help us out with that. That 13 year old kid who got killed.

And he said, you know, we never disclosed this stuff because he was a kid.

And we would have been exposed and embarrassed that the federal government was working with a kid in this capacity. They rejected that one too, even though he finally had someone willing to vouch for him. All right. And until 2013, 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, you know, white boy Rick.

Like no one kind of knew who he was. And in 2013 that that was a guy named Seth Farante, 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 activist article in 2015 that you were talking about that we read. Great.

And that was like, that was it. All of a sudden it was fully out there. Like he didn't even get to go to his dad's funeral. His dad died while he was in prison. And he has like six grandchildren at this point and is in his 40s, which is remarkable.

And he's like, not met these kids at this point. No. So one thing that makes it like really kind of gets across how just under the thumb of the Detroit Police Department, this kid was still decades on.

“A judge, judge Dana Hathaway, I think she was the original judge in his in his trial.”

She threw out the life sentence as a judge, right? This wasn't something she didn't or leisure time. Like she officially threw out his life sentence and prosecutors appealed and won. So he had his life sentence like was upheld. What 30 years later, and Hathaway even went on the record saying that this whole thing was very fishy.

Finally, two years later, he's granted parole.

This is 13 years after the last person who was given a life sentence under that Michigan 650 life hall, had already been laid out. He was the only one. His incarceration continued for 13 more years. He got out in 2017, age 47, and you would think that would be the end of the story. Chuck, but it was not 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 people start asking questions and stuff like that. Right. But he had to stay, or I guess, got recent 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 of 2020.

“I think he was 51 at the time and was like, I need some money.”

I need some restitution and he sued the feds. Of course, and he didn't get anything. No, the judge said the statute of limitations had run out in 2006, and he's like, well, I couldn't really say anything. Well, I was in jail because I would have gotten beaten up on a daily basis by the guards. And they said, sorry, pal, like none of your, your very legitimate suits against the federal government are going to be able to be tried.

So yeah. Apparently he's working on his own documentary project about his life, too, with the hip hop director hype Williams. Yeah, I worked with hype back in the day. Oh, yeah, is he related to freedom Williams? I have no idea, but hype was one of the biggest names in the game back then.

Oh, yeah, and I'll tell you off, Mike. Okay, some other stuff. I can't wait to hear this. Okay, well, since I want to hurry up and then this episode, because I want to hear a Chuck has to say about hype Williams.

“I think it's time for listening to mail.”

Instead of listening to a mail, we're going to give the issue one last, well, not one last, but another reminder about our voyage.

Where are we going? We're going from New York City to Burmuda and we're going to be doing our live show and we're going to be with our buddies from stuff. They don't want you to know and stuff.

Mom never told you and we're going to be doing like other events on boards.

Give me a lot of fun. Yeah, you can go to virginvoages.com/stuff@c and start booking passage today.

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It'll be fun. Let's try it. Get late. Can't wait. And we also can't wait to hear from you via email, which you can send to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

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The podcast. On the iheart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Here at the happiness lab, we're serving up some hot takes for the summer.

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