White Boy Rick

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
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.

**Chuck** (0:22)
Yeah, that's right. This is very Detroit, I was gonna say adjacent, but it's like firmly in Detroit. It's not even adjacent.

**Josh** (0:28)
Centered even.

**Chuck** (0:30)
Because we're talking about White Boy Rick, who if you have not seen the movie, starring, oh God, what's the guy's name? Who played him?

**Josh** (0:38)
Matthew McConaughey?

**Chuck** (0:40)
No, he played the dad, Matthew McConaughey is older than we are.

**Josh** (0:45)
I know, I was like, did they dress him up like a teenager?

**Chuck** (0:47)
Yeah, how do you play a 14-year-old? I can't remember the kid's name, but I have not seen that movie. There's also a bunch of documentaries, but in particular one that's pretty good, about this kid in the 80s, Rick Wersch, who was an FBI informant at the age of 14 in secret.

**Josh** (1:06)
Yes, and this is completely 100 percent true. This has been vetted, thoroughly researched, and his claims, although they seem like, okay, this is just some guy talking, who's in prison just keeping himself from getting bored. No, basically everything he's ever said about his time as an FBI informant and a teenage drug runner has been confirmed. This is an amazing true story, and it's also a sad true story in a lot of ways, too, because this guy lost a significant portion of his life to really stupid drug laws at the height of the war on drugs, when everybody was so gung-ho about just lock them up, lock the drug dealers up, and go ahead and lock up the drug users while you do it, too.
And it was a bad time to be caught with kilos of coke, I can tell you that.

**Chuck** (1:57)
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.

**Josh** (2:12)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (2:13)
And then, you know, turned on him, and there was cover-ups, and it was Detroitan.

**Josh** (2:19)
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, popped his collar, turned him around by the shoulders, and shoved him out onto the street. That's basically how they induced him to essentially become a member of the East Detroit drug scene, like drug supply scene. He was rolling with as big as you get, essentially, at the time.

**Chuck** (2:45)
All right, so let's go back, I guess, to his birth in 1969 He's 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 Wersch, Jr. His parents separated, his mom moved out to the Burbs, and then generally, he and his sister, Dawn, lived with their dad, Matthew McConaughey. Richard Wersch, Sr. It was a time where the auto industry was disappearing in Detroit. The familiar story of Detroit is that it fell into violence and drugs and crack came along, and white flight happened in a big, big way.
Rick and Dawn and their father were a bit of an anomaly as a white family that kind of stayed where they were on the Detroit's east side at the time.

**Josh** (3:33)
Yeah, and one reason why is because this was their neighborhood. White Boy Rick's grandparents lived directly across the street from him.
So these were his dad's parents. It was like a family community. There were other people who were sticking around, but yeah, 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, 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.