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Richard Wershe Jr. the teenager and the adult
Convicted Detroit drug trafficker Richard Wershe Jr., who was granted parole in Michigan last month after nearly 30 years in prison, will not be free man after all.
Wershe, sometimes called "White Boy Rick" in gthe media, was taken Tuesday morning from the Oaks Correctional Facility in northern Michigan and is on his way to Florida to begin serving the remainder of his sentence in a car theft case, reports Vince Wade, a former Detroit investigative reporter who lives in California and runs a crime blog called Informant America. He's also writing a book about Wershe.
No details are available on where Wershe, 48, will be held in Florida.
Ralph Musilli, Wershe's attorney, told Deadline Detroit Tuesday he's not clear how long Wershe will be in prison down there. He wants to see what Florida corrections officials are thinking before he acts. He said it could a very short time or it could be 2 or 2 1/2 years.
He said the state had checked periodically on his behavior. Wershe had been a model prisoner, his lawyer says.
Wershe pleaded guilty in Florida in 2005 for being part of a car theft ring. At the time, he was housed in a federal prison there as part of the witness protection program after he helped the FBI in Detroit in a drug sting in the 1990s that resulted in the arrests of police officers and Mayor Coleman A. Young's common-law brother-in-law.
Wershe was in prison in northern Michigan at the time he worked with the FBI on that sting. He was sentenced to five years in Florida in the car theft case and has since been given 488 days of credit for time served. He qualifies for good-time credit, which means he'd serve about 22 months if Florida decides to make him fulfill the rest of the term.
In May of 1987, 17-year-old Wershe was charged with drug trafficking. Wershe, who had been dating the niece of then-Mayor Coleman A. Young, was later convicted and sentenced, under a tough, mandatory state law to life in prison without parole. The law eventually changed and he was resentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
Wershe believes he was repeatedly denied parole because he helped put away cops and other people with connections to important figures in town, including Mayor Young.
