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Richard Wershe Jr.
Richard Wershe Jr., aka "White Boy Rick," who was serving a sentence in Florida for being part of car theft ring, is scheduled to be released from a Florida halfway house July 20, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.
Wershe, 50, who was convicted of cocaine trafficking in Detroit in the late 1980s, was granted parole in Michigan in July 2017 after serving nearly 30 years in prison.
But instead of being free, he was sent to Florida to begin a sentence in a car theft case. Wershe pleaded guilty in Florida in 2005 for being part of the 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 and convictions of Detroit and suburban police officers and Mayor Coleman A. Young's common-law brother-in-law. He was serving his Michigan drug sentence at the time.
The Florida Department of Corrections did not immediately respond Sunday via email for comment.
Wershe is engaged to be married to a woman in Michigan he has known since childhood.
Retired FBI agent Gregg Schwarz and Rick Wershe Jr.
"I'm confident he'll do well when released," said Gregg Schwarz, a retired FBI agent, who regularly talks to Wershe and has worked deligently for decades to try and get his release.
As part of that effort, he pushed for Wershe's early parole in Florida. But in April 2019, the parole was denied.
Schwarz, who got to know Wershe after working on a joint drug task force in Detroit in the 1980s, said Wershe's placement in the halfway house and his release has nothing to do with Covid-19.
Schwarz said it was a corrupt system that kept Wershe behind bars all these years when others in the drug trade, who were much bigger players, were released after doing a fraction of Wershe's time.
"He should have done 10 to 15 years for his involvement with drugs in the city of Detroit," Schwarz said. "Now, because of all the past and current public corruption, he had to serve all this time."
Wershe was never given any cut in his sentence as a result of his cooperation with the FBI, which is considered unusual.
Wershe got a lot of national attention after two films were made on his life. One in 2018 titled "White Boy Rick," starred Matthew McConaughey, who played Wershe's father. The other one, a documentary, "White Boy," debuted at the 2017 Freep Film Festival.
