Richard Wershe Jr.

Wershe is being housed at TTH Kissimee FL after spending nearly three decades behind bars in Michigan as a nonviolent drug offender. He was housed at Florida State Prison after pleading guilty to being involved in a car theft ring. Wershe says he pleaded guilty to protect his mother and sister. In 2019, his application for an early release was denied by the Florida clemency board.

A film based on his life, titled White Boy Rick, was released in September 14, 2018. The documentary chronicling the case of Richard Wershe Jr., White Boy, won the 2017 FREEP Film Festival Audience Choice Award. It was released in 2017 and began airing on the Starz network in 2019.

In 1987 Wershe was arrested for possessing cocaine in excess of eight kilograms (17.6 pounds). He was sentenced to life in prison in Michigan under the state's 650-Lifer Law, a drug statute that penalized those found in possession of more than 650 grams (22.92 oz) of cocaine or heroin with life imprisonment without parole. Wershe earned parole in 2017 after nearly 30 years in prison. He was released from the Oaks Correction Facility in Michigan in April 2017 and turned over to U.S. Marshals.

Wershe and his lower middle-class family lived in a neighborhood on the east side of Detroit about seven miles from downtown. They lived there during a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Detroit and many other major American cities were gaining widespread reputations for crime and violence, largely due to an influx of cocaine and the emergence of the crack cocaine epidemic. Wershe's father was also an FBI informant and first reported to the police and the federal agency alongside him before going solo.

Richard Wershe Jr. (born July 18, 1969), also known as White Boy Rick, is the youngest known Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) informant ever, having worked with the bureau at only age 14.