PublishedEbury Press, January 2018 |
ISBN9781785037498 |
FormatSoftcover, 320 pages |
Dimensions19.8cm × 12.6cm |
Soon to be a major motion picture with Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Jason Leigh
Meet the boy who ruled the streets of Detroit - and served most of his life in prison as a result.
In 1980's Detroit, Rick was a teenage drug-dealing prodigy that ascended through the ranks of a volatile Motor City underworld, rubbing elbows with men twice his age before he could legally drive a car. He averted death in some half-dozen assassination attempts, negotiated million-dollar cocaine deals with Colombian and Cuban drug lords in Miami and Las Vegas, hobnobbed with the Mayor of Detroit, and played ball with a dearth of dirty cops and politicians.
At 17, Rick was arrested for a single drug offense and his trial became tabloid fodder across the country. Draped in full-length mink coats, wearing his signature Adidas tracksuit and gold rope-chain around his neck, Rick's sly-grinning face was splashed across newspapers and television news broadcasts. He was presented as the face of youth crime in the crack cocaine era. His romance with the Mayor of Detroit's beautiful niece, almost a decade his senior and the wife of his imprisoned drug-kingpin mentor, only stoked the flames further.
What nobody knew was that beyond the veneer of teenage drug chief was a creation of Uncle Sam, a fully bought, paid for and trained undercover operative working exclusively and very secretly for the U.S. government. Today, Rick Wershe, 48, is the longest-serving non-violent juvenile offender in the U.S. prison system - an unfathomable result of the government's War on Drugs in the 1980s. In July 2017 he was finally granted parole. This book will tell his side of the story for the very first time.
