The Trials of White Boy Rick (Kindle Single)

The Trials of White Boy Rick (Kindle Single)

Read the story that is soon to become a major motion picture, produced by Universal Studios.

It was the spring of 1987, and crack cocaine had turned whole swaths of Detroit into veritable combat zones. The city thought it had seen everythingâ€”until one evening that May, when the police arrested a 17-year-old kid named Rick Wershe.

They called him White Boy Rick. In a city known for its fraught racial divide, Wershe had somehow joined the ranks of the drug kingpins on the predominantly black East Side before he was old enough to shave. He flew in kilos of cocaine from Miami and drove a white Jeep with THE SNOWMAN emblazoned across the back. An incredulous judge once compared him to the gangster â€œBaby Faceâ€ Nelson. He seemed more an urban legend than a real personâ€”and then his story got even stranger. Years later, while he was in prison for cocaine possession, Wershe claimed he had been working with the FBI since he was 14. Was one of Detroitâ€™s most notorious criminals also one of the fedsâ€™ most valuable informants in the city?

Journalist Evan Hughes set out to untangle fact from fiction in Wersheâ€™s improbable story, tracking down the dealers, cops, and federal agents who shared the streets with him and eventually meeting Wershe himself at the rural Michigan prison where he remains incarcerated. The Trials of White Boy Rick is a gripping true-crime saga of hidden motives and betrayed trustâ€”and reveals never-before-reported information suggesting why Wershe is still behind bars.

Praise for "The Trials of White Boy Rick"

â€œFor anyone who lived in Detroit in the â€™80s, the drug dealer known as White Boy Rick remains legend. But the true story of Rickâ€™s epic rise and fall, as exhaustively reported by Evan Hughes, reads like a lost Elmore Leonard story. Essential, infuriating, wildly entertaining. Free Richard Wershe now!â€
â€”Mark Binelli, Rolling Stone staff writer and author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

â€œHighly recommend new Evan Hughes opus from The Atavist. Crooked cops. White Boy Rick. An Ellroy novella set in Detroit.â€ â€”Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker staff writer

â€œHoly crap, this Evan Hughes story in The Atavist is mind-blowing.â€ â€”Wil S. Hylton, writer for The New York Times Magazine and New York.

â€œWorth every nickel.â€ â€”Don Van Natta Jr., ESPN and ESPN The Magazine

â€œThis astonishing Evan Hughes piece on Detroit is Pulitzer Prize-caliber reporting and writing.â€ â€”Michael Lindgren, book reviewer for The Washington Post
Country USA
Manufacturer The Atavist
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2014-09-29
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	The Atavist
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2014-09-29
Format	Kindle eBook

The Trials of White Boy Rick (Kindle Single)

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