(RepublicanInformer.com)- Richard Wershe Jr., a former drug dealer and informant who inspired the movie “White Boy Rick” has filed a $100 million lawsuit in federal court claiming he was coerced into assisting police when he was a teenager.
Wershe, 52, served three decades in prison in Michigan and was released in 2017. He then served three more years in a Florida prison.
His lawsuit, filed in Detroit, alleges that, as a child in the 1980s, his legal troubles were caused by the pressure of pleasing the local police and federal agents who used him as informant. He claims that they repeatedly sent him into drug dens, but when he got into legal trouble, they abandoned him.
Law enforcement first began using Wershe in the 1980s when his sister began dating a known drug dealer. Wershe’s father contacted the FBI to get help ridding his daughter of the drug dealer. When FBI Agent James Jim Dixon met with Wershe’s father in 1984 and agreed to help the family, the agent asked if his father could identify people in photographs the agent brought with him.
Wershe, who was with his father at the time, identified most of the people in the photos. Just days after that meeting Agent Dixon pursued the 14-year-old Wershe, encouraging him to work as an informant.
According to his lawsuit, Wershe claims that, because the agent was an “authority figure,” he felt compelled to do what he was told, and continued to comply with Dixon’s commands thereafter.
Dixon then, according to the lawsuit, began jobbing out Wershe to other FBI agents and Detroit Police officers who were working as part of a joint taskforce.
Wershe’s suit alleges that even after his work as an informant got him nearly shot and killed, the taskforce agents continued to pressure him to work for them.
In a press conference announcing the lawsuit, Wershe said the justice system had not been fair to him over the last 33 years. Saying that the truth needs to be told, Wershe said that everything alleged in the lawsuit is backed up by documents and FBI agents.
Wershe’s attorney, Nabih Ayah, acknowledged that those named in the lawsuit will no doubt argue that Wershe’s constitutional claims are too old to bring to court.
Wershe’s life became the basis of the 2018 film “White Boy Rick” starring Matthew McConaughey and Richie Merritt.
