Earlier this month, in Jackson, Michigan, two officers led Richard
Wershe, Jr., into a one-story building at the G. Robert Cotton
Correctional Facility. Media and supporters of Wershe from around the
country fell silent as he entered and shuffled toward his seat, wearing
leg irons, handcuffs, and a belly chain. It would be Wershe’s first
parole hearing in more than fourteen years. A movie based on his life, starring Matthew McConaughey as his father, was shooting in Las Vegas
the night before.

Wershe is more widely known as White Boy Rick. He rose to prominence as
a teen-age cocaine trafficker in nineteen-eighties Detroit, where he
mixed with major names in the local drug trade who were almost uniformly
black and at least a decade older. Wershe’s arrest, in 1987, for
possession of more than eight kilos of cocaine, brought an end to his
career as a dealer; he was seventeen years old. He will be forty-eight
next month, and he is still imprisoned for that crime. His hearing
opened a window onto an earlier time in criminal justice, one that feels
like the distant past but is lately being invoked and resurrected in
Washington.

What Detroit did not know during Wershe’s rise and fall is that he also
served as a valuable off-the-books confidential informant for the F.B.I.
and the police beginning at age fourteen, according to F.B.I. records
and former agents and officers who have since come forward. (I wrote
about his connection to the F.B.I. for the Atavist magazine, in 2014.)
While Wershe was befriending Johnny Curry—“the cocaine king of the East
Side,” as the Detroit Free Press called him—and getting close to
Curry’s criminal organization, he was simultaneously playing a pivotal
role in their eventual downfall, feeding the authorities intelligence on
their drug houses and their alleged acts of violence, including the
murder of a thirteen-year-old boy. Later, from prison, Wershe again
coöperated with the F.B.I., in an elaborate sting targeting public
corruption, vouching for an undercover agent who posed as Wershe’s
trusted former drug connection. The operation resulted in the arrest of
sixteen people and the conviction of high-ranking Detroit police.

Wershe’s activities as an informant were not disclosed at his trial,
where he was sentenced to life in prison. The Detroit law-enforcement
community, which he has repeatedly exposed and embarrassed, has
vociferously fought his previous bids for release.

Even before this month’s hearing began, it was apparent that, with
interest in Wershe sharply on the rise, this was no ordinary proceeding.
The hearing began at 9 A.M. but a spokesman for the Michigan Department
of Corrections, Chris Gautz, was on site doing live TV interviews, in a
dawn-colored glare, before seven that morning. The audience filled the
largest room available in the state system (Wershe had been transported
more than two hundred miles from the prison where he is held), and a
video feed was made available outside. I happened to be seated next to
the wife of the parole-board chairman, and she told me it was the first
hearing she has attended for her own curiosity.

Wershe wore a blue prison uniform with orange piping and stencilled
lettering so faded as to be illegible. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a
shaved head, he scanned the crowd with a neutral expression as he
entered the room and moved toward his seat. He sat with his back to the
audience, facing state officials and a court reporter, and he swore to
tell the truth.

In aggressive questioning that lasted for three hours, an assistant
state attorney general, Scott Rothermel, led Wershe through not only the
crime for which he is incarcerated but the entire dramatic story of his
time on the streets and his involvement, from behind bars, in a
stolen-car ring. “I’m going to have a lot of questions for you, Mr.
Wershe,” Rothermel said near the outset, “so settle in.” The effect was
similar to watching a particularly adversarial journalistic interview.
“Can I ask you a question?” Wershe said at one point. “No,” Rothermel
replied.

Rothermel had done his homework and challenged Wershe on apparent
discrepancies between his testimony in the hearing and earlier accounts
(including mine). At times, Rothermel seemed more motivated by
fascination than by the job at hand, as he delved into minor details and
used street slang: “popped” for arrested, “cred” for credibility,
“weight man” for a cocaine wholesaler. Some observers had anticipated a
rote and dull proceeding, but the audience heard about Wershe’s
big-league Miami suppliers, an F.B.I.-funded trip to Las Vegas to gather
intelligence on Johnny Curry, a whiskey box full of cocaine, and corrupt
Detroit police. Wershe said that on the night of his arrest officers
seized thirty-four thousand dollars of his cash; when Rothermel asked
why the police report indicated that they had confiscated less than
thirty thousand dollars, Wershe replied, “You’d have to ask D.P.D.
that.”

Wershe has an excellent memory and is open about his crimes, and the
intense back-and-forth brought his teen-age involvement in the drug
world vividly to life. It almost seemed as though the two men were
discussing recent events. But, of course, they were talking about the
Reagan years.

Wershe’s time in the drug trade, the mid-to-late eighties, was the era
of the crack epidemic, of Len Bias’s fatal overdose, of the Central Park
jogger, and of crime rates in American cities reaching heights that have
not been matched since, with Detroit often at the top of the list. A
climate of fear pervaded city life, and the brutal Willie Horton attack
ad against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 Presidential campaign warned
every politician never to be seen as soft on crime. Drugs were
frequently portrayed as the root of all urban ills. Wershe was never
charged with a violent crime, but a judge called him “worse than a mass
murderer” from the bench, before the teen-ager had even faced trial.

The very fact that Wershe is still incarcerated makes him a vestige of
that era. Wershe was sentenced under arguably the most merciless drug
statute ever conceived in the nation, Michigan’s so-called 650-Lifer
Law, which, at the time, mandated a term of life without parole for
possession of more than six hundred and fifty grams of cocaine or
heroin. (Not even the Rockefeller laws ruled out parole for a one-time
drug offense.) The Michigan statute was amended in 1998, to give judges
some leeway and to retroactively allow for the possibility of parole.
But, in Wershe’s time, the thinking that gave rise to the original law
carried the day. Politicians did not know, of course, that the crime
rate was going to decline dramatically in the decades ahead, and they
were terrified of the opposite. Throwing away the key was the
panic-button response.

The 650-Lifer Law has become a symbol of the worst excesses of the drug
war and is widely regarded as a failure. The governor who signed it into
law, William G. Milliken, a Republican, has since called it the worst
mistake of his career.

Since the statute was rolled back in 1998, making those already serving
time parole-eligible, nearly all have been released, leaving Wershe
increasingly alone. (Johnny Curry, for his part, was sentenced the same
year as Wershe, but in federal court; he was freed eighteen years ago.)
A movement away from brutal sentences and mandatory minimums, especially
for drug offenses, has gained real traction, on both the left and the
right. The Michigan Department of Corrections now touts its recent
record of reducing the inmate population (despite the “perverse
incentive,” as Gautz put it to me, that success means laying off your
own staff). Wershe’s backers have reason to hope that he will finally be
granted parole when the board announces its decision, next month.

It’s strange, then, that in Washington, D.C., the winds are blowing the
other way. Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants no mercy for nonviolent
offenders. Sessions has sparked an outcry by reversing reform efforts
with bipartisan support, instructing federal prosecutors in a memo last
month to always pursue the charges that carry the maximum sentences.
Together, Sessions and President Trump seem mired in a nineteen-eighties
world view, haunted by the spectre of urban mayhem, fixating on the role
of narcotics, hanging onto ideas about the drug war that have been
widely abandoned. Crime is nowhere close to what it was in Wershe’s
day—in New York City, murder is down eighty-five per cent since 1990—but
Sessions and Trump are still hitting the panic button, still living in a
time when Rick Wershe was just a kid.