By SCOTT M. BURNSTEIN – Less than two weeks after Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced she would rethink her office’s longstanding opposition to paroling former teenage drug dealer and underage federal informant Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe, clips from an upcoming documentary film on Wershe have been released featuring a notorious convicted hit man claiming Gil Hill, the recently-deceased former Detroit City Council President and one-time head of the Detroit Police Department’s homicide division, offered him $125,000 to murder Wershe in 1987.
In an interview for Christopher Shawn Rech’s new documentary 650 Lifer – The Legend of White Boy Rick, one-time prolific street assassin and member of the infamous Best Friends gang, Nate (Boone) Craft, a man who admitted in court to killing 30 people, says he was given three separate murder contracts on Wershe in 1987, one of which came directly from Hill (the other two from fellow drug chiefs). Craft testified against leaders of the Best Friends and did 17 years behind bars. WDIV Channel 4, the NBC television affiliate in Detroit will show the clip of Craft implicating Hill in a Wershe murder plot tonight.
Rech’s film will be released next year. Two major Hollywood studios intend on making movies based on Wershe’s life.
Worthy issued a statement to the media late last month saying she plans on reviewing Wershe’s case in light of studying other similar juvenile lifer cases. She blocked Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Diane Hathaway’s decision to resentence and release Wershe last fall by taking the resentencing order to the Michigan Court of Appeals, which overruled Hathaway.
Wershe, 47, is the longest-serving non-violent offender in the state of Michigan’s Department of Corrections, incarcerated on a life prison sentence stemming from a routine traffic stop on the eastside of Detroit in May 1987 where police found cocaine buried under a nearby porch when he was 17 years old. He was living in Southfield at the corner of 11 Mile Road and Evergreen at the time of his arrest. The law he was sentenced under was tossed off the books in 1998. His next chance for parole is in December 2017.
Over the past decade, a number of ex-FBI agents and Detroit Police Officers have come forward and admitted they recruited Wershe out of the eighth grade at just 14 as part of federal narcotics task force and began paying him to infiltrate eastside Detroit drug gangs. The relationship between Wershe and the government lasted for two years.
Hill died of natural causes in February, best known nationally as a co-star with actor Eddie Murphy in his three Beverly Hills Cop movies of the 1980s. He was 84 and had staged an unsuccessful bid to become Mayor of Detroit in 2001. During his work with the government as a teen, Wershe told the FBI that Hill took a payoff to hinder the homicide probe in the accidental murder of a 13-year old boy in a drive-by shooting in 1985. Steadfast in his denial of the allegation, Hill was investigated, but never charged with any wrongdoing.
Craft claims in the years that followed Hill took him to Belle Isle and solicited him to kill Wershe. According to Craft, Hill offered him more than two drug kingpins did to carry out the murder.
“The most I was ever offered to kill White Boy Rick was $125,000 and that was from Gil, from Gil Hill..….. he decided (Wershe) knew too much about him, the mayor, the chief of police and those kind of people,” one clip of the documentary shows him saying.
As a teenager on the street, Wershe dated Mayor Coleman Young’s niece. While in prison, Wershe helped the FBI build a historic corrupt cop case in Detroit that came down in 1992. Craft admits to trying to complete the contract on Wershe’s life on numerous occasions to no avail. Wershe and Craft made peace while locked up together in the Witness Protection Program in the 1990s. Craft attended Wershe’s resentencing hearing last year to show his support.
Nate “Boone” Craft
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