Police Draft 14-Yr-Old Into Informant Slavery, Jail Him For Life When He's Later Caught Selling Cocaine

Chris | InformationLiberation
Jun. 27, 2015

Police drafted a 14-year-old child into drug informant slavery with the "permission" of his drug informant father and had the boy work for them for three years, then busted him for selling cocaine a year after they abruptly decided they were done with him.

From Click on Detriot:

Rick Wershe had an unusual job as a 14-year-old. Police were paying him to get close to drug dealers and then tell them when shipments were coming in. It was a job that led Wershe to sell drugs and land in prison for more than 27 years.

“They showed me some pictures and asked me who this person was, who that person was. I basically identified them and they said they would be in touch,” Wershe told Local 4 Defender Kevin Dietz.

His father, also a paid informant, gave permission for police to recruit his son.

At first, Wershe said, police from a federally-funded task force gave him a few bucks to identify drug dealers.

“And the relationship grew from there. It went into them sending me into houses to purchase drugs and stuff like that,” Wershe said.

Soon, he was collecting hundreds of dollars, and eventually thousands of dollars, to cozy up to criminals and help police bust them.

Police stopped using him as an informant at age 17, at which point he says he was "addicted to the money" and decided to sell drugs on his own.

A year later he was caught with 8 kilos of cocaine, the same government he worked for deemed him a "drug kingpin" and sentenced him to life in prison without parole under the "harshest drug statutes ever conceived."

Almost three decades later, he's still rotting in prison and was just denied a parole hearing for the third time.

Former Michigan Parole Board member Robert Aguirre said the decision to deny him a hearing was "wrong" as there's "no reason in this world that he should still be there."