Your average teen cocaine kingpin might balk when the same FBI who abandoned him came knocking with yet another exciting offer to collaborate — for the low, low price of yet another bullet to the stomach? But by 1991, 20-year-old White Boy Rick was locked up, all out of moves, and was once again enticed into cooperating with fast-talking Federal agents.
Rick became the linchpin of "Operation Backbone" described as "one of the biggest sting operations in Detroit public corruption history," per Click On Detroit. The plot played out like this: Rick called up ex-flame, drug dealer Johnny Curry's wife, Cathy Volsan Curry. He vouched for a drug trafficker calling himself "Mike Diaz." Diaz then lured the brother-in-law of the allegedly dirty mayor of Detroit as well as a cop who was also the mayor's bodyguard to a yacht in Miami. There, Diaz offered the men $50,000 cash for putting together a team of crooked cops to protect shipments of cocaine from Miami to Detroit.
All this is captured on video. The men shake hands with Diaz, who was actually FBI agent Mike Castro. In all, twelve corrupt cops would go down in the wildly successful sting. The FBI admits none of this would have been possible without Rick, but, they allegedly welched on their promise to help him secure his release. White Boy Rick, who was by this time more of a white man, languished in prison for another 28 years.
