January 28, 2022 — The widow of slain Detroit drug boss Richard (Maserati Rick) Carter was released early from a 20-to-40 year state prison sentence for a controversial narcotics-possession bust she took herself. Tracy Cowan had her sentence commuted by Governor Gretchen Whitmer to time served in the days before Christmas last month after former teenage drug dealer and prison-reform activist Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe, Jr. campaigned on her behalf in Lansing with the governor.
Wershe, who was a friend of Maserati Rick Carter’s on the street in the 1980s before he himself was locked up and Carter was famously shot to death in his hospital bed, was present in Pittsfield Township, Michigan on Wednesday when Cowan walked free. The 60-year old Cowan was locked up in the early 2000s following the raid of her ex-boyfriend’s home where she was present visiting her children.
Carter and Cowan had two kids together. During the 2002 raid, Detroit Police found 1500 grams of cocaine, a pound of marijuana and two loaded pistols. Her ex-boyfriend wasn’t present at the raid and Cowan was left to take the heat. The ex-boyfriend, Motor City drug world figure, Rory (Roy Boy) Jones, wasn’t charged in the case, but took a federal cocaine-trafficking and racketeering pinch shortly thereafter and did a dozen years behind bars. At the time of her arrest, Cowan had no criminal record and was no longer in a romantic relationship with Jone
Carter was killed on September 12, 1988 at age 29 and buried in a $30,000 custom-made Mercedes-Benz coffin. Wershe had been sent to state prison for life at just 18 years old ten months prior after being found guilty at a highly-sensationalized jury trial for cocaine-possession stemming from a routine traffic stop.
Wershe, 52, was finally released from prison in the summer of 2020 after 32 years of incarceration as the longest-serving non-violent juvenile offender in the history of the American justice system and now works promoting prisoner rights issues and advocating for prison reform. In the years following his imprisonment, it came out that Wershe was recruited out of the eighth grade by a federal drug task force and put to work as a paid informant. The task force encouraged him to drop out of high school in the ninth grade and gave him close to $50,000 for more than two years of employment. He wasn’t working for the task force when he was arrested.
Wershe’s case gained attention and sympathy across the globe and the media coverage of his plight forced the Michigan Parole Board to finally act to free him. The board had previously rejected four parole requests. The story was chronicled in the 2018 Hollywood film White Boy Rick, starring Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey and the 2021 Netflix documentary White Boy.