In Detroit’s drug world in the 1980s, everybody had a nickname, but only one man had a nickname that told you everything about him before you even knew his real name, Maserati Rick. Not just because he drove one, though he did, a custom convertible that made people stop dead on the street because nobody in Detroit had ever seen anything like it.
But because the name captured something about who he was, a man who believed that if you were going to do something, you might as well do it louder, flashier, and more extravagantly than anyone around you. Custom suits, diamond rings, Rolex watches, a riverfront condo, a car wash on 7 Mile that doubled as his headquarters, an estimated $20 million a year in cocaine, and when he died shot twice in his hospital bed by a killer who walked right past nurses and security dressed in a doctor’s white coat, he went out in a $16,000 silver
coffin shaped like a Mercedes-Benz complete with spinning tires, BBS rims, and a hood ornament because even in death, Maserati Rick wasn’t going to be ordinary. His real name was Richard Earl Carter, born July 31st, 1959, pronounced dead at 6:01 p.m. on September 12th, 1988 in room 307 of Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 29.
And while his murder remains officially unsolved to this day, the prime suspect walked free, the case was closed, and no one was ever charged. On the streets of Detroit’s East Side, the story of what happened and why has been told and retold for nearly four decades. But the real question ain’t who killed Maserati Rick.
It’s how a kid from Detroit’s East Side who started off stealing cars became the most flamboyant drug dealer in the Motor City’s history. How does someone build direct connections to Colombian cartels, control the cocaine supply for an entire region, and live like a celebrity while the Feds and the Detroit PD watch from the sidelines? That story don’t start in a hospital room.
It starts in 1959 in Detroit, where a baby was born into a city that was already starting to crumble, and he decided the only way to rise was to break every rule. Richard Earl Carter was born on July 31st, 1959 in Detroit, Michigan, a city that was at the peak of its industrial power but already showing cracks.
Detroit in the 1950s and ’60s was the Motor City, home to Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, pumping out cars and creating jobs for hundreds of thousands of black families who’d migrated north during the Great Migration. But by the time Richard Carter was old enough to understand the world around him, those jobs were disappearing.
The 1967 riots had torn apart entire neighborhoods. White flight was accelerating, and the East Side, where Richard grew up, was becoming a place where opportunity meant something different. Richard Carter grew up in a working-class family on Detroit’s East Side, in neighborhoods near Alter Road and East Jefferson. His family wasn’t rich, but they weren’t homeless, either.
They were just trying to survive like everybody else in the neighborhood. Richard had two brothers, Greg and Clyde, who would later become part of his operation, and together, they learned early that if you wanted anything in Detroit, you had to take it yourself. Growing up, young Richard showed an interest in sports.
Before he ever touched drugs, he was a boxer. He trained at local gyms on the East Side, learning discipline and how to take a punch. But more importantly, boxing put him in the same rooms as Detroit’s elite athletes. Richard became a towel boy and bodyguard for Thomas “The Hitman” Hearns, one of the greatest boxers Detroit ever produced.
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Hearns would go on to become a world champion in multiple weight classes, and during the mid-1980s, he was at the peak of his fame. Richard watched how Hearns carried himself, how people treated him, how money and fame opened doors, and he wanted that for himself. Richard also became a manager for his own brother, who boxed competitively.
He saw firsthand how the boxing world worked, how promoters made money, how fighters got paid, and how quickly it could all disappear if you didn’t have the right connections. That lesson stayed with him. You had to control your own destiny, build your own empire because nobody was going to hand you anything. At 18 years old in 1977, Richard Carter caught his first conviction, receiving stolen property.
It wasn’t a major charge, just enough to put him on the radar of local police and show him what the inside of a jail cell looked like, but it didn’t scare him straight. If anything, it taught him that if you were going to commit crimes, you had to be smarter about it. Don’t get caught with the goods, don’t leave evidence, and most importantly, don’t work small time.
For the next 5 years, Carter stayed relatively quiet, running small hustles, stealing cars here and there, making enough money to get by, but nothing that would draw serious attention. Then in 1982, everything changed. Sylvester “Sly” Murray, one of the biggest cocaine and heroin suppliers in Detroit, was convicted and sent to prison.
Murray had been the chief supplier for Young Boys Incorporated, or YBI, Detroit’s first major crack gang, and he’d controlled the drug flow into the city for over a decade. His conviction left a vacuum, and ambitious young dealers across Detroit saw an opportunity. Richard Carter was one of them, and his partner in that rise was a childhood friend named Demetrius Holloway, who would later become known as the original Big Meech, long before Demetrius Flenory from the Black Mafia Family ever used the name. Carter and
Holloway had grown up together on Detroit’s East Side, and they understood each other’s strengths. Holloway was strategic, disciplined, and good at building networks. Carter was flashy, charismatic, and had a gift for making connections. Together, they decided to fill the void left by Sly Murray’s downfall.
By 1983, Carter and Holloway were making moves. They started flying to Florida and Los Angeles, connecting with suppliers who could get them Colombian cocaine at wholesale prices. Federal authorities later confirmed that Carter and Holloway made frequent trips to Miami and LA, using those connections to secure a reliable pipeline of product back to Detroit.
And once they had the supply, they flooded the East Side with cocaine, undercutting YBI’s remnants, the Chambers brothers, and anyone else trying to control the market. But here’s where things get interesting. Carter and Holloway didn’t just source their cocaine from Colombia. They also connected with a white suburban cocaine wholesaler named Art Derrick.
Derrick was one of the biggest weight men in Detroit, a guy who had direct ties to Miami suppliers and a small fleet of aircraft to transport kilos of coke. According to estimates, Art Derrick was raking in $100,000 a day in the mid-1980s. His clients included all of Detroit’s major drug legends, Maserati Rick, Demetrius Holloway, the Curry brothers, and the Chambers brothers.
Derrick’s partner was a man named Sam Curry, an older black man who happened to be the father of Johnny and Leo Curry, the infamous Curry brothers who ran one of Detroit’s most powerful drug gangs. Sam Curry knew all the black players in Detroit’s drug trade. Art Derrick had the Colombian supply lines.
Together, they moved massive amounts of cocaine, and Maserati Rick was one of their best customers. It was through this network that Richard Carter also crossed paths with a teenage FBI informant named Richard Wershe Jr., better known as White Boy Rick. Wershe was just 14 years old when the FBI recruited him to spy on the Curry brothers.
By 15, he had a fake ID and was flying to Miami and Las Vegas to do drug deals. And by 16, he was dating Cathy Volsan, the beautiful niece of Detroit’s first black mayor, Coleman Young. Art Derrick had two customers named Rick. One was black and drove a Maserati. The other was a white kid from the East Side. To avoid confusion, Derrick started calling the black Rick Maserati Rick, or Maz for short, and the white kid became White Boy Rick.
The nicknames stuck. But while White Boy Rick would eventually be betrayed by the FBI and sentenced to life in prison as a teenager, Maserati Rick would rise to become one of Detroit’s most feared and respected drug lords. Carter’s operation took off, and with it came the money, lots of it.
By his mid-20s, Carter was pulling in an estimated $20 million a year, moving kilograms of cocaine and heroin through a network of runners, dealers, and enforcers spread across Detroit’s East Side and beyond. Federal investigators later described Carter as a kilo man, meaning he dealt in 2.2 lb quantities of cocaine, the kind of weight that only the most important traffickers could afford to inventory without serious financial strength.
Carter didn’t just make money, he spent it, and he spent it loud. Around this time, Carter bought a brand new Maserati convertible from an Ohio dealership and drove it back to Detroit, parking it outside one of the hottest nightclubs on the East Side. People stopped and stared. Nobody in Detroit had a Maserati, and from that moment on, Richard Carter became Maserati Rick.
The name stuck, and it fit perfectly with the image he was building, a larger-than-life figure who dressed in custom suits, wore gold rings on every finger, and lived like a king. But Carter wasn’t just about cars. He invested heavily in luxury and status symbols. He owned multiple high-end vehicles, including custom Corvettes and Mercedes-Benzes, all decked out with expensive rims and sound systems.
Rims were a big deal in Detroit’s drug scene. They were evidence you had money. You were somebody. As comedian Chris Rock once joked, “We’ll put shiny ass rims on any piece of [ __ ] car in the world.” But Carter’s cars weren’t pieces of [ __ ] They were top-of-the-line machines, and they announced his arrival before he even stepped out of the driver’s seat.
Carter listed his official home address as a modest bungalow on Burwood Avenue in Northwest Detroit, but that was just for the paperwork. In reality, Carter kept multiple residences. He had a fortified flat near Alter Road and East Jefferson, equipped with reinforced doors and surveillance systems. He also owned a plush condominium on the Detroit International Riverfront, where he could escape when the streets got too hot, and he used those properties not just for living, but for business.
They were meeting spots, safe houses, places where deals got done and plans got made. Carter’s lifestyle was the stuff of legend. He wore designer clothes from head to toe, Armani suits, Gucci loafers, custom-tailored shirts that cost more than most people’s monthly rent. He dripped in jewelry, gold chains, diamond rings, Rolex watches with custom bezels.
He ate at the best restaurants, tipped lavishly, and made sure everyone knew who he was when he walked into a room. At night, Carter hit Detroit’s hottest nightclubs, places like The Lady on the Lower East Side, where Tuesday nights were known as dope dealer nights. The scene was straight out of Scarface.
Everyone wanted the best table. Everyone wanted to be seen. Everyone wanted to spend the most money. Carter rolled up in his luxury cars with gaudy rims, walked through the door like he owned the place, and held court in his own VIP section. Other dealers had their own sections, too, like high school cliques, but Carter’s was always the most crowded, the loudest, the most extravagant.
To mask the proceeds of his drug operation, Carter invested millions of dollars into legitimate businesses across Detroit’s East Side. He bought car washes, barber shops, and hair salons, turning them into fronts where his runners could make pickups and drop-offs without drawing attention.
One of his most well-known spots was a car wash on the corner of 7 Mile Road and Mansfield, which doubled as his headquarters. It was there, on September 10th, 1988, that everything would come crashing down. But, before we get to that, we got to talk about the muscle behind Maserati Rick’s empire.
Because Carter didn’t just rely on charm and money to control the East Side, he had enforcers. And in the mid-1980s, those enforcers were the Brown brothers, Reginald “Rock and Reg” Brown, Ezra “Wizard” Brown, and Terrence “Boogaloo” Brown. Together, they formed a murder-for-hire crew that became known as the Best Friends, and they were responsible for some of the most violent killings in Detroit’s history.
The Best Friends started out working for Maserati Rick and Demetrius Holloway, handling hits, collecting debts, and making sure rivals stayed in line. They charged between $10,000 and $30,000 per hit, and they were good at what they did, efficient, ruthless, loyal. For a while, the arrangement worked perfectly.
Carter and Holloway made the money. The Best Friends handled the dirty work. And together, they controlled Detroit’s East Side drug trade. But money changes people. And by the late 1980s, the Brown brothers weren’t satisfied being hired guns anymore. They wanted a piece of the drug trade for themselves.
Rock and Reg Brown, the eldest and most ambitious of the brothers, started making his own connections, sourcing his own product, and cutting into Carter and Holloway’s profits. Maserati Rick introduced Boogaloo Brown to his supplier, a man known only as Colombian Mike, thinking he was doing a favor for one of his top enforcers.
Instead, he gave the Best Friends the plug they needed to become independent. Tension started building. Carter and Holloway began to suspect that the Best Friends were planning to take over, and on December 20th, 1986, Ezra “Wizard” Brown was sitting in a Chevrolet Blazer with his brother Boogaloo when someone opened fire, hitting Wizard in the head and killing him instantly.
Boogaloo was also shot in the head, but survived, throwing a brick through the window of the nearby 7th Precinct police station to get help. Wizard’s murder was a warning shot. The streets were getting bloody. Rock and Reg Brown was arrested and convicted for a separate murder in 1988, sentenced to life in prison.
But he won an appeal in 1992 and was released, immediately going on another murder spree that included the killing of a 3-year-old child on Buckingham Avenue. He was eventually recaptured in New York City in 1993 after trying to buy an $80,000 BMW with cash at a dealership. Today, Rock and Reg is serving life in prison.
Boogaloo Brown, the youngest brother, became a fugitive in 1993. On August 9th of that year, his body was discovered in Atlanta. The Best Friends were done. But while the Best Friends were collapsing, Maserati Rick had a new problem, Edward “Big Ed” Hanserd. Big Ed Hanserd had once been a customer of Maserati Rick and Demetrius Holloway, buying cocaine from them to sell on the East Side.
But by 1987, Hanserd had secured his own California connection and was building an organization that directly competed with Carter and Holloway. The beef between Carter and Hanserd became personal real quick. According to street legend, Hanserd started calling himself “Big Ed” and told people it was a nickname given to him by Maserati Rick’s mother, a deliberate insult designed to get under Rick’s skin.
Most people on the streets called Hanserd “Black Ed” or “Eddie Money”, but the “Big Ed” nickname stuck and became a symbol of disrespect. The two men clashed repeatedly. In one early confrontation, possibly in Hanserd’s unisex hair salon in 1987, Carter, Holloway, and Hanserd got into a wild shootout that left Hanserd with a nasty scar across his abdomen from a gunshot wound.
Maserati Rick tried to kill Hanserd at least three times after that, all unsuccessful. Each failed attempt made the situation worse, and by mid-1988, the beef had escalated to a point where everyone on the East Side knew it would end in blood. Both Rick and Edward’s lava-hot tempers, their proclivities for violence, and their fondness for automatic weaponry posed a grave threat to the citizens of Detroit at large.
As one law enforcement official put it, Carter and his crew made enough enemies to fill Tiger Stadium. And none of those enemies seemed more determined to annihilate Maserati Rick than Big Ed Hanserd. On September 10th, 1988, around midday, Maserati Rick and Edward Hanserd’s top enforcer, Lodrick “Ricky the Hitman” Parker, got into a shootout outside Carter’s car wash headquarters on 7 Mile and Mansfield.
The details of who shot first are murky, but what’s clear is that both men were hit. Parker took a bullet to the shoulder and was treated at Sinai Hospital, where he was patched up and released that same day. Maserati Rick was shot multiple times in the stomach and rushed to Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital, where he underwent several hours of surgery before stabilizing.
Carter was placed in room 307 in the intensive care unit under guard, or at least he was supposed to be. But hospital security in 1988 wasn’t what it is today. Visitors could walk in and out with minimal checks. And on the evening of September 12th, 1988, someone dressed in a white doctor’s coat and surgical scrubs walked right past the nurse’s station, entered room 307, and shot Maserati Rick twice, once in the head, once in the face.
Rick never woke up. He was pronounced dead at 6:01 p.m. When police arrived, they found a wooden cross, a set of rosary beads, and a .357 Magnum revolver resting on the bedside drawer. But the killer was long gone. The murder sent shockwaves through Detroit. This wasn’t a street corner execution. This was a hospital hit, the kind of thing you saw in mob movies, not real life.
Detectives immediately focused on Lodrick Parker as the prime suspect. Parker had motive. He’d been shot by Rick’s crew just 2 days earlier. He had opportunity. He’d been released from the hospital and was free to move around. And according to at least one eyewitness, he was seen entering the hospital around the time of the murder. But when Parker went to trial in December 1988, he was acquitted.
The prosecution’s case fell apart. The eyewitness testimony wasn’t strong enough. There was no physical evidence tying Parker to the scene. And Parker’s defense argued that he’d been set up, that someone else had killed Maserati Rick and used Parker as a scapegoat. The jury believed him, and Parker walked free.
Parker was rapidly gaining a reputation as the most dangerous man on the East Side of Detroit, and the acquittal only added to his legend. Years later, a different story emerged. According to Nate “Boone” Craft, a former Best Friends member who turned informant, it wasn’t Lodrick Parker who killed Maserati Rick.
It was Terrence “Boogaloo” Brown, the youngest of the Brown brothers. Craft claimed that Boogaloo, still loyal to the Best Friends and looking to consolidate power, had assassinated Rick while he was vulnerable in the hospital, and then blamed it on Hanserd’s crew. If that’s true, it means Maserati Rick’s murder was an inside job, carried out by someone he’d once trusted, someone he’d helped rise to power.
But regardless of who pulled the trigger, the result was the same. Maserati Rick was dead, and his empire was about to collapse. On September 16th, 1988, 4 days after his murder, Maserati Rick was laid to rest in a funeral that became the stuff of legend. Thousands of mourners showed up at Peace Chapel on Detroit’s East Side.
The service was packed with family, friends, rivals, and people who’d never met Rick, but wanted to see the spectacle. Because Maserati Rick didn’t just get buried in a regular casket, he was laid to rest in a custom-made $16,000 silver coffin designed to look like a Mercedes-Benz complete with spinning tires, BBS rims, gold-plated accents, a hood ornament, and gleaming metalwork.
It was the most extravagant gangland funeral Detroit had ever seen. The casket alone cost more than most people made in a year. And as Rick’s body was carried out of the chapel and driven to Elmwood Cemetery, the final resting place of thousands of Detroit underworld figures, including members of the city’s powerful Italian crime families known as the partnership, people lined the streets to watch.
Maserati Rick had lived loud, and he went out the same way. None could match Rick’s Shakespearean-like flair for the dramatic, an attribute he displayed even in death. But Rick’s death didn’t bring peace to Detroit’s East Side. If anything, it made things worse. Demetrius Holloway, Rick’s childhood best friend and business partner, immediately went into hiding.
Just weeks after Rick’s funeral, Holloway staged his own kidnapping from a burger joint near Gratiot and I-94, spreading the word that he’d been abducted and possibly killed. In reality, he’d gone underground, terrified that he was next on the hit list. Holloway stayed hidden for months, but eventually he came back.
And for a while, he survived. He dodged indictments, avoided assassins, and kept his operation running despite the chaos. But on October 8th, 1990, Demetrius Holloway’s luck ran out. He was shopping at the Broadway, a trendy men’s clothing store in downtown Detroit, just two blocks from Detroit Police Headquarters, when someone walked up behind him and shot him twice in the back of the head while he was paying for a pair of Ralph Lauren Polo socks.
According to witnesses, the gunman reportedly whistled “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” as he pulled the trigger. Holloway died instantly, reportedly with over $14,000 in cash and a loaded .32 caliber pistol in his pocket. Clyde Carter, Maserati Rick’s brother, who’d taken over parts of the operation after Rick’s death, was killed in a gangland drive-by shooting in 1989, just a year after Rick’s murder.
The Carter-Holloway empire, which had controlled Detroit’s East Side for nearly a decade, was gone. Edward “Big Ed” Hanserd, the man who’d started the war with Maserati Rick, didn’t fare much better. In 1988, Hanserd was jailed on gun charges and forced to forfeit close to $1 million in cash. He was released on probation in early 1989, but his freedom didn’t last.
Big Ed had his parole violated in June 1989 and was arrested as he exited Northland Mall in Southfield heading to his red BMW. He was eventually convicted on federal narcotics and racketeering charges and spent nearly three decades in prison, finally being released in 2016. Lodrick “Ricky the Hitman” Parker, the man accused of killing Maserati Rick, was acquitted of that murder but couldn’t stay out of trouble.
Less than a month after his acquittal, he was arrested for shooting a drug-dealing rival near Gary, Indiana. He was later convicted of firebombing and extorting a local candle shop in the early 1990s and is currently serving life in prison. Looking back, Maserati Rick’s story is a perfect example of how fast an empire can rise and how quickly it can fall.
In less than 6 years, Richard Carter went from stealing cars to controlling a $20 million cocaine operation. He lived in luxury, drove custom Maseratis, and became a legend in Detroit’s underworld. But he also made enemies, lots of them. And when you live by the gun, you die by the gun.
Or in Rick’s case, you die in a hospital bed, shot by someone who walked right past security like they belonged there. To this day, Maserati Rick’s murder remains officially unsolved. Detroit Police closed the case after Lodrick Parker’s acquittal, and no one else was ever charged. But on the streets, people still talk about it.
Some say Parker did it, others say it was Boogaloo Brown. A few claim it was someone else entirely, maybe even a cop or a federal agent tired of watching Rick operate with impunity. The truth is, we’ll probably never know for sure. What we do know is that Maserati Rick’s life and death left a mark on Detroit that’s still visible today.
His story has been told in documentaries, books, and rap lyrics. His name is still mentioned with a mix of respect and caution. And his $16,000 Mercedes-Benz coffin, buried in Elmwood Cemetery, remains one of the most talked-about symbols of Detroit’s violent drug era. So, what do you call a man who built a $20 million empire, lived like a celebrity, survived half a dozen shootouts, and then got executed in his hospital bed by a killer who was never caught? That’s the question Detroit’s been
asking since September 1988, and maybe the real lesson here isn’t just about Maserati Rick’s rise and fall. It’s about the betrayal that brought him down, the system that let killers walk free, and the fact that in Detroit’s drug game, loyalty is a myth and survival is never guaranteed. Because Maserati Rick might be gone, but the streets that created him, those are still here.
And the cycle of violence, money, and murder, that’s still spinning, just like the tires on his Mercedes-Benz coffin.
