by
Cathy Volsan-Curry
The late Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young’s niece, Cathy Volsan-Curry, who had a turbulent life filled with romances with big-name drug dealers and battled addiction over the years, died Wednesday at Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit, according to a family friend. She was 64.
She had been battling kidney disease, the family friend said.
Volsan-Curry was subject of a number of newspaper articles over the years.
In the 1980s, Volsan-Curry married Johnny Curry, a prominent drug dealer on the city’s east side. When he went to prison, she dated other people, including Richard “White Boy Rick” Wershe Jr., who also eventually went to prison.
She was the daughter of Mayor Young’s sister, Juanita Clark, and Willie Volsan, both of whom are deceased.
In 1991, both Willie and Cathy got tangled up in an FBI sting.
Cathy Volsan-Curry was in a drug rehab facility in the Upper Peninsula when Wershe, who was in prison, contacted her about helping recruit police officers to protect drug shipments at Detroit City Airport and cash shipments at Detroit Metro Airport. It turned out Wershe was working with the FBI, and the drug shipments, that were actually fake cocaine, were part of a sting.
Cathy subsequently contacted her father, who helped recruit a number of police officers. In the end, Cathy, Willie and officers from Detroit, Highland Park and Royal Oak Township, were charged in federal court.
Charges were dropped against Cathy, but Willie Volsan was convicted and went to prison. He died in April 2006, shortly after being released.
“She was a beautiful, friendly person,” said the family friend. “You wouldn’t have known she was involved with the people she was. She was just a beautiful, sweet person.”
“She did have some regrets, and she really felt her life was kind of wasted, I guess, after a while.”
She had been living in her mother’s home in northwest Detroit and had a grown son from her marriage to Johnny Curry.
