The Ballad of Danny Wolfe by Joe Friesen

Author:Joe Friesen [Friesen, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-3031-4
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2016-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

Danny’s time in group homes and prisons as a teenager, not to mention his transient childhood, could have exposed him to sexual abuse. But he never mentioned it elsewhere, nor do his prison records suggest it, so it’s not clear whether he was a victim of sexual abuse.

In the pictures that Danny kept from his time in Prince Albert it’s possible to glimpse a little bit of the life he led. He and his friends hung out in various cells decorated with pin-up photos of girls in bikinis. Danny and company are often playing video games or watching TV, smoking cigarettes and posing with stern faces. They stand with shirts off to display their muscles, staring blankly into the camera, and they make Indian Posse gang signs by forming the letters I and P with their fingers. The rooms look institutional and the peeling paint on the walls lends an air of decay. It’s a bleak environment.

In July, the Indian Posse made a move against a native prisoner, someone Danny and Richard knew from Manitoba. This man was a convicted killer serving a nine-year sentence for beating his uncle to death, and clearly he made the mistake of crossing either Danny or another high-ranking member. He suffered a brutal beating that resulted in dozens of stab wounds. The prison was locked down for days and Danny got sent to the hole. Two and a half months later he was still there.

“I don’t keep track of the time,” he wrote to Richard. “I just do it. Day by day.”

They didn’t charge anyone for the stabbing, which Danny took as confirmation that he could get away with anything in this prison. He was also suspected of plotting to take a guard hostage, according to his prison files, yet he was never charged.

As yet more trouble piled up on Danny’s doorstep, his jailers threatened to ship him to the Atlantic Institution in Renous, New Brunswick, a maximum-security jail far away from any concentration of Indian Posse members. That prospect made him nervous. An emerging Corrections strategy against the gangs seemed to be to send the leaders and high-profile members to far-flung locations in Eastern Canada to separate them from the pack. Danny and Richard increasingly had to update one another on who was being sent where.

“There’s four bros coming here from Stony and four going East but I don’t know what joint yet,” Danny wrote. “They’re shipping everyone everywhere now. Good. Now we can rip shit up all over.”

Some IP members were going to a super-maximum facility called “the SHU,” the Special Handling Unit in Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, the highest security jail in Canada. That brought with it some stature for the Indian Posse, a sense that the gang had finally arrived, and Danny wondered if that’s where he would be heading eventually. Having seen the terrible riot at Headingley, corrections officials were vigilant about not allowing the Indian Posse to grow so large that it could overwhelm a given institution. By now, in the early 2000s, the Indian Posse was vying to be the largest recognized gang in the prison system.

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