Danny Wolfe
Daniel Richard Wolfe was a Canadian gangster who along with his brother Richard co-founded the Indian Posse street gang in 1988. Wolfe remained one of the leaders of the gang until his murder in 2010.
Youth
Wolfe was born three months premature at the General Hospital in Regina, Saskatchewan, the son of Richard Wolfe Senior and Susan Creely. Both of his parents were Cree. His Cree name was Come Up Shouting At The Earth. In 1979, his parents moved to the North End of Winnipeg, where he grew up. Both of his parents were alcoholics, and Danny along with his older brother Richard Wolfe Jr. were essentially left to raise themselves. Creely drank during her pregnancy and Danny suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder as his brain had been damaged in the womb by the alcohol in his mother's blood. Richard Wolfe Sr. abandoned his family, and the Wolfe brothers were left in the care of their mother. Creely attended a residential school from the age of 6 onward and was raped by her teacher, causing her to engage in heavy drinking from the age of 12 onward. In an interview, Creely defined her mothering as: "I just went to the party and got drunk. I didn't give a shit. I did that because I didn't have any love in my heart and I didn't have parenting skills. I lost that in the residential schools".The Wolfe brothers were brought up amid "the howling chaos of the North End" where prostitution, drinking, drug use and violence on the streets were the norm. Carolyn Loeoppky, the principle at the Pinkham School in the 1980s, where Wolfe was educated, described the Wolfe brothers as quiet children who kept to themselves and rarely spoke in the classrooms, but possessed fierce passions under their quiet surfaces. Loeppky recalled: "They were enigmatic. They were hard to figure out, hard to reach, and suspicious about the purposes of others". Loepply stated she knew that Danny Wolfe was destined for an unhappy life as he was a small, undernourished boy with an unhealthy pale look. She added: "Behind that very quiet façade you thought there were all kinds of things going on in that boy's mind". The Wolfe brothers were frequently in trouble with their teachers, and Danny often accused his teachers of being racist, saying that they were biased against him for being Cree. When the Pinkham School held a fundraiser, sending out the children to sell chocolates, the Wolfe brothers along with all of the other First Nations children were excluded by the teachers under the grounds that they would steal the money. The Wolfe brothers along some of the other First Nations children raided the Pinkham school in the evening, and in an act of revenge trashed the school.
Susan Creely lived on welfare, and spent her welfare cheques on alcohol. To get away from the constant parties at their mother's apartment, the Wolfe brothers stayed out late. As the Wolfe brothers were usually hungry as their mother spent so much of her income on alcohol that she lacked the means to buy food, the Wolfe brothers raided the garbage bin at a local Kentucky Fried Chicken, looking for scraps of uneaten food. In the summertime, the Wolfe brothers raided the gardens kept by the Portuguese immigrants, stealing carrots and tomatoes. The Wolfe brothers soon moved on to smashing the windows of cars and taking any money they found to buy food. Danny Wolfe was known as an adventuresome boy who had no sense of fear. At the age of 8, he stole away on a freight train and ended up in northern Ontario before he was discovered. By the age of 10, Danny Wolfe was already an accomplished shop-lifter and stolen his first automobile. At the age of 12, Danny along his brother and some of their friends stole a van and drove out to Regina. Journalist Joe Friesen wrote about the Wolfe brothers: "By the time they were about ten or eleven years old, Danny and Richard were quite accustomed to raising themselves. They had no regard for conventional rules or morality. They saw themselves as survivors and were prepared to do whatever it took to make it". The Wolfe brothers were often placed "in care" and to escape the abuse ran away to live on the streets. In the spring of 1988, Danny saw his father living as a homeless man on the streets of Winnipeg. Danny had not seen his father for several years, and was heartbroken when his father said "hi" to him and then kept walking down the streets as his son did not matter to him.
Indian Posse
In the summer of 1988, the Wolfe brothers founded the Indian Posse gang in the basement of the house that Susan Creely was renting on Beverley Street. Richard Wolfe Jr. described his brother as "a mischievous little guy" who was the first one in the Indian Posse to take up smoking cigarettes, the first one to drink alcohol, and the first one to smoke marijuana. The Wolfe brothers were part of a gang of thieves who called themselves Scammers Inc, but resenting the way that the older boys took the majority of the profits for themselves, the Wolfe brothers founded a new gang called the Indian Posse in August 1988. Both of the Wolfe brothers were greatly influenced by Afro-American gangsta rap, and the name Indian Posse was inspired by the rap songs they loved. The term Indian was often used in a derogatory sense in Manitoba and copying the way that rappers had used the term "nigga" in an attempt to turn a derogatory word into an affirmative one, the name Indian was chosen as the part of the gang's title. Much of the gang's symbolism and rules such as the choice of red bandannas as a sort of uniform were designed by Danny's friend Lynn. The most important rules were that the Indian Posse was only open to Indians and Metis with all other ethnicities excluded while in a nod to Cree traditions the gang was governed by a "circle" of 5-10 people who made decisions by consensus. The structure of the Indian Posse with its three levels of membership, "hang-arounds", "strikers" and "full" members whose status were identified by their tattoos was copied from outlaw biker gangs.The Wolfe brothers moved from breaking into automobiles into breaking into houses. Danny served as an apprentice thief to his older brother Richard. Danny's first criminal conviction was on 18 January 1989 at the age of 12 for a break and enter into a house. He was sentenced to a year in open custody. In 1990, the police raided Susan Creely's house and found numerous stolen stereo systems and televisions in the basement. Later that year, the Wolfe brothers started to sell drugs and worked as pimps as they forced their teenage classmates into prostitution. The Indian Posse catered to the most depraved sexual tastes and forced girls as young as 10 and 11 to work as child prostitutes despite the gang's rules which forbade pimping child prostitutes. In 1991, Danny started to date Crystal Simard, a 14-year old who already had a daughter. Collen Simard, Crystal's cousin recalled: "They were a sweet couple. Inseparable. They'd be just sitting there, their thin builds with matching long black hair and matching black clothes. Walking down the street you couldn't tell which was which". Collen Simard recalled Danny as a "sweet" young man who was always gentle towards Crystal and her daughter and was generous in supplying her with stolen jewelry as gifts. Simard described Wolfe as a "twisted Robin Hood" who stole from middle class white people to give to poor First Nations people. Another girlfriend recalled that Danny was a young man with "beautiful dark soul eyes" who would quietly break into her basement apartment to have sex with her without awakening her grandmother. She recalled that he was never violent and was always generous in supplying her with cash and stolen jewelry. The journalist Carleigh Baker noted the contrast between "...the gentle and loving young man raved about by his former girlfriends and the hardened thug running a prostitution ring of girls as young as 10. Richard and Danny's posturing on this topic – shame, remorse, and occasionally outright denial – doesn't change the fact that it made them a lot of money."
By the beginning of 1992, the brothers Wolfe had sufficient income to rent a house with a monthly rent of $866. Richard was considered to be the diplomat while Danny was considered to be the warrior. Though easygoing, Danny was known for his ungovernable rage. During his frequent stays at the Manitoba Youth Centre, Wolfe sold drugs and made allies. A pastor at the Youth Centre stated: "Danny was very impressionable. He didn't have the smarts Richard had". Danny served as the principle enforcer for the Indian Posse and was involved in 14 shootings between 1990 and 1994. Danny disliked drive-by shootings, which he considered to be cowardly, and much preferred walk-by shootings, which involved more risk and hence more courage. Danny had an obsession with his underworld reputation and always wanted to be seen as someone without fear. The precise number of people Danny killed remains unknown as his rivals followed the underworld code of never incriminating another criminal to the police and younger members of the Indian Posse usually confessed to the shootings that Danny committed to spare him prison time. The most notable of Wolfe's shootings were a shoot-out on the streets in 1993 with a rival gang called the Crips, which ended with Danny ambushing a van carrying some Crips and emptying his handgun while standing in the open, blasting away while showing no fear about the bullets flying around him.
Wolfe found himself frustrated at the lowly status of the Indian Posse in the underworld as the street drug dealers who took on the most risky and least profitable end of drug dealing, but the principle suppliers of drugs in Manitoba were the Asian crime syndicates and outlaw biker gangs who offloaded the responsibility and the risks of street dealing onto the Indian Posse. Wolfe lacked the international connections to have foreign drug suppliers sell to his gang directly, and instead had to purchase drugs from the Asian gangs or the biker gangs who inflated the prices and took none of the risks the Indian Posse had to take. Much to the dismay of the Wolfe brothers, the Indian Posse served as subcontractors to the outlaw biker gangs in Winnipeg such as los Bravos and the Spartans. Though the Hells Angels did not establish a chapter in Manitoba until December 2000, the Hells Angels national president Walter Stadnick was very active in Winnipeg from 1990 onward, playing off the los Bravos and the Spartans against each other, and selling both gangs drugs. Richard Wolfe later stated "Danny always hated bikers". Most Canadian outlaw biker gangs are virulently racist and have a whites-only admission policies, and Danny never disguised his disgust and dislike of the outlaw biker gangs, though it did not stop him from doing business with them if the need arouse or copying their tactics. Wolfe especially hated the openly racist Hells Angels who have a strict whites only admission policy; use Nazi symbols such as swastikas and the SS lightning bolt runes as their own; and who always treated the Indian Posse in a contemptuous manner. The archenemies of the Indian Posse was a Hells Angels-backed aboriginal gang, the Manitoba Warriors, whom the Indian Posse started to feud with in 1994. The Hells Angels courted both the Manitoba Warriors and the Indian Posse to serve as a puppet gang, and came to prefer the former over the latter as the Warriors proved more docile.
In July 1994, Danny escaped from the Manitoba Youth Centre, which led to his conviction for escaping lawful custody. Danny was sent to the Headingley Correctional Centre, which marked his first time in an adult prison. Though short and small, Danny was known as a ferocious fighter, and was frequently involved in prison brawls. Richard who was also serving a sentence at Headingley stated: "I saved a lot of foes from being killed at the hands of D-Boy . We fucked up a lot of people". In December 1994, Danny was released from Headingley and resumed his criminal career on the streets. Both the Wolfe brothers adopted the fashion styles of gangsters in Los Angeles wearing baseball caps, checked jackets and Nike shoes.