Indian Posse
The Indian Posse is an indigenous street gang active in Western Canada based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It is one of the largest street gangs in Canada.
Criminal Intelligence Service Canada has designated the IP as being a member of indigenous-based organized crime. CISC asserts that the Indian Posse, in addition to engaging in marijuana cultivation, auto theft, illegal firearms activities, gambling, and drug trafficking, also supports and facilitates criminal activities for the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and Asian-based networks.
The Wolfe brothers
The gang was founded in the summer of 1988 in Winnipeg as a street gang by the Wolfe brothers, Danny and Richard. Richard Daniel Wolfe was born in 1975 and Daniel Richard Wolfe was born in 1976. The Wolfe brothers were Cree, but spoke English as their first language though Danny Wolfe as an adult expressed the wish to learn the Cree language. Danny Wolfe was born premature and suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome as his mother drank during her pregnancy. Throughout his life, Danny Wolfe displayed poor self-control, anger issues and a tendency towards aggression, which are typical of those born with fetal alcohol syndrome. The father of the Wolfe brothers, Richard Wolfe Sr, was an alcoholic while their mother, Susan Creeley, was a drug addict and an alcoholic who by her own admission failed dismally at being a mother. As a father, Richard Wolfe Sr, was only irregularly involved in raising his sons, and was last seen by them in 1988. Richard Wolfe Sr. ended up living on the streets. Creeley's father was the chief of the Okanese First Nation reservation in Saskatchewan and he was a highly respected World War II veteran. But his life fell apart due to his alcoholism, and he regularly beat his wife and children. Creeley 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, Creeley 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". In sentencing Richard Wolfe Jr. in 2010 following his convictions for rape and assault, the judge stated: "He was raised in an environment where substance abuse and domestic violence was prevalent. Richard was repeatedly exposed to violence which occurred during his parents' house parties. He was sexually abused at the age of seven, once by a stranger and twice by a neighbour. The episodes of sexual abuse left Richard confused, ashamed and full of hate".Creeley lived on welfare, but spent so much money on alcohol and drugs that her sons were usually hungry. To feed themselves, the Wolfe brothers started stealing, smashing the windows of cars to steal whatever money happened to be in the car in order to buy food, leading to frequent arrests. By the age of 10, Danny Wolfe was already an accomplished shop-lifter and stole his first automobile. The Wolfe brothers grew up in the "howling chaos of the North End" of Winnipeg where the people live in a Third World level of poverty and where arson, shootings, heavy drinking on the streets, prostitution and drug abuse were daily occurrences. The journalist Jon 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". Creeley, who stopped her substance abuse and drinking in 2001, believes that if she had been a better mother, her sons might have chosen a different path, and now works as an youth counselor, trying to save troubled First Nations young people from the fate of her sons.
The Wolfe brothers were greatly influenced by American gangsta rap, which was their favorite genre of music, and much of the style of the gang owned considerably more to Afro-American gangsta rappers than to First Nations culture. The word Indian was often used in a pejorative sense in Manitoba, and the Wolfe brothers picked the name Indian Posse as an attempt to cancel out the negative sense of the word Indian, just in the same way that some Afro-Americans call themselves "niggas" in an attempt to turn a derogatory word into an affirmative one. The symbol of the gang was and still is a red bandanna. The red bandanna is a symbol of the group's Red Power politics, symbolizes blood and passion, and because the gang believes that red is the color of power. The group was only open to indigenous people and was led by a "circle" of ten. The Indian Posse does not and never did have a single traditional crime boss. Officially, all decisions had to reached unanimously by the circle in a nod to the traditional collective leadership of the Cree whose ruling "circles" required unanimity, but in reality the Wolfe brothers dominated the circle. A sense of First Nations identity outweighed any of the traditional divisions and Cree, Ojibwa and Métis were all well represented in the Indian Posse. Within a year of its founding, the gang had hundreds of members and primarily engaged in theft. Initially the gang had both male and female members, but in 1990 the rules were changed to make the gang into an all-male group, ostensibly to protect the female members from violence. The cardinal rules of the Indian Posses are that its members were forbidden to take "hard drugs" such as cocaine and heroin; are never to speak to outsiders about the gang's activities: and that new members had to endure "minutes of pain" where they be beaten by other members for at least five minutes to test their toughness while those wishing to leave had also endure the "minutes of pain", but only for much longer. All members of the Indian Posse were required to serve a prison term, which created the perverse initiative for the Indian Posse members to commit crimes with the idea of being arrested and convicted. The requirement to serve a prison sentence was imposed partly as a test to weed out those who might be inclined to turn Crown's evidence and partly as a means for indoctrination as the Indian Posse has a strong presence in prisons in western Canada.
The Indian Posse was divided into levels modelled after those of the outlaw biker gangs. An Indian Posse applicant would be asked to commit a crime, usually a robbery or moving drugs, and provided the mission was accomplished successfully would be allowed to wear the "G-money" tattoo, which consisted of a G intersected with a dollar sign, which gave them the status of a "prospect". Provided that a member continued to complete missions successfully, they would be promoted up to the rank of "striker", the second level in the Indian Posse. The highest level was that of a "full patch" member who would be allowed to wear a tattoo of a shied on the neck, a tattoo of arms bars on the forearms, and by a tattoo reading Indian Posse on the back. The "full patch" back tattoo was only allowed for those members who served time in a federal prison. Membership of the Indian Posse was to be for life, and the penalty for leaving the gang was death. The gang grew rapidly. One early member recalled that in 1988-1989: "Within a year the numbers climbed into the hundreds. I have no idea why that happened. I thought we were just a bunch o kinds hanging out together. But all of a sudden there were members everywhere". One female founding member, known as "Lynn" stated: "Once in a while we would have the silver spoon kids come and hang with us, but they wouldn't last. They had everything: meals, parents who cared they went to school, clothes, chores. I never had that. Danny never had that. We were just running all the time at all hours". For most members of the Indian Posse, the gang provided a surrogate family in place of their own dysfunctional families.
Richard Wolfe started carrying a handgun to school at the age of 13, and after his gun was discovered by a teacher, resulted in his first criminal conviction on 2 February 1989. By 1990, the Indian Posse moved into automobile theft and armed robbery. By 1991, the teenage Wolfe brothers had moved into drug dealing and prostitution and by 1992 had rented a house for $866 rent per month. In 1991, the Indian Posse had established an open air drug market outside of the Merchant's Hotel, known locally as "the Merch", on Selkirk Avenue in the North End of Winnipeg. The drug market outside of "the Merch" became one of the largest emporiums for buying drugs in Winnipeg. The Lord Selkirk Park Housing Development, whose inhabitants were almost entirely First Nations or Métis people, had become the stronghold of the Indian Posse, whose members sold cocaine, LSD, heroin, and marijuana. The Third World poverty of the North End of Winnipeg made joining the gang attractive to many young people. Richard Wolfe was considered to be the "diplomat" who was calm and able to think in the long term while Danny Wolfe was the "warrior" who was a hot-head who thought only in the short term. On 1 June 1993, the Indian Posse was mentioned for the first time by the Winnipeg Free Press, who described the Indian Posse as the gang that caused much crime in the North End.
Expansion
On the night of 9 February 1994, a rival gang called the Overlords fired a shotgun at an Indian Posse house, leading to a drive-by shooting in retaliation a few hours later that left a woman wounded. As the first drive-by shooting in Winnipeg the incident attracted much media attention. Drive-by shootings are the favorite means of the Indian Posse to eliminate rivals, which in turn reflects the influence of black street gangs in Los Angeles, whom the Indian Posse model themselves after. The clothing style of the Indian Posse was a carbon-copy of Afro-American street gangs as the Indian Posse's preferred dress were and are baggy jeans, baseball hats, and track suits. The hand gestures which carry symbolic meanings used by the Indian Posse are copies of those used by black street gangs in Los Angeles. Danny Wolfe's favorite rapper was Tupac Shakur and the CDs of his music were one of his treasured possessions. Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member, the 1993 autobiography of Sanyika Shakur, a member of the Los Angeles gang, the Crips, has been described by the police as the "bible" of the Indian Posse, being virtually the only book that Indian Posse members all read, and which is constantly found whenever they raid the homes of Indian Posse members.In September 1994, the Winnipeg police announced that they were targeting the Indian Posse, whom they blamed for much of the crime in the North End. In response, Richard Wolfe gave an interview with the journalist Paul Wiecek of the Winnipeg Free Press which gave the gang a high profile in Winnipeg and beyond. Richard Wolfe claimed the Indian Posse was a Red Power group committed to defending First Nations people from a racist society. The Indian Posse uses slogans such as "Red Till Dead" and "Fuck Canada, this land is our people". In 1994, the Indian Posse had made contracts with criminal elements in reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota in an attempt to set up a cross-border smuggling network. The Wolfe brothers also frequently visited British Columbia to set up a drug-smuggling network with the Vancouver underworld. Despite their claim to be protecting First Nations people, the IP engaged in sexual slavery, forcing girls as young as 10 to work as prostitutes.
By 1994, at the age of 19, Richard Wolfe was making between $15,000 to $30,000 a week, giving him an annual income of about $1 million Canadian dollars. However, the Wolfe brothers, like other Indian Posse members, were better at spending money than earning it. Sergeant Mike MacKinnon of Winnipeg police department stated: "There's no discipline to save cash and accrue assets. No education to rely on for cash management. You might pull them over and they'll have $10,000 or $15,000 on them, but at the end of the day that's money already spent... We haven't seen anyone moving up into buying large condos or anything like that. They still live in the neighborhoods they always lived in". MacKinnon dismissed the claim that the Indian Posse is defending and protecting First Nations people, saying: "If you look at the victims of their homicides, the girls they force into prostitution and the people they sell drugs to, they're victimizing their own people. There is nothing cultural about the Indian Posse. The only cultural thing is a gang subculture." Most of the Indian Posse members come from broken homes, which was a disadvantage as Richard Wolfe conceded in a 2011 interview: "The smart guy can be a tough guy when the time comes, but not vice versa. The smart guys usually stay out of gangs, though." In a letter to his brother in 2000, Danny Wolfe put it more earthly that the Indian Posse's principal problem was "too many fucked-up people recruiting fucked-up people."
On 14 May 1995, Richard Wolfe shot a pizza delivery man, Maciej Slawik, and was convicted of attempted murder on 31 May 1996. The owner of the pizzeria Jumbo Pizza owed the Wolfe brothers $60,000 in a drug debt and Richard Wolfe expected the money in cash in the pizza box when he ordered a pizza. To send a message to the pizzeria's owner, he impulsively decided to kill the pizza delivery man, saying in 2011: "I lost my cool. There were lots of people mad at me for that". The fact that Slawik was a Polish immigrant who had nothing to do with crime was not relevant to Wolfe who blasted him with a shotgun. The journalist Jon Friensen used the Slawik shooting incident as typical of the Indian Posse's reckless style as he noted that most gang bosses assign such work to their subordinates, instead of attempting to kill people themselves in public. After Richard Wolfe was charged with attempted murder, Danny Wolfe threatened to kill two witnesses if they testified against his brother, leading for him to be convicted of obstructing justice and uttering death threats in September 1995.