The Ballad of Danny Wolfe by Joe Friesen

Updated with new material, the harrowing story of the life and death of the man who founded and ran the first and largest Aboriginal street gang.

In 2008, Danny Wolfe, a Winnipeg Aboriginal man, was 31-years-old and awaiting trial on two counts of first-degree murder in at the Regina Correctional Centre. In spite of his young age, it wasn’t his first time behind bars—in fact, Danny had found himself in and out of correctional facilities since his teenage years, sometimes even finding his own way out. Now, fifteen years after his last break out of prison, in an adult facility only a few cells down from his younger brother, Preston, Danny was orchestrating a bold move: a bigger escape from a jail where the notion was inconceivable.

Cinematically tracing the early years of Daniel Wolfe’s life, from his birth in Regina to his mother Susan Creeley, a First Nations woman; to his first brush with the law at the age of four and then his subsequent arrests; to the birth of the Indian Posse—the Aboriginal street gang in Canada that would eventually claim the title of the largest street gang in North America with over 12,000 members (from BC to Ontario, and even Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona) and Danny at the helm; to Danny’s death in 2010, Joe Friesen’s account of this fascinating character, the gang world he was at the center of, and the current state of First Nations relations in Canada is gripping, timely, and provocative.

Publication History: Signal HC (04/16)