The Last Gang in Town

by Chapman, Aaron;

  Another East Ender, Rod Schnob, recalled his turbulent home life years later in a letter from Matsqui prison where he was serving a life sentence. “The kids on my block jumped me and beat me up pretty good … I ran home with tears in my eyes and [my father] leaned down and told me that cowards don’t live in this house … [My grandmother] armed me with a stick and a garbage can lid in order to make my presence known to the neighbourhood kids.” The only time his father expressed pride in him was when Rod came home wearing the neighbours’ son’s blood on his clothes.6 In such homes, the boys often learned the particular vocabulary of male violence, handed down from father to son. And while once they were too small to defend their mothers or sisters, eventually they became old enough, big enough, and skilled enough to fight back.

  Houses along Heatley Avenue, 1972.

  PHOTO: Walter E. Frost, City of Vancouver Archives, CVA 677-947

  Born in Nova Scotia in 1954, Malcolm “Mac” Ryan was another East Vancouver teen with an unstable home life. School life was no less turbulent; disciplined on too many occasions for fighting, vandalism, swearing, and possession of alcohol, he became too much to handle, even for East Van teachers used to dealing with disruptive youth, and he was expelled from the district’s schools. “About three or four of us got kicked out of all the East Van schools altogether, so we had to go to Kitsilano Secondary School [on the west side]. What a culture shock!” He laughs when recalling this. “From all the greasers to all the hersheys—that’s what we used to call guys from good homes who had better clothes. We had cut-off jackets and tattoos and Dayton boots.”

  Now in his early sixties, Ryan is a likeable, raffish character with a good sense of humour and a gravelly laugh. He strikes you as the sort of man who worked in the trades for most of his life—but in a trade that may not have always been above-board. He still lives in East Vancouver and is a storehouse of names and stories from decades of living there, periodically interrupted by stays in prison, which began at an early age.

  “My stepdad was a real bastard,” says Ryan. “He used to beat me and my mother. So eventually, I just ran away from home, and I ended up getting sent to juvie at twelve years old.”

  Ryan didn’t know it, but he was headed to a place that thousands of Vancouver’s young offenders would pass through and where many Clark Park gang members would first meet. Vancouver’s Juvenile Detention Home was where some of the most unmanageable kids were sent to be disciplined—and for more than just not saying their prayers or combing their hair.

  1 Bruce MacDonald, Vancouver: A Visual History (Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks, 1992), 55.

  2 Michael Kluckner, Vancouver: Between the Streets (Vancouver, BC: Consolidated Merriment Ltd., 1981), 121.

  3 MacDonald, 55.

  4 Ibid., 60.

  5 Jak King, The Drive: A History to 1956 (Vancouver, BC: The Drive Press, 2011), 62.

  6 Rod Schnob, “Dear Mother, Dear Mother,” The Incarcerated Ink Well, http://theincarceratedinkwell.ca/

  TWO: THE JDH

  It’s long been a rule of thumb to keep society’s troublemakers as far away as possible from its decent citizenry. In Vancouver, as in other cities, most prisons, reform schools, or juvenile detention homes were built at the far reaches of the city limits, then eventually torn down and built even farther away as the city grew. However, in almost all cases, these institutions operated for far longer than they were properly inhabitable or useful.

  For several decades, most young women who had run afoul of the law were taken to the Provincial Industrial School for Girls at 868 Cassiar Street. From 1914, when it opened, to 1937, 600 girls aged eight to eighteen from all over BC were incarcerated there for crimes such as incorrigibility, vagrancy, or association with a criminal. A 1954 newspaper report painted a grim picture of the school. The girls were lumped together as inmates, “from the wayward child to the prostitute, drug addict, alcoholic, or mentally ill.” In another ward, “sick or homosexual girls are isolated.” A group of solitary confinement cells in the basement were noted to be particularly “dungeon-like,” with just a mattress and blanket on a damp floor. They were all surely sad places, lacking adequate management, where inmates’ problems were ascribed to lack of sufficient discipline or blamed on now-archaic symptoms like “tired blood.”7

  Hospitality wasn’t much different in the institutions for Vancouver’s young male offenders. From 1910 to 1930, they were sent to places such as the Juvenile Detention Home (JDH), a simple, three-storey building that didn’t necessarily evoke a house of correction, located off Pine and West 10th streets, or the Boys Industrial School near 4th and Wallace streets that housed boys ages nine to nineteen.

  Problems at the Boys School drew the attention of the press in 1918. The Daily World reported on a grand jury investigation that found that the facility was “dirty and unsanitary, cheerless and depressing,” and that the children were victims of discipline from one particularly brutal guard who choked and beat them with a stick. It made a strong recommendation to abolish the solitary confinement cells “calculated to manufacture criminals or lunatics.”8

  A year later, the building was condemned. But the Point Grey site could not shake the grim ghosts of its past when the building became repurposed as a school for deaf, mute, and blind children called Jericho Hill. As blogger and civic historian Lani Russwurm notes, “Allegations of rampant childhood sexual abuse began surfacing in 1982 at Jericho Hill, and the province shut it down a decade later. After another twelve years of minimizing and downplaying the abuse, the provincial government finally agreed to spend more than $15 million to compensate Jericho Hill school victims in 2004.”9

  While a new boys’ reform school had opened in Essondale Hospital (later to become Riverview), and girls were taken to the newer facilities at the Willingdon School for Girls after it opened in 1959, for decades young male offenders were sent to the Juvenile Detention Home off Wall Street in Burrard View Park. Built in 1924 by city architect Arthur Julius Bird, like Jericho Hill, the site had its own ghosts. It was previously the site of the Wall Street Orphanage, which had closed after a 1927 British Columbia child welfare report found that the Vancouver Children’s Aid Society was housing children in a building condemned as a fire risk. Foster homes were found for the orphans, the building was demolished, and the Juvenile Detention Hall constructed. By the 1940s, the JDH endured a scandal of its own as a result of overcrowding in its cells.10

  This reformatory, with its imposing architecture and design that had gone unchanged since the 1930s, would be where a young Mac Ryan, just twelve years old, arrived in 1966. “The first time I got sent in, I was scared shitless. I was really young, and I didn’t know anybody,” Ryan recalls. JDH inmates were kept in individual cells, woken up early, given strict schedules that involved some schooling, and delegated various chores that kept them busy during the day.

  Next to the JDH building that housed the delinquent youth stood a smaller one-storey building that was Vancouver’s first family court. The courthouse itself had been constructed on the back of the building that was once the Wall Street Orphanage in Burrard View Park, and is now a hospice centre. The family court was tasked with specifically handling child protection and family maintenance cases, as well as those that fell under the Juvenile Delinquents Act.

  The Juvenile Detention home in 1934. The building went unchanged over the years, and as late as the mid-1970s delinquent children were sent there. “Juvie” would be where many future gang members first met.

  PHOTO: Stuart Thompson, City of Vancouver Archives, 99-4698

  “When I first started to practice law, I spent nearly every day there,” says provincial court judge Justice Thomas Gove, who early in his career specialized in the area of family law. Gove recalls that delinquents housed there who faced charges would be escorted by university student-aged guards through a tunnel that connected the cells of the JDH to the courthouse. “They were young, athletic guys, some of them football players—just in jeans and T-shirts
. They weren’t staff from BC Corrections—they had no uniforms, and nobody had guns or anything like that. They brought the accused kids into the courtroom, usually a few at a time, lining them up on a low bench, like for a basketball team on the sidelines,” he says, also noting that none of the youths were ever handcuffed, even though quite a few of them were charged with robberies and violent crimes.

  “Occasionally, one of them would try to run away—and when they did, one of the young guards would have to run out of the courtroom to chase after him,” Gove says. “One day I was there for a case, and a kid ran, just bolted for the front door, and one of the guards chased and tackled him outside in the parking lot. The kid had got a little bloodied up getting tackled and wanted to go to the hospital, but the guards just dusted him off, told him he was fine, and marched him back into the courthouse. It was always a pretty vivid and interesting scene there.”

  For those found guilty, the lengths of their sentences were often based on how long before the young offenders became adults. Therefore, it didn’t always matter what the crime was; you could potentially be sent away for years. “So if you were caught for shoplifting at age thirteen, you theoretically could remain in custody—unless the staff had determined you had reformed—until you turned an adult, which at that time was considered aged twenty-one. I guess they figured it was good for them to keep them in there for years,” Gove says, shaking his head incredulously. “Not many who got sentenced that young had to remain jailed for years, but it could and did happen that delinquents received unnecessarily long sentences.”

  Furthermore, another section of the Juvenile Delinquents Act allowed parents to go to the court and claim that their child was beyond their control. If the court agreed, the child could be arrested, brought to court, and sent off to juvenile detention, never having actually been arrested for a specific crime. Gove recalls that these cases were much less common, and when they did fall on the juvenile court dockets, they most often involved delinquent girls. “Their parents usually complained that they were hanging out with an older boy who was no good for them, and their daughter would no longer listen to them,” he says.

  As for the young males in juvenile detention, “A lot of them were in for burglaries, fighting, or stealing cars,” Gove says, “but these weren’t kids chopping up the cars for parts to resell, or sending them on freighters overseas for profit. They were stealing cars to commit a robbery with them, or just going for joy-rides. I remember one kid was in there on and off quite a bit for stealing cars and then driving or pushing them off a hill or a ravine, just to see the cars crash at the bottom. So this wasn’t organized crime—it was just crime or violence for the sake of doing it.”

  Gove admits that by the early 1970s it was quite commonly accepted among those who worked around the courts that the JDH was an archaic institution; it began to be viewed as an unacceptable place to house delinquents. But for those who experienced a disruptive life at home, the JDH would often be perceived as a welcome respite.

  A cell inside the JDH.

  PHOTO: Gordon Croucher, The Province, 1972

  “I can still remember my first morning there,” recalls Mac Ryan. “After they got us up, I went down to the cafeteria for breakfast. At home, all I had was shitty powdered milk and lousy food. But there on each table they had big pitchers of milk—real homogenized milk!” he laughs. “There were four different types of cereal, toast and jam, apples and oranges. I couldn’t believe it! I ate a bowl of cereal and pushed my bowl away figuring that was all we were allowed to have, and a kid next to me says, ‘Have some more.’ I said, ‘Holy shit, you’re allowed to have more?’ Lunch was good, too. Dinner was beautiful.”

  But when he was released, life at home had not improved, and Ryan repeatedly found himself being sent back to juvenile detention. “Maybe because the food was good, I kept subconsciously going back,” Ryan jokes. For years he would repeat a pattern of avoiding home, crashing with friends, and after getting arrested for a new string of burglaries and offences, being sent back to the JDH. “I practically grew up there—it was like my second home. I stopped counting after twenty times. Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, I must have been sentenced there twenty-five times.”

  There were so many East Vancouver youths in Juvenile Detention that the guards had to split them into two shifts during recreation or sports hours (murder ball was a favourite game), as the East Vancouver boys were deemed too problematic to be let out of their cells all at once. Even then, altercations were not uncommon. In 1968, when Ryan was fourteen, he got into a fight started by another boy in the JDH. While defending himself, he broke the boy’s nose and was put in solitary confinement—a narrow cell with a steel-plate door.

  A typical stint in solitary lasted a few days to a week and was usually doled out only to the more mature boys in detention. But Ryan was kept in solitary for six weeks. “I went fucking nuts in there. When the head of the JDH found out from the bulls [JDH guards] that I’d been in there that long, I heard him screaming in his office at them, ‘You can’t keep somebody in there that long, especially a young kid like that!’” No one at the JDH was reprimanded for Ryan’s unreasonably long seclusion in solitary.

  Boys who were too problematic or repeat offenders, like Ryan, were eventually sent right out of the city. “In 1970, I got sent to the Brannen Lake jail outside of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island,” Ryan recalls. “They walked me right out of the JDH with an escort guard and down across the street to Burrard Inlet where the float planes were that took you over there.” When they got in the plane, the guard handcuffed Ryan to the seat. “I said, ‘What if this thing goes down? What am I supposed to do, for chrissake?’ And he says to me, ‘If this thing goes down, you’re finished anyway.’”

  Ryan spent three months at Brannen Lake, a large institution run by the province that at its height housed about 200 boys. But his stay there did little for him except introduce him to older and/or more serious offenders who had come from all over BC with lawbreaking skills that they were more than happy to pass along to their young pupils. Ryan would graduate, so to speak, when he left with a BISCO cross tattoo. “BISCO stood for Boys Industrial School for Criminal Offenders, which is [what we] called the place.” He still has the tattoo on his hand, to symbolize the time he did in the jail.

  After numerous stays in detention, Ryan began to recognize a number of familiar faces of those who, like himself, had been in and out of reformatories over the years. There was, in fact, seemingly little reforming going on in such places. In juvenile detention halls, younger offenders were more apt to learn new criminal skills and make new connections, including Ryan, who made friends on the inside with a number of juvenile offenders from East Vancouver.

  “One day, this kid I’d seen around in the JDH was in the cell next to me and said, ‘Ryan, where do you hang out?’ I told him I was mostly in South Vancouver with some guys I knew down there, and he said, ‘Do yourself a favour, and when you get out of here come to 14th and Commercial. That’s where the Clark Park gang is. If you’ve got the jam, that is.’ I had heard of them, heard about their tough reputation. I told him ‘I don’t know if I want to go up there.’ He just laughed and said, ‘Just tell him Gavin sent you. Gerry Gavin. I’ll probably be there.’”

  The BISCO Cross tattoo on the hand of Mac Ryan. The tattoo was earned because he’d done time at the Boys Industrial School for Criminal Offenders, where typically only the most incorrigible and unmanageable young men were sent.

  PHOTO: Erik Iversen, 2016

  7 “BC Delinquent Girls Housed in Damp Cells,” Calgary Herald, November 11, 1954, 6.

  8 “Grand Jury Finds Conditions in Boys Industrial Home Appalling,” Vancouver Daily World, December 13, 1918, 1.

  9 “Boys Industrial School 1920,” http://pasttensevancouver.tumblr.com/

  10 Leslie T., Foster and Brian Wharf, eds., People, Politics, and Child Welfare in British Columbia (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2007), 13, 16.

  THR
EE: RUMBLE

  The word “gang” has been so widely and sensationally used by police, media, and popular culture over the years to define such a broad range of criminals that everything from a loose affiliation of street urchins dabbling in mischief and pickpocketing to organized criminal operations with international connections involved in drug trafficking and murder are given the “gang” label. The first time the word was used in print in Vancouver is over 100 years ago, when it appeared in the November 23, 1909, edition of The Province. The article noted that police identified and apprehended a “gang” following a series of house burglaries and reported that the home of Mrs. Keddy at 699 Cambie Street “was robbed of furs, silverware and $20 in cash.”

  But specifically, youth-gang activities in the city appear to increase in the 1920s. Vancouver’s first recognized gangs were largely made up of orphaned street kids and dropouts who travelled in packs. Little is known about these gangs aside from what was reported in the newspapers of the period. With names like the Collingwood Street gang or the Homer Street gang, they were comprised of boys aged eleven to twenty who, given to loitering on street corners, harassed passersby and engaged in automobile theft, arson, vandalism, and often violent robberies of local businesses. Their activities left a disgusted public—especially senior members of the community, who were often repeat victims—calling for increases in criminal prosecutions.

  The gangs were, at the very least, a nuisance to police and the court system. But if caught by police, these young offenders were often turned back over to the discipline of their parents, if the parents could be found at all. Juvenile detention facilities of the time were typically overburdened and reserved for the worst of the bad apples. In some cases, the parents of the young gang members may have even been harsher or more vicious in their punishments than the court sentences and reformatory schools might offer.