News

The plot began with nail clippers and a radiator grill, and ended four months later with bed-sheet-ropes thrown over barbed wire, the climax of the improbable, cinematic escape of six of Canada's most wanted gangsters from a Regina prison.

An external investigator's report released yesterday concludes there were significant failures of intelligence-gathering and inmate supervision at the Regina Provincial Correctional Centre in the months leading up to the Aug. 24, 2008, escape.

The investigation, led by former federal corrections official William Peet, produced 23 recommendations, including improvements to intelligence sharing, a review of segregation and confinement policies, and the removal of recreational internet access from guard posts. It also said that aboriginal elders be given a more prominent role in inmate rehabilitation.

Saskatchewan's public safety minister Darryl Hickie said he accepted all 23 of the recommendations in the highly critical report.

“Mistakes were made,” Mr. Hickie said. “The escape should not have happened.”

He pledged $9-million to upgrade security measures in prisons, and $87-million to build a new remand centre in Saskatoon that will house prisoners awaiting trial.

Two months before the breakout, on June 26, an informant told a corrections worker that a group of prisoners was “going to be out soon” and that they were “doing it like in the movies,” the report said in a detailed description of the escape. Superiors dismissed the tip as old news and failed on several occasions to follow it up.

Meanwhile, the plan was in full swing. In early May, inmates in prison unit 3A had identified a vulnerable area that led to an external wall directly beneath and out of range of the unit's surveillance camera.

The inmates in 3A belonged to the Indian Posse, a violent native street gang with hundreds of members across western Canada, and nearly all were facing trial for serious, violent offences, including murder. Among them was one of the gang's founders, Daniel Richard Wolfe.

The first step in the plan was to fashion a kind of screwdriver from a set of nail clippers, which the inmates used to remove and replace the grill of a heating register on the wall. They employed other makeshift tools to dig behind the heating register, tearing away its steel back plate and boring through the 10-centimetre-thick cinder block wall.

While one inmate scraped at the wall, others set up a card game to obscure what prison guards could see from the other end of the unit. They kept up their work for four months. As many as 87 prison guards who had contact with these inmates failed to notice anything amiss, according to the report.

Even the escapees were surprised at the lax surveillance.

“We didn't think we would get away with it. We started working on it. It was something to do and we just kept at it. When we didn't get caught, we picked our night and just went,” one escapee told the investigators.

The moment came just after the 8:30 p.m. bed check on Sunday, Aug. 24. The gangsters were just days away from being moved to a new, high-security wing. They removed the grill for the last time, revealing the exterior brick that they had left barely intact, and smashed their way out.

Using ropes they had made out of braided blankets, the men then climbed an exterior wall, using winter coats to shield themselves from the barbed wire. From there, they dropped into an exercise yard, scaled two more barbed wire fences, and made good their escape.

It wasn't until 65 minutes later, after Regina police got wind of the plan, that the prison was aware it was dealing with a breakout.

One man, Kenneth Iron, was nabbed in a nearby field that night, and James Pewean was caught in Regina a few days later. Cody Keenatch and Preston Buffalocalf were arrested in Winnipeg on Sept. 10, and Mr. Wolfe, who was the RCMP's most wanted man, was caught in Winnipeg on Sept. 17. Ryan Agecoutay was the last to be caught, on Sept. 23.