Gang life was not the easy street Tom Winget hoped it would be.
He got involved with drug dealing and gangs after injuries dashed his dreams of becoming a professional athlete – he set records for powerlifting in high school and earned a scholarship to play football at the University of Manitoba.
The gangster lifestyle garnered him money, a cool truck and lots of ‘friends’, but daily life was filled with violence and manipulation, he told a room full of Grades 11 and 12 students at John Barsby Community School last week.
“This lifestyle only gets you two places and that’s jail or a coffin,” said Winget, 26.
His gang career ended in the former, but the lives of some fellow gang members ended in the latter.
Winget paid his dues doing “bitch work” for other members and at 24 became a full-patch member and sergeant-at-arms – the man who enforced the rules of his Manitoba gang.
Winget’s position meant he had to beat up friends when called upon and make sure rival gangs didn’t show up at his gang’s hangout spots. If they did show up, fights often resulted.
Gangs draw people in with promises of belonging to a brotherhood and protection of the gang, said Winget, but those promises mouthed by fellow gang members rang hollow when times got tough while he was in the gang and proved even more empty when he was in prison.
He remembers being beaten up by three men in a washroom when he was a bouncer at a nightclub and when he told his fellow gang members about it, none offered to do anything about it.
“Not one person budged, saying ‘Let’s go do something about it,’” said Winget.
Winget’s gang involvement ended after he was arrested in a major police bust in the winter of 2009.
Jail was a big wakeup call – he realized that he was on his own.
“I was in the gutter, completely in the gutter,” said Winget. “And not one member cared.”
“Why am I doing this? I want to make sure you guys can learn from my mistakes.”
Brodie Virtanen, a Grade 11 student at John Barsby, was shocked to learn that Winget was required to beat up his own friends and that this type of violence happened in reality.
“It’s the stuff you see in movies,” he said. “There’s not a lot of gangs in Nanaimo that we see.”
Students have had the drugs talk, but no one has ever gone in depth with them about gangs, added Bryn Lagasse, a Grade 11 student.
“It’s just not something we’ve ever talked about before,” she said. “I think it will make people think about what drugs can lead to.”
After Winget came to the police with his story, Nanaimo RCMP went to the Nanaimo school district with his proposal and got approval to go into secondary schools.
So far, he’s spoken at Wellington and John Barsby secondary schools, giving students the low down on what gang life is really all about.
“I remember listening to his story and thinking, ‘Kids have got to hear this,’” said Cpl. Jake Ryan, of Nanaimo RCMP’s Community Policing division.