(Photo courtesy RyanTheRealDealFord.com)
By Mike Russell
Five years ago Ryan Ford’s goals and priorities were much different than they are today.
Back then he didn’t have anyone to answer to but the man in the mirror and his motivation for bettering himself was to help plead his case for parole.
Having grown up straddling the poverty line while raised alongside his younger brother and sister by a hard working single mother, Ford was enticed by the gangster lifestyle, partially due to the fact that he lacked a male role model in his life, partially because he grew up without and partially because he had been fooled by Hollywood into believing that being a criminal can be glamorous.
A lifelong athlete, Ford, who was a standout on the high school gridiron and track, was recruited along with a handful of his junior football teammates to be debt collectors for a powerful drug dealer in his hometown of Abbotsford, British Columbia. Although none of them had criminal pasts besides minor brushes with the law as teenagers for being, well, irresponsible teenagers, they were far from being thugs. But because they were a tough, muscular brood and they knew how to bully and to intimidate – skills they developed on the football field, they figured, why not make some easy money using their physical assets.
The problem was, they were all young and none of them really knew what they were doing aside from what they had seen the guys in movies do and they proved just how little experience they had being criminals as they botched a collection visit in which a small-time dealer who owed their boss a substantial amount of money was assaulted in front of his wife and children while the three men searched his home for the cash and drugs. The man’s wife escaped the house and called police from a relative’s home and the trio were caught as they fled the scene.