February 7, 2021 – The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ordered Detroit drug boss John (The Bread Man) Bass back to prison Friday while it decides if U.S. District Court Judge Arthur Tarnow should have let him out of his double-life prison sentence in the first place. Federal prosecutors appealed Tarnow’s ruling earlier this week after he granted Bass a compassionate release on COVID-19 concerns last month. The appellate court stayed Tarnow’s decision and Bass will have to wait to hear word of his fate from a cell

“Bread Man” Bass, 51, led Detroit’s Dawg Pound Gang in the 1990s on the city’s Westside. In 2003, he was sentenced to life behind bars with no chance of parole for killing two members of the DPG, including his step brother and DPG co-founder Patrick (Pat the Ram) Webb. He did 22 years in prison before Tarnow set him free in late January, citing a “transformative redemption” on the inside and Bass’ 325-pound frame placing him at a higher than normal risk of contracting the Coronavirus.

When Bass and Webb created DPG in 1989, they took over Westside turf once belonging to Young Boys, Incorporated, Detroit’s iconic heroin-slinging crew famous for making elementary school-aged kids and teenagers rich from street corner narcotics trafficking. Upon YBI boss Milton (Butch) Jones getting out of prison in the early 1990s, Bass brought him into DPG and Jones’ presence in the organization intensified friction between Bass and Webb.

Bass ordered Ram Webb murdered on June 6, 1996. That same week, Bass killed DPG enforcer “Fat Moe” Shelton, the man he had hired to gun down his step-brother four days prior. Once Webb was dead and Bass was eventually locked up for dusting Webb and Shelton, Butch Jones grabbed the reins of DPG until he was taken off the streets in 2001 in a drug, racketeering and accessory to murder indictment.