At first glance, his email read like any other. He was a diehard Colts fan, desperate for Colts news. This was eight months back – a few days before the NFL Draft – and he wanted to know who his favorite team was taking sixth overall. I like this GM already, he wrote. We need to build Luck a line, he added. Nothing out of the norm.

He was a lifer, this fan, casually tossing out names I had to look up in the back of the Colts’ media guide – Glenn Doughty, Nesby Glasgow, Lydell Mitchell. He’d grown up in Baltimore, scraping up tickets and riding the city bus to games at Memorial Stadium in the 70s. He and his friends would climb the rails and sneak on the field afterward, hoping to meet the players. They looked like the biggest men in the world to me, he wrote.

He remembers Curtis Dickey “coming around the corner with all that speed,” and the double-overtime playoff loss to John Madden’s Raiders in 1977, “watching Bert Jones and the boys fighting hard to make it to the Super Bowl but come up short.”

He remembers Doughty, whose mom lived in the same housing project he grew up in, watching his pee wee games on Saturdays. The uniforms they wore back then were royal blue – just like the Colts. He remembers dreaming of growing up and playing for the real Colts one day.

He remembers March 30, 1984. He was 17 when Bob Irsay’s team fled Baltimore under the snowy veil of darkness, and when most of his hometown turned its back on the franchise, he didn’t. He remained loyal. The Colts are all I know.

Stories – he wanted stories. Updates. News. He wanted anything about the Colts he could get his eyes on. No links, though. Links did him no good. He couldn’t browse the internet; he could only read emails. He was asking the text be copied and pasted and sent off, so I obliged, sending him updates on the Colts’ draft class and the new coaching staff and Andrew Luck’s shoulder.

And I learned more and more about Antonio Barnes. He told me about the children’s book he’d written, and that he wanted to donate the proceeds. He told me about his job as a cook. My shift starts at 4 a.m. and I have to make 1,600 turnovers. He told me about tutoring the mentally handicapped, about working the suicide watch. I’ve saved two inmates’ lives in here.

Here? It clicked.

Here was prison.

This man was serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder.

***

He was hustling by the time he was 12. He’d buy an ounce of marijuana and sell it off in $5 bags. He’d buy valium wholesale and charge $2 a pill. Soon enough he’d graduated to cocaine and heroin. “A dealer of death,” he calls himself now. “We’d sell 500 bags of heroin and 300 caps of cocaine a day.”

Antonio Barnes was swept into the brutal Baltimore drug scene of the 1970s and 80s, rising from low-level pawn to mid-level player in a world awash in dope, cash and cold-blooded executions. He climbed the ranks of the infamous Stanfield-Bates drug ring, the one that would later inspire an HBO drama called “The Wire.” For Barnes, this wasn’t TV, this wasn’t fiction. This was how he grew up.

Three decades later, from inside the walls of Coleman Medium Security Federal Penitentiary in Wildwood, Fla., inmate No. 26361-037 rehashes the horrors of his youth. When he does, he does not hold back. This is his penance, his punishment. His 52-year-old self detests his 17-year-old self.

“I watched my best friend get his brains blown out in my car,” he says one night. “Nothing I could do but run.”

Our conversations always begin the same. The phone rings. An automated voice speaks. “You have a call from an inmate at a federal prison,” it says, “would you like to accept?”

So I accept. And over the coming weeks and months, Antonio Barnes tells me his story.

“The saddest thing is I didn’t have to do it,” he begins. “I can honestly say I don’t know what it’s like to go hungry.”

With this, Barnes is saying he wasn’t raised on the streets – he chose them. His stepfather worked at a steel company, earning enough to put dinner on the table every night. His mother stayed home and raised seven kids. Chores completed, Antonio earned a $3 allowance on Fridays. He played pee wee football and little league baseball and went to Colts games on the weekend. “We had a TV, everything a child my age could want,” he says.

But it wasn’t his parents he looked up to, or the pro football players with the horseshoes on their helmets he watched on Sundays. It was the street hustlers who manned the corners outside the Murphy Home projects he grew up in. “They had the cars, the girls,” he remembers. Barnes became a “runner” before he was even a teenager, tapped by a dealer named Butch Peacock to grab the duffel bags stocked with dope and bolt whenever the police rolled up. He once carried out the order in the middle of a little league game, scurrying from his spot at shortstop, swiping the duffel and disappearing around the corner. He was fast. Peacock took a liking to him. Started calling him Bird.

Bird was 20 when he was sentenced to life in prison.

Five of them were tried together, the drug kingpin for pulling the trigger and his four lieutenants for refusing to cooperate with police. Timmirror Stanfield was charged with killing a state’s witness before that witness could testify against him in a separate murder case. That one, prosecutors claimed at the time, was the result of a low-level drug dealer not showing Stanfield “appropriate respect” during a dispute on the fourth floor of the Murphy towers. Stanfield put six bullets in his head.

Guilty, all of them. Stanfield and his crew. Antonio Barnes was part of the crew.

“I didn’t kill nobody, never shot nobody, none of that,” Barnes vows all these years later. But his connection to Stanfield and his refusal to cooperate with police, plus a prior drug charge, were enough to earn him a life sentence.

He remembers April 2, 1987, the day he was locked up for good. “When the judge said my name, my stomach got real tight, and I felt like I was getting short of breath,” Barnes says. “The only thing going through my mind was, ‘Boy, if you pass out and hit the floor, you’re gonna be on the front page of the paper tomorrow. The newspaper gonna read, ‘BIRD PASSES OUT AT VERDICT,’ in big capital letters.”

He didn’t pass out that day. Instead he strolled out of the courtroom convinced life in prison didn’t actually mean life in prison. Handcuffs clamped around his wrists, Barnes flashed a cocky smile at the Baltimore city homicide detective whose investigation had led to his arrest. “You happy now,” he told Ed Burns, according to The Baltimore Sun, “see ya in a year or two.”

Sixteen years later, in the sixth episode of the second season of “The Wire,” a show co-written by Burns and inspired by his two-decade run in the Baltimore Police Department, a hitman stands trial for killing a state’s witness.

The defendant in that scene?

They called him Bird.

***

Thirty-two years incarcerated, little to do besides wrestle with the arrogance of his youth and weigh its cost.

“Bird is dead,” Barnes says.

His is a life reformed. It was in prison he learned to read, to write, to cook. He works as a chef at Coleman, rising as early as 4 a.m. some mornings to prepare breakfast for more than 1,000 inmates as well as prison staff. He designs cakes, and is especially proud of the one he scripted with a Colts’ horseshoe.

Instead of burying his past, Barnes says he learned from it. He calls the life sentence the judge handed him in April of 1987 “the greatest reward a career criminal could receive.”

“I walked in those prison doors an ignorant punk,” he says. “I thought my filthy drug money would have me out of jail in a snap.”

He was wrong – and three decades later he knows that’s exactly what saved him, that life sentence. Another year or two on the streets ends one of two ways. “Back in prison," Barnes says, "or dead."

Inside those walls, he’s become a tutor to the mentally handicapped, a suicide companion and a published author. “Prison is Not a Playground,” is Barnes’ manifesto, the aging, former drug peddler’s attempt to use his story to halt the next generation from plunging down the same path. He says his dream is to see the book distributed in schools and detention centers. Any proceeds he earns, he says he wants to donate to children’s hospitals.

“This is my way of giving back. It’s a mess out there. Whenever I give speeches, I tell people I have choked generations. Why I say that: Even though I’m done selling drugs, whoever I taught is gonna keep selling. If not them, someone else. It’s a domino effect. It never stops. This is what I created. I can never make up for it, but I can damn sure help it stop.”

He’s founded three self-help programs for inmates, including one called Save Our Selves, another called Keys to Success. “Since these programs have been instituted,” Barnes’ warden wrote in a 2011 memo identifying his positive impact at the prison he was at, “over 200 inmates have successfully graduated and we note a decline in inmate discipline issues ... Mr. Barnes has provided valuable assistance with helping and educating other inmates.”

Brian Teausant’s 25-year-old son is one of those inmates.

He is Barnes’ cellmate at Coleman. He’s also mentally handicapped. Barnes mentors him, tutors him, and protects him in an environment that can turn violent quickly.

“He’s been incredible to him, always looking out for him,” Brian Teausant says of Barnes. “We know he is someone our son can trust, and sometimes that’s hard to find. (Antonio) is an amazing example of someone deciding they’re going to grow and develop (in prison) instead of being sucked into all the negative that happens in there.”

***

When not mentoring, or tutoring, or cooking, or writing, Barnes follows his favorite football team. He catches every Colts’ game he can, though it’s not always easy wrestling the remote away from Jaguars and Dolphins fans in Florida.

When the Colts win, he lets them hear it. When they lose, he takes plenty of grief. He made a bet with a few fellow inmates before the season began: If the Colts don’t make the playoffs, he has to make every last one of them a meal.

Three games to go, he remains confident.

He pores through the articles that are sent his way. He emails his thoughts, sometimes at halftime.

We’re in a dogfight. But we’re gonna be alright.

This line is really holding up for us.

Frank is doing an amazing job.

What a big win.

His next parole hearing – his next shot at freedom – arrives in March of 2020. Antonio Barnes will be 53 years old, jailed the majority of his life. He’ll have spent 33 years inside.

One evening, during a conversation that veers from the drug-ridden streets of Baltimore to his three decades behind bars, Barnes tells me what he’s long dreamed of doing with that freedom, if the day ever comes.

“One of the first things I wanna do is see my Colts in person."

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.