Somebody's Daughter (10 page)

As Sullivan and Elliott began questioning informants, they started to hear some disturbing stories about large numbers of pimps operating in the Halifax area; abductions, they were told, were not at all uncommon. The more he heard, the more Sullivan became convinced that, quite aside from the McAndrew case, it was imperative to determine how big a problem pimping was in Metro Halifax; he proposed a fact-finding operation, and he won approval. It was only natural that John Elliott be assigned to work with him, Sullivan argued: the Cole Harbour detachment covers North Preston, and North Preston was the name Sullivan's informants were mentioning as the home base of the pimps.

The name for the investigation, fittingly enough, was Operation Heart; it could as easily have been called Operation Eye-Opener. Within weeks, Sullivan and Elliott realized they had uncovered a major problem. After only a month of interviewing prostitutes, following leads, and talking with informants, Operation Heart had revealed there were more than fifty pimps working in Halifax—and they knew many hadn't yet been identified. As the officers moved onto the street to tail a few or their subjects, they were shocked at how blatantly these men operated, picking up their girls every evening, stopping at a pharmacy for condoms and at a fast-food restaurant for the prostitutes' usual dinner of burgers and fries, and finally dropping them off on Hollis Street as casually as a cabby dropping off a fare. These passengers would be paying for their ride all night. Some of the pimps parked near their girls and spent the night there—after each date, the girl would walk over and give them the money—while others preferred to cruise the stroll, passing their girls every few minutes and stopping once or twice an hour to collect. Either way, they were practicing what the men of Miles States' era derisively called “popcorn pimping”—they popped down to the stroll to oversee their cash flow—a procedure later supplanted by the cell-phone method favored by the likes of Stacey's jilted pimp Kenny Sims. On a busy night, Sullivan and Elliott counted more than thirty young girls—they would later learn how young some of them really were—working on Hollis, and almost as many fancy cars hovering around them or parked nearby. Two emotions began to build as Elliott and Sullivan continued their operation; one was anger and the other was guilt. The two officers knew what they were watching had been going on for a long time, it was too organized to have happened overnight and they knew that they—like virtually every other Halifax area police officer—had ignored what was right in front of their eyes.

Eighteen year-old Kimberly McAndrew, whose fate remains unknown, disappeared in 1989.

As Operation Heart widened, the officers began to earn the trust of several young prostitutes, who agreed to talk with them once they realized these policemen neither threatened their livelihood nor saw them as “sluts.” The girls described their difficulties with abusive pimps; their grim existence; their frequent trips to Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Niagara Falls, Calgary, and even some American cities. It was the unexpected mobility of the sex trade that made Sullivan and Elliott begin to wonder whether Kimberly McAndrew really might have been taken to another city—or cities. The officers got in touch with police forces across Canada, and sent McAndrew's photo to the morality squad personnel most likely to deal directly with prostitutes

In March, an officer from Calgary who had agreed to keep an eye out for Kimberly asked Sullivan and Elliott to do him a favor. Calgary police had issued a warrant for the arrest of a seventeen-year-old Nova Scotian who had jumped bail after being released pending his trial on pimping-related charges. They asked around, and found out that the youth was running a couple of girls on Hollis Street. It didn't take long to find him: the officers had a description of his car, and when they saw it circling the stroll in the now-familiar pattern, the Mounties knew they had their man—or boy, rather. For the first time in their lives, Brad Sullivan and John Elliott were face-to-face with a pimp: it was an encounter neither of them would forget. When they tried to question him at the lock-up, he simply laughed, openly admitting he was a pimp and challenging the officers to give him a reason to quit The Game. “Look, man, when they arrested me in Calgary, they took my clothes, my jewelry, my car, and my money. Look at me now. I got clothes, I got jewelry, I got a car, and I got money. I'm seventeen and I make more than my father. What else am I gonna do to make this kind of money? Forget
you
, man—you do your thing and leave me alone. I got a good thing going.” There was no point asking this walking attitude problem about Kimberly McAndrew. His infuriating arrogance did serve one purpose: it stuck in John Elliott's mind with such force that he promised himself to help find a way to target these pimps, who saw the police as an inconvenience, or a joke.

The guilt the two officers felt at having ignored the prostitution trade in Halifax was made worse when they realized other police officers across Canada were well aware of the problem in Nova Scotia. A routine call for help to the Metro Toronto Juvenile Task Force turned out to be an embarrassing incident for the Nova Scotia Mounties. The officer they talked with knew more about the pimps working in their area than they did. Fortunately, that officer was more than willing to share information. Elliott and Sullivan had been told by more than one prostitute that Manning Greer was the worst pimp and they had hoped he would have information about the missing McAndrew girl. The Toronto officer informed them that Manning Greer was not someone who would be willing to talk with them about anything—let alone a girl they thought had been abducted by pimps. Greer spent most of his time in Montreal or Toronto and police in both cities considered him a serious player. The Toronto officer said he believed Greer ran girls in both cities, and in Halifax; that he had first come to the attention of the Toronto Task force in 1989 when a turf war spread from Halifax to Montreal and then Toronto. The Toronto Task Force had been unable to get a girl to make a statement identifying Greer as a pimp but they had heard enough street talk to know he was feared by the prostitutes—and a good number of Ontario based pimps. That police in Toronto and Montreal knew of a problem that originated in Nova Scotia strengthened the resolve of both young Mounties—they wanted to clean up the mess in their own back yard.

In the final days of Operation Heart, the officers received a frantic call that heightened Elliott's determination to strike back at the pimps. The girl on the phone, who had provided them with information before, was a juvenile prostitute working for a particularly violent pimp from North Preston. She was in a house in North Preston and said she was being held against her will; when Elliott asked how many people were there, she replied: “No-one.” No-one? Why not just leave, then? She was just too afraid, she said, her pimp had too many friends in the neighbourhood, and he'd asked them to watch for her, and if she tried to escape she would be captured, and he would beat the shit out of her. The terror in her voice was palpable: Elliott asked her to describe the house and said he and Brad Sullivan would be there in twenty minutes; she was to run out of the house and jump into their unmarked police car.

The rescue was like a scene from a movie, Elliott recalls—the teenage girl bursting through the front door, slamming it against the outside wall of the house as she scrambled across the yard and jumped into the back of the car. The hysterical screams for the officers to drive, to get her out of there. The squeal of the tires as Sullivan accelerated down the street, circled back, and headed out of North Preston. No-one had apparently paid the slightest attention to the car or the young girl; that wasn't the point. The point was the level of fear the pimp had instilled in this child.

On the way back to Halifax, the officers tried to persuade the girl to give them a statement; they would arrest that pimp, they said, and help her break away from The Game forever. No, she said. He'd have her killed. Sullivan and Elliott agreed to take her to a friend's house. Both officers felt bad as they watched her walk away from their car. It was the first chance they had to press a charge against a pimp and they had let it slip away. Later, they would learn it was the wisest decision they could have made, under the circumstances. The girl told several other young prostitutes that Brad Sullivan and John Elliott could be trusted; they weren't like other police officers, and if the girls needed help, these were the men to call. Eventually, they would start calling.

Sullivan and Elliott faced some frustrating setbacks when Operation Heart wrapped up in the spring of 1990. Police were no closer to locating Kimberly McAndrew, and Sullivan was turned down when he made a formal proposal to expand the operation's mandate into a full-scale, Metro-wide crackdown. He wanted the four area police forces—Halifax, Bedford, Dartmouth and the RCMP—to work together to catch and jail the pimps openly running the sex trade in downtown Halifax. Sullivan and Elliott knew those pimps were running the trade with a large number of under-age prostitutes—
girl
was the street term regardless of age, but many of them were under eighteen. Tight budgets were the problem, the officers' higher-ups said, but Elliott felt that the politicians and policy-makers just didn't see prostitution as a priority or prostitutes, even very young ones, as worth bothering about—except as an eyesore to be dealt with through existing anti-solicitation laws.

Elliott and Sullivan considered this view narrow and shortsighted, but they realized that only when—if—there were a wide-ranging change of attitude towards prostitutes would an effective attack on pimping be launched. During the two years that followed, they often discussed the growing need for a major push to stop the pimping. They were hearing more and more from their contacts, especially Dave Perry the young well-informed Toronto police officer who had been so willing to share his information. Perry was a member of a unit that was doing exactly what Sullivan and Elliott wanted to do—he was fighting pimps and helping young girls. Perry knew, and he shared his belief with the two Mounties, that he could not stem the tide of Maritime girls flooding his streets without the help of police in Nova Scotia. It was a constant source of embarrassment for Elliott and Sullivan that Nova Scotia pimps—the Scotians, as police started calling them—were making their presence felt on the streets of big cities like Montreal and Toronto and being ignored at home.

Dave Perry had an enthusiasm for his job that was contagious—he loved arresting pimps. He welcomed the information Sullivan and Elliott were able to provide, the names of the fifty or so pimps identified during Operation Heart. Perry also had a goal that both Elliott and Sullivan adopted; he wanted to arrest Manning Greer. It was Perry who first used the term Scotians to describe the Halifax area pimps to Sullivan and Elliott. He told the officers he was not certain how big an operation it was but he did know Manning Greer and his associates were a powerful force in Canada's sex trade. They were powerful because they were violent and no one involved in their operation would talk to police about it. That single fact had kept the Toronto Task force from breaking the ring—as they had several other pimping rings active in that city. Perry told the Nova Scotia officers that Police in Montreal were also looking for a chance to nail the Scotians who were as active in that city as they were in Toronto. The problem faced by the police was simple—until they had a statement or something solid to go with, Manning Greer was a ghost. He was haunting them and taunting them but they could not touch him.

Dave Perry of the Metro Toronto Juvenile Task Force. [Print from ATV video tape]

The myth of Manning Greer infuriated Brad Sullivan but every time he tried to revive his proposal, he got the same response: great idea, but no money to implement it.

Elliott and Sullivan kept in contact with the prostitutes they had met during Operation Heart, and helped when they could. They couldn't do a thing unless a girl knew enough to approach them—and Stacey Jackson hadn't spoken with the teenager they'd rescued from the house in North Preston. If she had, she might just have decided to call, and she might have avoided the nightmare that was just beginning.