Somebody's Daughter (32 page)

Throughout Halifax-Dartmouth, in coffees shops and parents' homes, at Sullivan House and at the residential school in Truro, over the phone and in police cars and at the task-force office, conversations very similar to this were playing themselves out, again and again, as investigators and counselors fought to get their points across to deeply troubled young people like Stacey. The stakes were immeasurably high. Those struggling to save the girls knew there would be some lost—but Stacey Jackson would not be one of them.

She did come precariously close to returning to The Game; John Elliott's mention of her dear friend Annie Mae prompted a renewed bout of nostalgia for the good times and laughs they'd shared. All the terror, pain, and confusion of her experiences in Halifax and Toronto began to recede into the rosy haze of a daydream—she and Annie Mae together again, sharing a little apartment, maybe even working for themselves. Or maybe not; all pimps weren't as screwed up as Smit, and they came and protected you when you lucked out and got stuck with a bad date. Stacey had pretty much decided to give it another go.

On January 28 she changed her mind. It took a tragedy—a heartbreakingly ironic tragedy—to finally set Stacey free. Annie Mae was dead, slain in an apartment only a few kilometres from Sullivan House. Slain by a pimp whose anger against her decision to choose another man got out of control. She knew about that one; still had bruises on her thighs to remind her of what had happened when she tried to leave Smit for Joystick, way back in the summer. It seemed so long ago, but it was only four months. So much had happened, and so much still faced her—the custody battle, the trial, school.… But Stacey Jackson, perhaps for the first time in her life, felt a deep certainty she knew could never be destroyed: she would keep two very important promises. One she made to John Elliott, earlier in the evening, when he'd come to tell her about Annie Mae—she would testify against Smit. The other she was making to herself, now, alone in the common room at Sullivan House; never again would she work as a prostitute. Raising her glass of Coke, Stacey offered up a toast: “Here's to you, Annie Mae.”

Within a few days of her friend's death, police had decided to move Stacey to Toronto pending the trial of Michael Sears—Smit. Investigators were concerned about her facing any more pressure from pimps like the one she'd been talking to (although they needn't have worried about her yielding to the persuasion), and although Smit's trial was still more than a month away, it was decided Stacey should be sent to the safe house Dave Perry had described to local reporters months earlier. It was in a part of the city far from the downtown stroll.

Back in Halifax, the teenagers at the safe house and the residential school in Truro continued to develop closer bonds with the investigators handling their files. There was still the daily struggle to keep girls from returning to the street but there was also reason for the task force officers to feel a sense of accomplishment. Teri MacDonald had left the Truro training school but not for a return to The Game. Teri promised her case officer she would testify in Toronto when the time came but told him that until then she did not want to hear from him. She was not upset with the officer, she explained, she was just making a clean break from everyone and everything associated with the part of her life. Teri was returning home to live with her mother and restart her life and to do it she wanted to erase that sordid chapter completely. Teri's mother promised to call the officer at the first sign of trouble; she never had to. Taunya was another success story; she remained at the Truro school but had shown the counselors there she was committed to remaining free of The Game.

With new witnesses coming forward all the time, and existing ones often seeking conversations with the officers every day, task force members had their hands full. It was in the winter of 1993 that the representatives of Operation Hectic began to realize how appropriate the name was. The number of files grew steadily. Between January and March of 1993 the task force officers arrested twenty-five pimps who had not been picked up, or even identified in the statements obtained, during the Toronto bust. More importantly in the eyes of Brad Sullivan they had managed to convince thirty young girls to leave the streets and take up residence in the safe house or the Truro Residential Centre. Each new case brought revelations of cruelty and violence that stunned and angered investigators all over again, strengthening the officers' resolve to see the project through.

The arrests continue in Halifax. [Print from ATV video tape]

In early 1993, despite the growing number of pimps in custody at the Halifax County Correctional Centre, most of the remaining players carried on their business as freely as usual. Investigators learned that a few minor players had left The Game for other professions, but the others continued to take their chances. Other than Manning Greer's family of players, most Nova Scotian pimps worked in small independent groups. They knew the value of the blowfish approach. Many had helped Greer when he needed it and now they joined ranks to take on this new, police threat. Ironically in their twisted logic it was not the threat of imprisonment they feared. They believed they were losing the respect of their girls and that they would not tolerate. They did not want over confident prostitutes who knew a simple call to the task force would take a player out of The Game. They needed to return fear to the streets. The newly formed cooperative of pimps decided to make an example of one of the prostitutes; fifteen-year-old Clara Ferguson was in trouble again.

Clara, who had been forced to chose the bullet that would kill her during the incident Manning Greer's enforcer had so readily bragged about, had returned and had managed to stay away from crack cocaine. She found a new pimp, but by January, with his demands for countless attentions and services becoming an increasing burden, she made the mistake of threatening him. She would call the task force and sign on him—then he would stop being so pushy. Her rash action was more the result of outrage than thoughtless defiance: her elder sister, who, like Clara, had run away from home in her early teens to escape sexual abuse by a family friend, had been badly beaten by the Scotian pimps as a supposed cure for her cocaine addiction. From the day she chose to become a prostitute, Clara had been following her older sister's lead, first into the Scotian family and later into crack addiction. By January of 1993, Clara's sister was working as a freelancer in Toronto; long after being beaten and turned loose by the family. She worked now to pay the pusher not the pimp.

Clara's pimp and a group of other players talked over the young prostitute's threat; if she was hanging out on Hollis bragging about that threat then they were all in trouble. The girls would start losing respect for their men—that is, stop fearing them. Something had to be done. Clara's pimp, Miguel Joseph, picked her up on the stroll one night in January and drove her to a house in North Preston. It was the beginning of three days of hell for the teenager, who was repeatedly gang-raped, beaten, and threatened with worse reprisals if she ever stepped out of line again. The message worked, to a degree. Clara was demoralized and defeated, she would never again threaten or disrespect Miguel, at least that was how she felt upon leaving the house where she had been so savagely tortured. What the pimps had not counted on was Clara's friends on the street. Clara was well liked by the other girls on Hollis Street, and they were infuriated when a couple of the pimps involved in her brutalization started bragging about what they'd done. By then, the information pipeline was moving, and task force investigators found out what had happened—the torture, and the message it was supposed to send to officers about the esteem in which Operation Hectic was held by the Halifax pimping community.

The girl they found on Hollis Street was angry, bruised, and more than a little confused. Clara had worked the streets for two years, and her mistrust of the police was even stronger than Stacey Jackson's; the cops had busted her and booked her—and, worst of all, sent her home when her age was discovered. She was not inclined to cooperate with them now, but she could see these men were different. They weren't arresting her; they were offering her a place in a safe house where she'd find other girls trying to break free of The Game, and they were giving her plenty of time to make up her mind whether she wanted to sign on the men who had assaulted her. She decided to take them up on the offer. The girls at Sullivan House welcomed Clara and urged her to allow the task force to move on that pimp and his buddies.

This advice, sound as it was, also signaled a new motivation for some of the young women at Sullivan House who began to view the task force as a weapon of revenge against pimps, not necessarily a way to stop working the streets. The attack on Clara had fostered the very attitude it was designed to eliminate. By the time Clara arrived, house rules permitted the young witnesses to sign themselves out on passes for several hours at a time. The new procedure facilitated Amber's new routine: during the day, she talked to the counselors about her ostensible plans for the future; at night she worked the north-end stroll and partied with her cabbie friend at the crack houses.

Clara, too, started playing it both ways, giving investigators their statement and agreeing that she would testify in court against her tormentors, while at the same time shopping around for a new pimp. Like many of the other girls, Clara also fell into the habit of bartering with investigators for the treats she wanted—lunch at KFC in exchange for information about life on the street; cigarettes and conversation for the background on a certain pimp; coffee and pop for a week to tell the officers about how girls were taken from Nova Scotia to other provinces. Crass, perhaps, but the system was what the girls had grown accustomed to in their dealings with pimps; and the officers knew what they were doing, and understood why—they could only hope it sank in that task force investigators were a whole lot different than pimps in their demands and behaviors.

By the spring of 1993, the task force had discovered that the Nova Scotia pimping operation was much broader than they had thought. Greer and his family regularly ran girls from Halifax through Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Niagara Falls, like Clara and Amber had informed them, but now their police contacts were describing Scotian pimping activity in Calgary and Vancouver, and, most recently, they were starting to hear about pimps from Nova Scotia operating in the United States. This realization was prompted by a call from a New York City transit police officer in April. He had noticed a man in his mid- to late thirties leading an apparently injured teenage girl through one of the turnstiles in a subway station. He didn't like the looks of the situation, so he approached the two of them and discovered the source of her difficulty—an untreated stab wound. While he was comforting her, the man—her pimp—vanished into the usual throng of commuters; the officer took the fourteen-year-old to the hospital and found out what had happened. To task force officers, it started as a familiar story: a Nova Scotia teenager lured into prostitution by a pimp posing as ardent suitor, she was taken first to Montreal, where she worked the Scotian stroll for only a few weeks before he told her they were going to New York. This was the new part, at least to the investigators: the Nova Scotia pimp sold the teenager to a New York pimp for about a thousand dollars. Two task force officers went to New York to take her home. Luckily, she was able to turn away from prostitution, but unluckily for investigators, she refused to give police a statement against the pimp who'd recruited her, saying she wanted to forget all about her ordeal. However, officers now had an untravelled path—to the United States—to explore in their efforts to combat juvenile prostitution. They questioned some of their young witnesses about other examples of international sex-trading by Maritime pimps. They discovered that the practice was sporadic. The Scotians' occasional forays south revealed a ready market. Still, the Nova Scotia pimps had no apparent connection to the huge international market in juvenile prostitutes. Their motives seemed to be consistent, the girls were a source of money and if they were on the road and someone wanted to buy a girl that was a way to make a fast buck. The pimps knew they could recruit a replacement.

Still, their brush with the international sex trade gave Sullivan and Elliott an opportunity to renew their investigation of the Kimberly McAndrew case, stonewalled yet again the previous fall during their frustrating interviews with Greer and his uncle, and still lying dormant after police departments in every major Canadian city reported no leads from the photographs of the girl that the task force had sent them. The officers now wondered if Kimberly, like the fourteen-year-old in New York, could have been taken to the United States—but such a search would be massive and extremely costly, and could not be immediately launched. The best the task force could do was forward Kimberly's picture to police forces in the United States and keep asking about her when they interviewed girls in Canada.