Somebody's Daughter (12 page)

The drunk was getting louder and pushing the girl, and a few other prostitutes had gathered to curse at him. They could see Tiny passing by on the street side of the man's car, but he only saw what was happening after Tiny had circled around the front of the car and come back towards him. “I suppose you're gonna hit me with that bat, are ya?” the belligerent drunk demanded. “Why don't you just fuck off outta here and leave me to my business?” Without a word, Tiny pulled back and swung the bat, striking the man in the side of the face and sending him to his knees. Blood poured from a gash above his cheekbone.

Tiny remained silent, and his victim wasn't saying much either. Calmly, the pimp lifted him by the arm and led him to his car; the man managed to get his keys in the ignition and drive away. Good riddance: Tiny didn't agree that his own presence on the stroll was a deterrent to customers, but he knew for sure that a bleeding date at the side of the road would not be an incentive to others. Tiny did not talk to the prostitute whom the drunk had been pestering. She could thank him by choosing him, and moving over to stand with his girl; if she didn't, he had no business talking to her. This was a pimp with his own style, but he was still a pimp; attacking the unruly date was a courtesy to a fellow player, but so much the better if his action gave a girl—or girls, preferably—the message that he was the man to be with. Tiny walked back to his car, tossed the bat inside, lit a cigarette, and returned to the conversation he was having with his now very excited young employee.

Tiny's girl was not the only one turned on by what had happened; all the prostitutes began talking and joking about the man who learned the hard way not to mess with them. Stacey felt an adrenaline rush, and she quickly forgot about Viki and her injury. Once again, she began to feel she was involved in something adventurous and wild, and she liked that feeling. She would remember it all the way to Toronto, she promised herself—and maybe she didn't need to worry about leaving The Game if it was going to be like this.

Part Three: Taunya and the Big Man

In the spring of 1992, Manning Greer was out cruising in his yellow Corvette one night, enjoying the sight of Montreal coming to life as winter released its grip. The comfortable warmth in the air meant more to Greer than the sheer pleasure of the season, however. The warmth meant Montrealers were once again venturing from their homes and apartments having survived the cold of another winter. Greer looked around at the pedestrian clogged sidewalks and smiled at what they represented. More people meant more business for his family of pimps. Most of all it meant more money—and that was something to
really
be happy about. The screech of car tires on pavement as he turned a corner startled pedestrians; a few looked up, but the heavily tinted side and rear windows prevented them from seeing who was making all the ruckus. It wasn't just the tires, but also the Corvette's dual exhaust, spitting and crackling with the firing of the engine's eight cylinders—not to mention the deep bass thud of the powerful stereo, which could be heard half a block away.

In a way, it was a shame he'd had the windows tinted, because the Big Man presented quite a spectacle behind the wheel of his 'Vette. The gleaming yellow sports car sparkled as he moved along the street. The car came alive as it passed beneath the amber street lights, their warm glow bouncing off the long sleek hood and catching another equally polished array of yellow metal as they danced over the swept back windshield. Seven sparkling, jewel-studded rings adorned his fingers; as he clasped the steering wheel, they seemed to fight for attention in the amber wash of the street lights. As he shifted gears, the flash of an expensive white running shoe could be seen below the car's dashboard. His powerful, muscular frame was draped in a deep-green, low-necked T-shirt tucked into trendy, baggy jeans secured by a belt with a buckle of real gold. Around his neck, he wore a massive gold chain, below which hung, fittingly enough, a solid-gold dollar sign. The three thousand dollars in his wallet was what the Big Man would call “chump change.”

Money and power were Greer's gods: he had utter contempt for most of humanity, and only really cared about one person outside his Scotian family of pimps. That person was his mother, Rose.

At the age of twenty-seven, the youngest in a family of two boys and three girls, Manning was Rose Greer's baby boy. The Greers, like many other hard-working families in their North Preston, Nova Scotia neighborhood, had high hopes for the bright, energetic Manning, a natural leader who possessed that special quality—charisma, as it's sometimes called—of someone who could exert influence over others. Rose Greer believed her baby was working in Montreal as a delivery driver for a large furniture company. Aside from his personality traits, Greer's size and strength meant he could handle the toughest physical labor and Rose was happy he was not afraid of hard work. Her own husband, Manning's father, had worked hard all of his life and Rose was happy that very important ethic had been passed on to her son. She was equally happy that Manning had been able to find work in Montreal for his older brother. There simply wasn't enough work for the boys in Nova Scotia and she was thrilled that they had the sense to move away and make a life for themselves. She did wish the boys would visit more, but they came when they could and she had to be happy with that. That was the life Rosy Greer thought her youngest child was living; hard working delivery man with an eye to the future. It pleased her that the high-school drop out had managed to make it after all. There was a time when she was afraid he would fall under the influence of the wrong crowd: and she spent many a Sunday on her knees in church praying that would not happen.

Rose's prayers were not answered—although she really believed they had been. By the age of sixteen, Manning Greer had fallen in with the wrong crowd; he had become a pimp.

The man who was probably the key to young Manning's career choice was his uncle, Garfield (“Popeye”) Greer, a dynamic, outspoken, and very successful North Preston player in the style of Miles States. The elder Greer made his money and achieved his dubious fame in the 1970s. Like Miles States, Popeye had a large stable of young women working for him and was not shy about showing his burly young nephew what those girls had done for him. Popeye loved to flash his cash and watch as Manning's eyes popped at the sight. He filled the young Greer's head with his own romantic interpretation of life on the streets. The sight of all that cash had a profound affect on Manning Greer. His hard working father kept food on the table and a roof over the family but there was rarely extra cash kicking around to offer the kids. Popeye on the other hand always handed Manning a twenty, or even a fifty, before he left town to return to the city and the life Manning wanted for himself. Like many pimps, Popeye Greer liked the idea of having an apprentice, so he agreed to introduce Manning to The Game when the young Greer asked him in the early 1980s. The student soon outstripped the master. Manning Greer jumped from bubble-gummer to full fledged pimp in less than a year. He was too big and ambitious to settle for the menial jobs the other young pimps accepted. Popeye Greer saw in the young man the potential to make some serious money and he encouraged it. Manning had not been successful in school not because he lacked intelligence but because he lacked motivation. He resented what he perceived as the racist attitude of the white school system and he could see the fear in the eyes of the other students when they looked at the angry young Greer. At age sixteen Greer was already approaching six feet, a height he would pass within two years. In his uncle's tutelage Manning was motivated by the quick return he saw for the time invested.

By the mid 1980s Popeye Greer had been in The Game for most of his life and he was content to settle down and reap the rewards. Manning, on the other hand, was just beginning and he wanted to see everything Popeye had seen and do even more. When Popeye Greer explained the rules of The Game to Manning one rule stuck out in the young recruit's mind. “We're the lords of this game man, the streets are ours, the rules are ours. We make 'em and we break 'em.” Manning Greer very quickly started playing by his own rules. He began recruiting young men from home to help him find girls to work the streets. Greer never trusted the other pimps he met in Montreal because they were not from home. He preferred to do business with the people he trusted. Gradually Manning Greer surrounded himself with a core group of close friends and relatives that he called “his family.” These young men enjoyed the life and the money the Big Man offered so they followed his lead. Greer spent most of his time working with that close knit group of friends but he also dealt with almost any pimp from his home town and by the end of the 1980s there were close to one hundred of them.

When Toronto police first began to hear about the Big Man they wrongly assumed he was a kingpin and that all the Nova Scotia pimps answered to him. Greer's vicious temper had earned him the fear and respect of the other pimps but the family was not as organized as police first believed. “Everything we did, we did because we learned it the hard way. There was no big plan to it,” one jailed pimp remarked. There was no master plan driving the Scotian pimps, they worked together when they had to and apart when it suited them. Greer was a firm believer in fear as a great motivator so he used the threat of a large number of pimps working as a unit to keep girls in line and keep competition at bay. A girl working for Greer in Toronto might think she could break free while he was in Montreal, but the thought that the other pimps working in Toronto would stop her kept her in line. Other pimps might think about raiding Greers stable but short of all out warfare with the Nova Scotians there was no way to move on the Big Man. Manning Greer was a re-active pimp not a pro-active one. When Jamaican pimps began to hassle the Nova Scotia girls in Montreal, claiming the prime corners as their own, Greer reacted quickly and decisively. He used brute force, and the number of loyal friends he had welcomed into The Game, to teach the Jamaicans a lesson. After beating one pimp and ordering him to take his girls out of town, Greer decided to claim sections of the stroll as his own, or as Scotian territory. He did the same thing in Toronto. Interestingly though, the loyalty of the Scotians did not extend to their business activities in Halifax. Greer and the others shared their territory in Montreal and Toronto and watched to make sure other pimps did not place their girls on the family's turf. Back home in Halifax, Greer, who was the biggest, claimed the best turf and his associates claimed their own in a trickle down fashion.

It is still unclear how much money Manning Greer was making as a pimp; he never shared that information with anyone. Police believe he made millions of dollars during his career, an estimate based on the belief that Greer ran a stable of five to fifteen girls depending on the season. In peak season—the summer when he needed as many as fifteen girls to meet the demand in Halifax, Montreal and Toronto—his girls would all earn a minimum of five hundred dollars a night.

Like other pimps from North Preston, Greer lied to his mother about the widespread criminal activity he was involved in; as far as Rose Greer was concerned, Manning worked for that trucking company in Montreal—his favorite of the three cities he most often visited in his actual profession. To explain the elegant attire and flashy jewelry he always wore on visits home, he boasted about how his great strength made him such a valuable asset to the company that he earned twice what the other shippers could generate. He made more money, he explained, because when a late shipment had to be delivered the company would ask him to do it alone. He worked all that overtime and his company rewarded him handsomely. Rose Greer was very proud of her son's success; she knew other boys from North Preston had been drawn into prostitution, and held up her Manning as an example of what they should be doing with their lives. The few neighbors who knew the truth didn't have the heart to disillusion her.

The streets are a dangerous deadly place where fear is a fact of life. The streets are also a pipeline of criminal information where legends grow bigger with every telling. It was fear that placed Manning Greer at the top of the heap. He was big, he was mean and would stop at nothing to defend his turf—that was the legend and legend is as good as the truth in the street. Manning Greer
had
become a leader, known across Canada as one of the most-feared, most-powerful players in the business—a man who, only in his mid-twenties, had reached the top of a profession he was too ashamed even to identify to his mother. She would have been shocked to hear the real story of his “progress”—from popcorn pimp to violent kingpin who used fear and unpredictability to control his girls in Montreal, Halifax, and Toronto. The Big Man didn't bother cruising the strolls regularly to collect cash: he was far too important for a job better suited to a bubble-gummer. He thought nothing of jumping on a plane to Toronto or Halifax so that he could ensure the young prostitutes were toeing the line. They never knew when to expect him, and that's just the way Greer wanted it. Greer did nothing to dispel the myth, that he was the boss. He reveled in it, and like every other opportunity that came his way he took advantage of it. If impressionable young men wanted to work for him, instead of developing their own stables, as he had done, that was fine with him. Greer knew he could not expect real players to follow his orders and he never asked them to. Popeye Greer, and the others who came before the new king of the street, worked with Manning when it was profitable and did their own thing when it was not. The following of impressionable young bubble-gummers helped Greer exert his force without ever raising a fist. He was not reluctant to order one his henchmen to administer a bit of physical or psychological discipline if a girl strayed out of line; the definition of “straying” altered according to his highly volatile moods, as did the criteria for determining when a particular prostitute required his personal attention. He had no qualms about exacting these punishments—it was just part of doing business, whether wrangling with rival pimps, or teaching a “'ho” a much-needed lesson.