Somebody's Daughter (30 page)

The task force officers saw Sullivan House as a safe refuge for the girls but those working inside the safe house saw it as much more. To counselors like Kirk, Sullivan House was the first step toward the beginning of a new life for the girls. The Sullivan House staff consisted of trained child care professionals who had no trouble seeing the girls as victims, and they set out to help them. The most common problem faced by the counselors was developing a sense of self-worth in the former prostitutes. “A lack of self-esteem was evident in all of the girls and we set out to use a system of rewards to help them feel good about themselves.” Kirk recalls, “It was very important that we set goals the girls could easily achieve, if they failed they would return to the negative self image that had led to so much trouble for them in the first place.” The system devised in Sullivan house served two purposes: it gave the girls a sense of accomplishment and taught them basic life skills they were lacking. Simple hygiene became the first lesson and the first reward based incentive program at Sullivan House. Many of the girls had come from families where they had endured years of neglect and had not been taught the most basic skills. The Sullivan House rules were simple, when residents got out of bed they were required to make the bed and then head to the washroom to wash and brush their hair and teeth. “It was really easy for the girls to develop those habits but we made a big deal when they did” says Kirk. “We used every opportunity to tell them what a fine job they were doing or how good they looked.”

Sullivan House was the answer to many problems but presented several of its own. Many of the problems came about because of an apparently innocent piece of technology in a short corridor linking the common room to the dormitory's main hallway—a pay phone. Several girls had taken to calling their pimps, sometimes complaining about being kept in the “loony bin.” A few of the girls had jotted down the cell-phone numbers for their men on the wall by the phone, while others had written their initials and their pimps' inside penciled hearts.

That same telephone also created a great deal of trouble for Stacey Jackson, just at a time when she was beginning to settle down and start to seriously plan her future. It started when a girl arrived at Sullivan House from the Truro school and immediately began to taunt Stacey, who had no idea why. She confronted the girl, who said she was in love with Smit and would be joining him the moment he was set free. It was all Stacey's fault that he was behind bars, and she'd better not make matters worse during his trial in Toronto. The girl had signed on her own pimp but that did not alter her judgment of Stacey. One day, the girl was talking on the pay phone when Stacey walked by.

“Here, Stacey—someone wants to talk to you,” she said, and Stacey took the phone. “Hello, who is it?”

“Never mind that, girl. I got a message for you and the rest of those bitches planning to go to Toronto.” Stacey recognized the voice; it was a seventeen-year-old nephew of Manning Greer's. She called him by name and asked what the message was, trying to stay calm. “No one is gonna testify at those trials,” he said threateningly. “Anyone who tries is gonna be shot on the courthouse steps.”

“Fuck off,” Stacey offered in response, then handed back the phone and walked away. She heard the other girl express surprise that she'd recognized him, but that was just plain stupid. The pimp had a bad lisp and always sounded hoarse; anyone who heard him once would know his voice forever.

Later in the evening, Stacey called John Elliott and told him she wanted to talk to him. In the weeks after moving into the safe house, she'd developed a strong bond with the officer, whom she trusted in a way that was not possible for her with Brad Sullivan. For his part, Sullivan considered the relationship between girls and their case officers much more important than trying to prove anything with Stacey, and he willingly passed her file to Elliott. The initial animosity between Sullivan and Stacey could have been worked through but her fondness for Elliott made that pointless, as long as she trusted a police officer they were happy. The constable was at the task force office when Stacey called, he said he'd be right over. They went to their usual spot to talk—a nearby Tim Horton's coffee shop—and a badly shaken Stacey described the pimp's threat. Maybe she shouldn't testify after all; maybe the family really would gun her down on the courthouse steps. No way, Elliott assured her; he would take care of that pimp, and she would have nothing to worry about. Stacey cracked a smile, but Elliott knew he would have to make good on his promise. Her confidence, like her emotional stability, was newly won and could be so easily tipped in the wrong direction.

The next morning, as Elliott grimly prepared the paperwork for his planned arrest of Greer's nephew, two visitors arrived at the task force office who were in town to interview Taunya about their case against the Big Man, Eddy, and Slugger. When he heard what had happened, Dave Perry was relieved that Elliott planned to move against the young pimp, and following his trip to Truro, was delighted to hear the Mountie was only just setting out for the high school his suspect attended; the Toronto officer looked forward to being there for the takedown. Perry, his partner, and their escorting officer arranged to meet Elliott in the school parking lot just before classes let out; the Mountie had informed the principal of the pending arrest and confirmed that his suspect was there that day. Like most bubble-gummers, he only played The Game after school.

Another suspect is arrested in Toronto as the pimping investigations continue. [Print from ATV video tape]

Elliott arrived first—but he was too late; the young man had just pulled out of the schoolyard with a group of friends. Elliott got a description of the car, raced out of the parking lot, and spotted the vehicle after only a few minutes. Slapping his portable flashing light on the dashboard of his unmarked cruiser, he gave chase; the pimp's car pulled over on the highway leading out of Cole Harbour and towards North Preston. Perry and his companion officers were on the same highway having linked up with it on their way back from Truro; they arrived just in time to see John Elliott approach the passenger-side window of the pimp's car. Elliott identified himself, asked the suspect to get into the cruiser, and told him why he was being arrested. A short time later, the seventeen-year-old was in the task force office, charged with obstruction.

The growing number of arrests, albeit still mostly in Toronto and Montreal, and the increased cooperation from girls involved in prostitution led investigators to expect a change in the behavior of the pimps. It didn't happen. The Scotian players' arrogance was unwavering: they continued to blatantly run girls on the Hollis stroll and to recruit new victims; even the incarceration of Greer and his cohorts hadn't crimped the style of their Halifax-based “relatives,” who gave the impression that the Big Man and company would soon be back on the street. While many young prostitutes were giving up The Game, many more were still trying to survive their dangerous profession. Amber Borowski was one of them.

Amber was still in The Game; although her long time partner Sheri Fagan was out, for good she claimed. Sheri was more afraid of her crack cocaine addiction then she had been of her pimp. When the Big Man went to jail, Sheri went to a social services counselor for help. She was placed in a detox program and managed to beat the crack and The Game. After the arrests, Amber left Niagara Falls and Sheri and returned to Toronto where she was reunited with her daughter and moved in with a businessman, a client who'd taken a liking to the prostitute over the year or so they had known each other. She continued to work the Scotian stroll—but as a freelancer—and, unencumbered by a greedy pimp, was able to take in a great deal of money. Unfortunately, one jealous master only substituted for another: crack cocaine, to which she was so seriously addicted that she ended up with about the same pittance she'd been given as a member of the family. Most times, there was only enough to pay a baby-sitter and buy a few necessities for her daughter. One night, she spent an unbelievable eight hundred dollars on the deadly drug, and when she returned home, she found a note from her lover. He was tired of her new routine and told her to make a decision, was it going to be The Game and crack cocaine or a life with him for her and the baby. Amber thought she wanted to make the right choice—not only could crack kill her, she realized, but if she landed in jail, her child would certainly be taken away. She wanted to make a clean break but she couldn't stop hustling, and she couldn't stop smoking crack.

A Nova Scotian girl tells her story to the author, just off the Scotian stroll in Toronto. [Print from ATV video tape]

Ironically, the Nova Scotian pimps ultimately made the decision for Amber: she was told by one of the pimps that she could no longer work for herself, and rather than try to find a man again, Amber decided to phone her foster parents, Amy and Steve Nicholson, and ask them if she could come home for Christmas. “It'll be the best present you could give us,” her relieved and delighted foster dad told her. The reunion in Halifax began with joy, but Amber's mood swung into suspicion when the Nicholsons introduced her to a friend of theirs, the task force's Darrell Gaudet; like most street-hardened prostitutes, she deeply mistrusted the police.

As for Gaudet, he was seriously worried about Amber, not just because of her hostility, but because her appearance clearly showed she was a crack addict. Indeed, the teenager who used to laugh about her bulky body was now almost anorexic. Her skin was a pasty, ghostly white behind the sunken, black-rimmed eyes. Gaudet gave Amber one of his cards and offered to help if she was pressured to return to The Game, or if she was having trouble re-entering the square world. Only a few days later, she had left that world behind—at least at night—and taken up prostitution again, this time on the north-end Halifax block, known as the crack stroll, because its girls serviced clients only to pay the price of admission to a dingy neighborhood crack house for another little rock. For two-weeks the eighteen-year-old spent nights on the stroll and days lying to her foster parents about what she was doing. But the pressure and guilt became unbearable, and Amber found a place to stay temporarily; the apartment of a girl she had previously worked with. Amy Nicholson agreed to watch the baby for a few days, and Amber went back to work, on Hollis Street this time.

It didn't take long for the unattached teenager to come to the attention of a pimp, Jeremy (“Jay”) MacDonald, who played The Game as a sideline to his main activities—robbery and assault. A three-time loser who had spent most of the 1980s in federal prisons, Jay always ran a couple of girls just to make ends meet when his primary professions weren't yielding either enough income or enough satisfaction, but he never considered himself a potential as a major player—until his employee of the moment, Deena Jacobs, told him about Amber, whom she'd befriended on the stroll. Amber had worked for Manning Greer, Deena pointed out, and Jay became keenly interested. Here was his chance to make it big at something: robbing innocent citizens wasn't paying nearly as well as it used to, and there seemed to be no chance of reviving his dormant career as an entertainer. Oh sure, he'd played with a band in Ontario and Quebec in the early days, and there was that time he worked as an exotic dancer—Ottawa or someplace; the ladies really took to his tall, lean, wild look, he reminisced egotistically—but he was too old for the nightclub biz. He had to admit he was not the only one showing signs of age. His gal Deena was getting a little long in the tooth. Twenty-seven, wasn't she? Another good reason for checking out the new talent. As he was fond of pointing out, “Jay ain't nobody's fool.” Recruiting this girl should be a piece of cake, he told himself; she didn't have her own place, Deena had told him, and she desperately wanted to make a home for her baby daughter. Those were facts he could use.