Stacey wasn’t spending much time on thoughts of revenge. She decided not to return to her apartment or pick up her baby from Roger’s parents; not just yet. She needed some time to clear her head and figure out how to deal with this tangled web of players trying to say they owned her. After spending the night at Annie Mae’s, she borrowed clothes from her friend and headed out on the bus to the Annapolis Valley. Maybe a few days with her Aunt Jean would help her. The visit seemed to be just what Stacey needed—some rest, good food, some heart-to-heart talks about her hopes to go to college. Stacey had only said there’d been some bad arguments with her mother (whose sister had had a few of those herself), so there was no cross-examination when Stacey, who looked very drawn and tired, said she just needed a bit of space. Her aunt even agreed to keep their visit a secret, after Stacey promised to call her mom when she got back to her apartment in Dartmouth. By the time the bus was on the outskirts of town, Stacey was ready to reclaim her life: she’d get a job, and she’d avoid these pimps, refusing even to talk to them if they called.
Debbie Howard was so delighted to hear her daughter’s strong new resolve to stay away from the pimps and prostitutes she’d been calling friends that she immediately forgot her disappointment in Stacey’s decision to take off to Toronto without telling her—and spend three days in the Valley before calling.
Stacey thought she had managed to break away from the nightmare that Kenny had introduced her to, at least for a couple of weeks as she began to see her life return to normal. As the Labour Day weekend approached it became clear her plans did not take into account the priorities of the pimps she had become involved with. When Toddy called Toronto to tell his cousin the news about Stacey leaving The Game, Kenny Sims was furious that he’d spent so much time on this girl without seeing any serious return on his investment. True, Stacey had earned enough in one night to cover his financial investment in her; but his time was worth more and he wanted compensation. Bad enough that T-bar had lost Annie Mae—but at least he could console himself that she did that to everyone. This was different. He was going to get his money’s worth out of this bitch, and then some; Kenny told Toddy to find Stacey and send her, or a leaving fee back to Toronto immediately. The younger pimp kept an eye on the stroll for a week or two; fully expecting to see Stacey there. When she did not return to work he simply went to her apartment and pounded on the door, ignoring her tears and pleas and calmly informing the terrified teenager that he would knock down the door and beat her severely unless she either came up with her leaving fee—eight hundred dollars—or returned to Toronto. With no job and no education that would bring her anything but minimum wage, Stacey knew she couldn’t come up with that kind of cash—and Toddy wasn’t interested in arranging a pay-back schedule. Stacey considered asking her father for the money, but that would mean telling him what she was doing. She just couldn’t talk to her mom, who’d been so thrilled to hear of her new plans. No, she would work for Toddy; and she persuaded him to promise he would give the money to Kenny and then leave her alone. It wouldn’t take long and then she’d be free.
Why didn’t she call the police? It’s a good question, and one most people in Stacey’s position might have been expected to ask themselves at about this point in the sequence of events. Unfortunately, Stacey would never even have contemplated making such a call. She hadn’t been in The Game for very long, and she badly wanted out, but Stacey Jackson had spent long enough in the murky world where respect means fear to have absorbed some of the twisted thinking characteristic of the prostitution business. Girls like Rachel and Annie Mae, who had been prostitutes for years, truly hated all police officers; indeed, Annie Mae had even told Stacey she’d been beaten and sexually assaulted by cops. Although she had never been more than vague about time and place when Stacey asked, enough of her anger against the law seeped through her friend’s equally vague doubts—policemen didn’t do that kind of thing, did they?—to plant the seeds of hatred in the younger girl’s mind. Never mind that both of them knew from personal experience how pimps behaved towards their girls. That was different; players were family, and both Annie Mae and Stacey knew the words family and violence often went together. They did in their families, anyway. But the police? They were, quite simply, the enemy. They stopped you from working and they treated you like dirt, besides. Stacey was also afraid she would be charged and sent to prison, she knew what she had done in Toronto and in Halifax was illegal. No, the police were to be avoided, always.
Not an assessment with which either Constable John Elliott or Constable Brad Sullivan, Halifax-area RCMP officers, would entirely disagree. At least, not considering prevailing attitudes to prostitutes at the time they began a fact-finding mission in February 1990 to identify pimps working in Halifax. The assault accusation would make them shake their heads in exasperation, but they would understand its origins. As John Elliott expresses it today, many of the people in positions of power—law-makers as well as law-enforcers—saw prostitutes, even those younger than Stacey, as “sluts who are out there every night doing what they want to do.”
RCMP officers Brad Sullivan and John Elliott.
The two officers’ involvement in juvenile prostitution had its origins in the August 1989 disappearance of a Halifax girl, eighteen year-old Kimberly McAndrew, whose fate remains unknown. Kimberly finished her shift at a local Canadian Tire store and left for home; she never got there. Halifax police were considering two theories: either she was a runaway, or she was a victim of murder, possibly at the hands of someone she knew. Kimberly’s father, a former RCMP officer, insisted his daughter had not run away—she just wasn’t the type to leave without contacting her family or her boyfriend. This was a teenager with plans for her future, and there was nothing in her behavior before the disappearance to suggest a problem so terrible that she had to run away without leaving a trace.
In January 1990, the investigation into McAndrew’s disappearance was faltering when a third theory surfaced. An informant who claimed to have information about Kimberly met with Elliott, an investigator with the Cole Harbour RCMP, and told him the girl had been picked up by a pimp not far from the store where she worked. This man had met Kimberly on several occasions when he came to buy auto parts, the informant said; and though it was difficult for Elliott to accept that Kimberly McAndrew might have been abducted and put to work as a prostitute in another part of the country, he decided to at least share the information with another Mountie.
Brad Sullivan and John Elliott were teammates in the Metro Halifax Police curling league—and they had become close friends. Elliott knew that Sullivan, an investigator at RCMP headquarters in Halifax, had a keen interest in the McAndrew case and had been monitoring its progress since the beginning. It was only logical for the two officers to discuss the possibility that Kimberly had been abducted, and Sullivan thought they should try it out on the Halifax police investigators. The reception they received was cool—at the time, police did not believe there was a serious pimping problem in the city and considered the idea of an abduction far-fetched. Brad Sullivan was not to be put off that easily; he asked for time to pursue his theory, and although this was not an RCMP case, he was told to go ahead. Anything relevant could be passed on to the investigators handling the file.
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 hav
e 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 prostit
utes—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.
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