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.
This was not a popular approach to pimping in Popeye Greer’s era, and Manning Greer didn’t start out by regularly and brutally beating his girls; but the Scotians learned in their efforts to hold onto their territory—the blocks demarcating a prostitution stroll—that muscle means power. Largely unchecked by the police, who concentrated their efforts on the girls, the Scotians’ penchant for the punch could be indulged at will, in battle with their equally aggressive and well-armed enemies, or for domination over vulnerable teenage girls. Violence had always had its place in The Game; as Popeye explained the rules to Manning, there were those times when a girl “needed a beating.” The difference between the two men was that Popeye and his generation of pimps used violence sparingly, believing the threat of it was enough. Manning and his generation of pimps used violence constantly, believing the reality was more effective than the threat. A girl who thought she might be abused might still risk violating a rule but a girl who knew her friends had been savagely beaten for the same violation would think better of it.
Manning Greer was not thinking about the past as he cruised through Montreal on that warm spring night. He was there and he was content. Greer glanced down at the speedometer—seventy clicks, a little over the posted limit but not enough to interest police. Still, why take a chance with those fools? Greer let his foot ease off the accelerator and watched the needle drop; as the car slowed to fifty kilometres per hour, he reached down and touched the handle of the dull-gray .9-mm Beretta handgun tucked between the bucket seat and the shifting console. He tapped his ringed fingers on the wheel in time to the blaring music. Police? The Big Man didn’t care about the police, and he was confident they didn’t care about him, either. One of Manning Greer’s greatest assets in The Game—along with his personal magnetism—was a remarkable ability to quickly assess and act on just about any situation presented to him, almost always to his benefit. Even the Big Man had a blind spot though, and Greer’s blind spot was the police.
If anyone told Greer there were police officers in three provinces and the state of New York who were aware of him and his activities and just waiting for a chance to put him behind bars, he would simply have laughed. The police were just an annoyance, to be avoided as easily as lifting one’s foot from the accelerator every once in a while. The fact was that police had been monitoring the activities of Greer and his family of pimps for some time. For example, Halifax RCMP officers John Elliott and Brad Sullivan had been told by some of the young prostitutes who opened up to them in 1990, during Operation Heart, that although Manning Greer was the acting leader of the Scotians, his uncle remained the highly respected family figurehead—the only player to whom the Big Man would defer. That kind of information was probably the single reason the police were unable to stop Manning Greer. The police really were chasing a ghost; they had accepted the street myth surrounding Greer and did not focus on the reality.
The police believed Greer headed a highly organized crime family on par with the Hell’s Angels biker gang. They had also heard the street story about the turf war between the biker’s and the Scotians. That story, like most in the street, was part truth and part myth. The Hell’s Angels had left the stroll in Halifax after a clash with the Scotians, but not because the Scotians were a serious threat to the Angels. The truth was the street trade in Halifax was not worth the police attention a turf war would bring and the Angels knew a turf war was the only way to chase the locals off the stroll.
There was a large number of Nova Scotia pimps but they were not, in the traditional sense, an organized crime family. The Scotians were more like a blowfish: blowfish can double in size when threatened. The fish does that by ingesting water or air and distending its stomach. It’s a trick, but it often scares off predators in the deep. When Manning Greer or one of his friends was threatened, or when they were all threatened by another pimp or some other perceived problem, they joined forces: distending the stomach and exaggerating their size. It worked for them as well. When the threat was over, most of the pimps would go their own way and do their own thing until the next threat was encountered. Greer did stay in close contact with his core group of friends but even they did business their own way. The pimps were just friends from the same small town sharing a wild adventure. The young bubble-gummers who followed Manning Greer’s orders were just naive and he and his friends took advantage of that. There was another problem that kept police from isolating and arresting Manning Greer. Unlike the Scotians, the police did not join ranks to solve a problem. Police in Montreal wanted Manning Greer arrested, or moved out of their town. They did not care if he worked in Toronto or Halifax. The same could be said of police in those cities. By 1992 that was beginning to change. The change started when Brad Sullivan and Dave Perry began to share notes following Operation Heart.
Greer was unaware of that subtle change in policing and he continued to believe the police were no threat as he whipped the ’Vette over to the curb and clambered out. Even without the flashy car, Greer turned heads as he headed along the busy downtown street. His 6′3″ frame carried 225 pounds in well-distributed proportion—a big man not only by reputation. The glowing gold jewelry; the expensive yet casual clothing; the smooth, dark face framed in thick black curls weighed down with styling gel: an extremely attractive package—except for the dangerous distance in the moist brown eyes. Manning Greer rarely met a gaze directly; his mind seemed perennially occupied with something other than what—or who—was right in front of him. On this night in early June, though, he was just enjoying the smell of the city, and he inhaled deeply as he walked towards his favorite club. Montreal smelled just a little like home. There was a hint of moisture in the air as the breeze from the waterfront worked its way into the downtown core, and he thought nostalgically of the Hollis Street stroll, only a block away from the busy Halifax harborfront; the sickly sweet scent of raw sewage and petroleum products—lifeblood of the ships slipping into and out of port—was a powerful trigger for memories of home. A trip back east was just what he needed—and he could also use the time to fill a vacancy in his stable of prostitutes. Lynn, one of the Big Man’s favorite girls had disappeared and he was looking for someone new to fill that void. He was also still looking for Lynn. Greer’s favorite club was a small, dark street-level bar popular with Montreal’s pimping community; two pool tables on one side of the room, a few small, round tables and a long oak bar on the other. Greer walked to the Scotian family’s usual table near the back of the bar where he sat with his back against the wall. The satisfied smile he had worn out on the street was beginning to fade, though. It was just after 11:30 P.M., and the Big Man had expected two of his cousins to be in the bar, but they hadn’t shown up. After ordering a Coke—Greer rarely drank alcohol—he pulled out a cellular phone and punched in a number. “Yo.” The single-syllable greeting was delivered in an impatient tone. “It’s B.M. Where you at?” Only Greer’s inner circle referred to Greer as B.M. instead of the Big Man; and it was a privilege that had to be earned. It was shared by that small group he spent most of his time with.
“Shit, man, it’s Glenda. Dumb ’ho got herself busted again.”
“Deal with it.”
“Yeah, later.”
Greer clipped the folding phone to his belt and sipped his drink, looking around the room and quickly deciding there was nobody worth hanging around for. On his way out he noticed five men at a table near the door; one of the three facing him looked familiar. It was a Jamaican player from New York; one he’d diss’d. Two weeks earlier, the Big Man had taken a girl from the other pimps stable and refused to pay the leaving fee of eight hundred dollars demanded by the Jamaican, who called himself High T. He’d done this deliberately as part of his continuing effort to drive the Jamaicans off what he considered Scotian territory—a pimp without respect would be unable
to hang on to any of his girls, or his turf—but now Greer was beginning to wonder whether he had made a mistake. He locked eyes with High T., who stood, met his glance, and walked out the door, followed by his companions. Greer was being challenged; if he stayed in the bar, he would be announcing that he was afraid, and there was no way he could do that. Pulling out his phone, he hit the re-dial button, but his cousins were at the police station bailing out the busted prostitute and they’d shut off their phone and left it in the car. Shit, and the gun is in the ’Vette! Well, he’d just give that fool High T. his money and catch up with him later.
Outside, the five men had gathered at the edge of the sidewalk near a gray van; when Greer walked out of the bar, High T. stepped away from the others. “B.M., you’d better be carrying my money, fool.” Well that was different: High T. could not call him B.M., and nobody called him a fool. The Big Man’s powerful leg shot out in a lightning-fast kick, and High T. was out of the picture. “Anyone else gonna dis’ me here?” The other men seemed confused. Greer’s challenge was not what they’d expected. One of them rushed over to the fallen pimp, who was still clutching his groin. “Fuck, T. You okay?” Greer prepared to kick this second guy in the head as the side door of the van slid open and two more men stepped out, one carrying a baseball bat. He tried to fend off the blow but only managed to slow it down with his raised arm. The bat glanced off the arm and struck the side of his head. He felt the sidewalk disappear beneath his feet. Then came flashes of light and mumbled sounds as a flurry of kicks battered his head and face.
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