Somebody's Daughter

by Jessome, Phonse;

  The new residence was named Sullivan House, much to the delight of task force officers who teased Brad Sullivan by claiming he had insisted the house be named for him. The name actually originated from the name of small pond in Halifax. When community service workers met in Halifax to discuss the establishment of the safe house they met in another youth facility across from Sullivan’s Pond. At the end of the meeting when someone asked what the new house would be called they all agreed Sullivan House would be appropriate enough. After that meeting Shane Kirk, a twenty-four-year-old child services counselor, began preparing Sullivan House for its new role. Kirk and other workers did everything they could to remove the institutional appearance of the old hospital building and give it a more relaxed home like feel. Stacey Jackson was the first resident, and she was met at the door by a smiling Shane Kirk. Stacey thought Kirk was another task force officer; his muscular build and short hair were enough to identify him as a policeman for her. Kirk quickly informed Stacey that he was not a policeman but that he was there to help her make the transition to a normal lifestyle. Within days, other girls began arriving, and Stacey found herself among friends who shared her problems and frustrations, and understood where she had come from. The girls lost no time redecorating their small rooms, putting up posters from their favorite magazines and setting out their jewelry and scarves to brighten up the usual institutional beiges and yellows that Kirk had unthinkingly used in his efforts to make the place more homey. The girls also did some redecorating in the large common room they shared when they were not in their own bedrooms. The common area gave the girls a lovely view of the tree-filled lawn of the hospital—and, unfortunately for girls wavering on the brink of a return to The Game, an unobstructed view of the lower end of Hollis Street, just across the Harbour.

  Sullivan House.

  Access to Sullivan House was closely restricted, and even relatives had to observe visiting hours. Kirk and the others running the facility heeded warnings from task force officers concerned that pimps would try to kill one of the girls as a means of getting a strong message to the others. Sullivan House followed a double lock down routine. The girls were housed on the second floor behind a large wooden locked door. On the main floor even task force officers were required to show their badges through a hole in the main entrance before they were granted access to the lobby. Visitors would walk through the large lobby, then up a flight of stairs that looked like it had been taken from a 1950s Hollywood musical. At the top was a foyer with a door that opened onto the residence itself—and no one without clearance from counselors and the task force was permitted beyond either the main entrance or the one at the top of those stairs. Along with Sullivan House’s location, on the second story of a building minutes from a police station, investigators had imposed the stringent visiting rules to protect the girls.

  In its early days, Sullivan House was also a locked unit, but some of the girls became so outraged—they had come from Truro, where no such restriction existed—that they lowered themselves on bed sheets from the common-room window and took off, some never to return while others came back reluctantly after being found by task force officers. A system of supervised releases took care of the problem. At first, the supervised releases were a challenge for the counselors required to provide the supervision. Shane Kirk recalls one trip to a Dartmouth bowling alley that proved disastrous. “There were five girls, and the minute we arrived at the bowling alley they all ran. We had task force officers, regular Dartmouth police force officers and every spare body from Sullivan House out looking.” The girls were not intent on escaping and had just run off to give their young counselor a tough time. They all returned after a few hectic hours of searching on the part of Kirk and the police.

  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 th
e 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.

  Indeed, when Jay promised Amber he could find her an apartment, her interest was immediately piqued—and he could already see himself paying off that whopping five-thousand-dollar fine that prevented him from renewing his driver’s license and getting a set of wheels again. The fine had long been forgotten by the irresponsible pimp; it was an insurance company judgment issued against him in 1972 when he had been at fault in an accident and did not have coverage. He had forgotten about it but the registry of motor vehicles had not. He had been informed of the problem when a Nova Scotia police officer ordered him to get a valid drivers license after he was stopped for running a stop sign. His license had long since expired and when Jay wen
t to get a new one he was told the price would be five thousand and ten dollars. Five thousand would cover the insurance judgment and ten would take care of the renewal fee. Jay was using Amber to get what he wanted, but she was also using him to find a place for her and the baby to live, and an incentive to kick her crack habit. Pimps, she knew well, did not tolerate their girls using drugs, and she hoped the fear of violent retaliation on his part would be enough to keep her clean.

  Unlike Manning Greer, who could take in more money in a month than Jay often made in a year, Amber’s new man couldn’t afford to rent an apartment for her—but he did know how to work the system. After the teenager picked up her daughter, telling her foster parents she’d found a job and an apartment, Jay took her to the local welfare office, and—presto!—a bit of cash and a place to live. Her objective, unfortunately, dissolved in the fumes from her first crack pipe as Jay’s girl. Only a few days after going to work for the pimp, Amber found a way to work both the north-end and Hollis strolls—one early in the evening, the downtown area later at night—thus earning enough to satisfy both her habit and her new man.