Somebody's Daughter

by Jessome, Phonse;

  Clara’s pimp and a group of other players talked over the young prostitute’s threat; if she was hanging out on Hollis bragging about that threat then they were all in trouble. The girls would start losing respect for their men—that is, stop fearing them. Something had to be done. Clara’s pimp, Miguel Joseph, picked her up on the stroll one night in January and drove her to a house in North Preston. It was the beginning of three days of hell for the teenager, who was repeatedly gang-raped, beaten, and threatened with worse reprisals if she ever stepped out of line again. The message worked, to a degree. Clara was demoralized and defeated, she would never again threaten or disrespect Miguel, at least that was how she felt upon leaving the house where she had been so savagely tortured. What the pimps had not counted on was Clara’s friends on the street. Clara was well liked by the other girls on Hollis Street, and they were infuriated when a couple of the pimps involved in her brutalization started bragging about what they’d done. By then, the information pipeline was moving, and task force investigators found out what had happened—the torture, and the message it was supposed to send to officers about the esteem in which Operation Hectic was held by the Halifax pimping community.

  The girl they found on Hollis Street was angry, bruised, and more than a little confused. Clara had worked the streets for two years, and her mistrust of the police was even stronger than Stacey Jackson’s; the cops had busted her and booked her—and, worst of all, sent her home when her age was discovered. She was not inclined to cooperate with them now, but she could see these men were different. They weren’t arresting her; they were offering her a place in a safe house where she’d find other girls trying to break free of The Game, and they were giving her plenty of time to make up her mind whether she wanted to sign on the men who had assaulted her. She decided to take them up on the offer. The girls at Sullivan House welcomed Clara and urged her to allow the task force to move on that pimp and his buddies.

  This advice, sound as it was, also signaled a new motivation for some of the young women at Sullivan House who began to view the task force as a weapon of revenge against pimps, not necessarily a way to stop working the streets. The attack on Clara had fostered the very attitude it was designed to eliminate. By the time Clara arrived, house rules permitted the young witnesses to sign themselves out on passes for several hours at a time. The new procedure facilitated Amber’s new routine: during the day, she talked to the counselors about her ostensible plans for the future; at night she worked the north-end stroll and partied with her cabbie friend at the crack houses.

  Clara, too, started playing it both ways, giving investigators their statement and agreeing that she would testify in court against her tormentors, while at the same time shopping around for a new pimp. Like many of the other girls, Clara also fell into the habit of bartering with investigators for the treats she wanted—lunch at KFC in exchange for information about life on the street; cigarettes and conversation for the background on a certain pimp; coffee and pop for a week to tell the officers about how girls were taken from Nova Scotia to other provinces. Crass, perhaps, but the system was what the girls had grown accustomed to in their dealings with pimps; and the officers knew what they were doing, and understood why—they could only hope it sank in that task force investigators were a whole lot different than pimps in their demands and behaviors.

  By the spring of 1993, the task force had discovered that the Nova Scotia pimping operation was much broader than they had thought. Greer and his family regularly ran girls from Halifax through Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Niagara Falls, like Clara and Amber had informed them, but now their police contacts were describing Scotian pimping activity in Calgary and Vancouver, and, most recently, they were starting to hear about pimps from Nova Scotia operating in the United States. This realization was prompted by a call from a New York City transit police officer in April. He had noticed a man in his mid- to late thirties leading an apparently injured teenage girl through one of the turnstiles in a subway station. He didn’t like the looks of the situation, so he approached the two of them and discovered the source of her difficulty—an untreated stab wound. While he was comforting her, the man—her pimp—vanished into the usual throng of commuters; the officer took the fourteen-year-old to the hospital and found out what had happened. To task force officers, it started as a familiar story: a Nova Scotia teenager lured into prostitution by a pimp posing as ardent suitor, she was taken first to Montreal, where she worked the Scotian stroll for only a few weeks before he told her they were going to New York. This was the new part, at least to the investigators: the Nova Scotia pimp sold the teenager to a New York pimp for about a thousand dollars. Two task force officers went to New York to take her home. Luckily, she was able to turn away from prostitution, but unluckily for investigators, she refused to give police a statement against the pimp who’d recruited her, saying she wanted to forget all about her ordeal. However, officers now had an untravelled path—to the United States—to explore in their efforts to combat juvenile prostitution. They questioned some of their young witnesses about other examples of international sex-trading by Maritime pimps. They discovered that the practice was sporadic. The Scotians’ occasional forays south revealed a ready market. Still, the Nova Scotia pimps had no apparent connection to the huge international market in juvenile prostitutes. Their motives seemed to be consistent, the girls were a source of money and if they were on the road and someone wanted to buy a girl that was a way to make a fast buck. The pimps knew they could recruit a replacement.

  Still, their brush with the international sex trade gave Sullivan and Elliott an opportunity to renew their investigation of the Kimberly McAndrew case, stonewalled yet again the previous fall during their frustrating interviews with Greer and his uncle, and still lying dormant after police departments in every major Canadian city reported no leads from the photographs of the girl that the task force had sent them. The officers now wondered if Kimberly, like the fourteen-year-old in New York, could have been taken to the United States—but such a search would be massive and extremely costly, and could not be immediately launched. The best the task force could do was forward Kimberly’s picture to police forces in the United States and keep asking about her when they interviewed girls in Canada.

  Sullivan and Elliott kept Kimberly’s file alive while they and the other investigators explored yet another angle of the multi-faceted juvenile prostitution problem—escort services. Discussions with the young witnesses had yielded insights that mirrored the research Darrell Gaudet had been conducting on his own even before the task force was formed. His findings, now contained in a brief, “Metro Escort and Bawdy Houses,” identified twenty-four advertised escort services responsible for a multi-million-dollar sex trade being carried on behind closed doors all over the Halifax area. Both Stacey Jackson and Taunya Terriault had launched their prostitution careers through escort services. According to Gaudet’s calculations, based on the hourly rates reported by his contacts, each of the operations would only have to employ one prostitute in order for their combined income to exceed one million dollars; and his study had identified some services that used as many as fifteen girls at a time. The implications were financially staggering, and, like every other aspect of prostitution the task force had investigated, socially appalling. Pimps often presented escort services as an attractive first foray into The Game for girls who were initially reluctant to stand on a street corner, where someone they knew might see them. The girls soon discovered, as Stacey did, that the brothels were dirty, degrading places; or they learned that the hotel rooms contained no elegant world travelers, but drunken louts of the type Taunya encountered on her first “out call.” Taunya had been lucky when she went to the escort service; she worked alone and kept her share of the money. The girls who were placed there by pimps handed it over at the end of the night as Stacey had.

  The task force’s probe of escort services brought Sullivan and Elliott no closer to solving the mystery of Kimberly M
cAndrew, but they were able to gain a wider understanding of its significance to The Game and its impact on their witnesses’ experience. One of the more recent additions to the roster was Lydia Chiasson, a nineteen-year-old whose experiences left investigators stunned by both the depth of human depravity—and the resilience of the human spirit.

  Lydia’s childhood in rural New Brunswick was the most hideous account of early abuse that investigators had yet heard. Her father, a sometime farmer and full-time alcoholic who regularly beat his wife and daughter, also fancied himself a high priest in the Church of Satan. Lydia was only seven when he took her pet dog to one of his meetings in the big barn that dominated the gently rolling farmland. As usual, she was not invited to attend, but the child could hear the animal’s terrified whining and howling as she sat on the front deck of the farmhouse; and the pool of blood she saw next morning on the barn floor told her all she needed to know. There were also the guns: Lydia’s father wanted everyone in the family to know how to use one—the child got her .22 for her eight birthday—along with free lessons. Within the year, she shot him with it; he had been beating her mother on the kitchen floor for some time before she pointed the gun at him—when he ignored her please to stop, she fired twice, hitting him in the leg. It was the last time she saw her family: Lydia was placed in a foster home and later ran away to live in Nova Scotia.

  Relatively mature for a recruit to The Game, Lydia was already nineteen when she met a pimp in north-end Dartmouth while she was on her way to a video store. Charlie Cochrane, a good-looking fast talker in his early thirties, easily persuaded her to get in his van and go for a spin; within two days, she was convinced that Charlie wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. His affection and attention were new experiences for the teenager, first abused, then largely ignored by the adults in her life. That she mistook his machinations for love was understandable—she had never been given anything resembling it—and her readiness to believe in the man who was providing this gift knew no bounds. When Charlie earnestly explained that Lydia could help achieve their dream of a home and family by trying out an escort service he knew about in Cape Breton, her reluctance was short-lived. She was soon on a bus bound for Sydney, and by that night she was employed, on and off the premises of a ramshackle old house in the Ashby district of the city. Money transactions for dates in the house were handled by the proprietor, a short, heavy-set, and decidedly coarse-talking woman in her late forties who had a big, hulking boyfriend with a decidedly roving eye—which Lydia studiously ignored, looking forward to her out-calls for a break from the man’s uninvited attentions.

  For the first three weeks, Charlie called her every other day, and made arrangements for her to give her weekly earnings to a “friend” (another prostitute) travelling to and from Halifax every Friday. He was generous enough to let her keep fifty bucks for herself for the week’s cigarettes and food. The thousand dollars or more that Lydia was pulling in weekly—or at least the half of it that wasn’t pocketed by the madam—began to seem like an awful lot to be simply handing over to a stranger, especially when Charlie’s calls began to dwindle. When he stopped phoning entirely, she decided it was time to consider going into business for herself. There was only one problem: the proprietor’s boyfriend had coerced her into having sex with him on the threat that his lady friend would have her beaten when he told her Lydia had propositioned him. Too fearful to say no to the man, or even simply jump on a bus instead of returning “home” from a date, Lydia carried on with the complicated and unpleasant situation. At least she had a few regular customers who made the experience seem less horrible.

  One of them, a prominent local businessman who told Lydia that his punishing work schedule prevented him from having “regular relationships,” often invited her to spend the night at his well-appointed apartment, where they would sip fine wine, munch popcorn, and watch videos; often sex was not even part of the agenda. He even took her to watch the Cape Breton Oilers of the American Hockey League trounce their opponents at a game in the Centre Two Hundred—a major event on Sydney’s social calendar at that time. Lydia hatched a plan to get out of Sydney and she used her businessman friend to make it happen. She had met an actor from Montreal who was involved in the filming of a movie in Sydney and she wanted to go live with him; all she needed was money. She began to book dates with her favorite client and not tell the Madam. Lydia pocketed the money herself until the night she was caught. To her relief, the proprietor did not have her beaten, as the offensive boyfriend had threatened. Instead, she did exactly what Lydia wanted—ordered her to leave Sydney and never return.

  Unfortunately, Montreal turned out to be Lydia’s worst possible choice. It would have been a clean escape if she left The Game behind when she left Nova Scotia. Instead she turned to the yellow pages, found an escort service and went to work. The service she chose had a girl working there who had a Nova Scotia pimp. When he learned a Maritime girl was freelancing at the service he threatened to beat her severely if she refused to work for him. That would have been okay too but he wanted her to work back in Dartmouth at an escort service, not in Montreal. Not long after her return Charlie was back in the picture. A complicated tussle ensued over leaving fees, freelance status, and who owed what to whom; a third pimp arrived on the scene and anted up with his offer, and by the time it was over, Lydia Chiasson was the property of one Alfred (“Sizzle”) Monroe, probably the portliest crack-head—at three hundred pounds—ever to light up a pipe. Unlike other pimps, Sizzle had no objection to a girl using crack. He wasn’t really a player at all—content to run only one girl so he could feed his habit, and hers, if she liked. She did, at first, but the deadly drug took its toll on the already thin young woman, whose life became a nightmare of hours on the stroll, and hours at home with the seriously unbalanced Sizzle, whose hobbies of choice included playing games with his gun when he got high.

  One day, he decided it would be fun to watch his girl and a friend of hers play a little game of Russian roulette—and as Lydia willingly plunked herself into a beat-up old armchair and watched Sizzle pluck all but one bullet from the chambers of his revolver, it occurred to her for the first time that she was in serious trouble. It was an idle fleeting thought—there was a detached quality to her feelings, as if they could come and go without having a lasting effect on her. Her face blank, she took the gun, hearing in her head the voice of her father instructing her on the proper grip. Then, as Sizzle urged her on, she held it to her head and pulled the trigger. Nothing. “Again!” and he giggled wildly—and she complied; by the third—or was it the fourth go-around?—Lydia found herself wishing, with that same odd detachment, that the bullet would be in the next chamber. Suddenly Sizzle called a halt; he was bored, and decided Lydia’s friend—a drug addict who didn’t work as a prostitute—should play the next round. As inducement he offered a free chunk of crack, and she didn’t hesitate. Suddenly horrified, really horrified, and frightened, Lydia watched the deadly game unfold, her heartbeat so loud she thought it was the gun going off. Then she heard her friend laughing, and she was putting down the gun and reaching out her hand to claim her reward.

  The next morning, Lydia called the task force office and made arrangements to talk to one of the officers—Darrell Gaudet. In the end, it was her friend’s predicament more than her own that prompted the call, and as Gaudet listened to her spine-chilling story, he vowed to bring the pimp to justice. Tracking down Sizzle was as easy as finding Amber’s pimp Jay had been; investigators simply headed out to Bedford Provincial Court, where he was answering a drug charge. After Sizzle was released, pending a sentencing date on his conviction, Gaudet identified himself to the enormous man, who meekly accompanied him to an interview room for questioning, panting and exclaiming as he hauled his huge body down the aisle: “You Tass Force guys, you’re good, man. I knew you wuz gonna get me. I knew when I saw you here. ‘That guy’s Tass Force,’ I said, ‘Sizzle, the Tass Force is here to get you, man.’” So this was the Ru
ssian roulette fan who liked playing with teenagers’ lives! Half-pityingly, Gaudet listened to the man’s pathetic statement—the officer knew much more about The Game than Sizzle did—then placed him in custody. Charlie was not such an easy catch, hearing about Sizzle’s predicament he packed up his van and headed for Montreal, a move many of the smarter pimps were making. They picked Montreal because they wanted to avoid both the Halifax and Toronto task force officers. The unlucky crack-head-cum-pimp also got to go to Montreal. Sizzle was sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary and found himself housed just outside the city his pimping pals favored. Sizzle was telling inmates how the “tass force” had nailed him as he spent his days at the LeClaire Institute.

  By the end of March, Craig Botterill was preparing for what he considered the biggest test of Operation Hectic—preliminary hearings for the pimps swept up in Operation Hectic. The Nova Scotia cases were developing much more quickly than those of Greer and his players in Toronto. The prosecutor had been given a boost by the outcome of most of the bail hearings that had wound up the month before; none of the applications presented by the pimps’ attorneys had been accepted, easing Botterill’s fear of being forced to tell his young witnesses in Sullivan House that their tormentors were even temporarily free. He did feel sympathy for the parents of the young men accused, who had come forward to offer the sureties required to seek bail; they were often putting their homes on the line, and always their hearts, to offer support to sons he doubted would keep their promises to stay in Halifax until their trial if they were granted bail. It was for the best all around that it inevitably was not, he concluded.