Somebody's Daughter

by Jessome, Phonse;

  Pimps in Canada take in millions of dollars yearly. They use the money to fuel their love of high living: fancy cars, fine clothes, expensive jewellery, while they shunt their young workers from city to city, stroll to stroll, degradation to degradation to maintain their preferred standard of living.

  It was in the hands of the Scotians, the name given by police to the Metro Halifax-based pimping ring, that Annie Mae Wilson became a pawn in The Game. It was by the hand of one of its players, and only a peripheral one, that her involvement in it reached its tragic conclusion. Unlike the growing list of young prostitutes in Halifax, Toronto, Vancouver, and other cities, Annie Mae had rebuffed police efforts to take a new tack against the appalling trade in young people. That new approach had police targeting the pimping rings instead of their youthful victims.

  Anti-pimping task forces had been fighting the battle against juvenile prostitution since the mid-1980s in Toronto and 1988 in Vancouver. They were making steady gains on the city street as officers slowly persuaded more and more young prostitutes to testify against their pimps. The key to their growing success was a dramatic change of attitude, deriving from a new police recognition that they were in a war to save young lives as much as to jail those bent on their destruction. Each one of these youngsters was somebody’s daughter, and, often starved for nurturing family relationships, a young prostitute frequently turned to a task-force officer as a surrogate parent once she saw that the police were no longer intent on punishing her, but on rescuing her by putting her pimp out of commission.

  But if juvenile prostitution preys on girls who fall through the cracks, who come from broken homes, or who are easily influenced for other reasons, it is also a predator that gives up its victims with great reluctance. Some cling to the heartbreaking belief in their pimps as “family.” The vicious beatings those pimps often deliver are almost always accompanied by the reminder that the pimp/relative is only punishing a girl for her own good, however grossly inappropriate the lesson. Others turned their backs on the offer of help from the new police task forces in the belief that they can play The Game on their own terms, and that their lives will ultimately be better than their upbringing. That was Annie Mae Wilson’s belief until Bruno Cummings showed her The Game is no place for an independent-mined working girl.

  For police in Halifax, the death of a teenage prostitute could not have come at a worse time. Public outrage over juvenile prostitution was at an all-time high late in 1992, fuelled by media accounts of circumstances leading to the arrests of key members of the Scotians that summer. Graphic reports on the pimps’ abuse of several Nova Scotia teenagers who had been located and returned home during a police raid in Toronto led to the highly publicized establishment of the joint-force anti-prostitution task force. It was set up in Dartmouth less than two months after the raid. The unit’s office was only a few minutes by car from the apartment building where Bruno had killed Annie Mae, and it didn’t take long for word to reach that police unit. The news hit the task force hard; its investigators, from the Halifax, Dartmouth, and Bedford police forces and from the RCMP, had spent endless hours trying to persuade local prostitutes to cooperate with them. The death of Annie Mae Wilson could cost the officers their credibility in the street. They knew the prostitutes might think their pimps still had the upper hand. The task force could not help Annie Mae because she would not let the officers get close to her. Before her body was even taken to the morgue for an autopsy, police were planning a news conference in an effort to exercise damage control. The message would have to get out that Annie Mae had not been under the protection of the task force, and that her death was unrelated to the struggle between police and the Scotian pimping ring. Senior police officers called a quick news conference on the morning after Annie Mae was killed. They explained to local reporters that her death had nothing to do with the work being conducted by the task force and that it would not stand in the way of their mission to run the pimps out of town.

  Ironically, in her death Annie Mae did something she would never have done in her life. She provided a powerful boost to police in their attempt to successfully combat pimps who were running girls from Halifax-Dartmouth to Montreal, Toronto, and other major centres. Hearing that she had been killed, a seventeen-year-old girl she had befriended finally decided not only to stick to her decision to testify against her violently abusive former pimp, but to stay out of The Game for good.

  That Stacey Jackson even survived to make those choices was, in large part, because of her friend Annie Mae’s bravery. In August 1992, the two Nova Scotia teenagers were in Toronto, and in the middle of a real-life horror story that made even the worst experiences of their young lives seem inconsequential by comparison. Annie Mae stood numbly in a dingy downtown pool hall and listened as her pimp and Stacey’s planned to “get rid of Stacey,” a comment Annie Mae took to mean kill her young friend. The pool hall plan came the afternoon after Stacey had been beaten to within an inch of her life for planning to switch allegiance to another pimp. Her pleading calls home after that beating almost proved to be her undoing.

  Praying the pimps would not notice, Annie Mae slipped out of the pool hall and found a phone booth nearby; she called the apartment she and Stacey shared with their pimps and told her to get out right away, without stopping to pack. Unknown to her, Anti Pimping Task Force officers had responded to a series of desperate phone calls from Stacey’s mother and launched a sudden unexpected raid in Toronto that struck at the heart of the Scotians’ powerful and seemingly unassailable pimping machine. Within a few hours, it was all over: Stacey and two even younger girls from Nova Scotia were on a flight back to Halifax; five key members of the Scotian ring were sitting in a Toronto jail. Among them was twenty-seven-year-old Manning Greer of North Preston, Nova Scotia—the Big Man, as he was known to Scotian players and prostitutes, and to those involved in The Game on both sides of the law across Canada.

  That was only the beginning: less than three years after the raid, sixty Halifax-based pimps had been arrested through the efforts of the Halifax task force. All but three of them were jailed after convictions on charges ranging from living on the avails of prostitution to exercising control for the purpose of prostitution. The three men who walked away did so after the young girls they were accused of pimping refused to testify against them in court. Those who did not walk out of court were sent to federal prisons for terms ranging from two to seven years. Less than three years after the raid, Halifax, whose Scotians a Toronto police officer once described as one of Canada’s most brutal pimping rings, was all but rid of at least the menace of juvenile prostitution. Officers patrolling the city’s main stroll on Hollis Street rarely saw an underage girl there, nor were they turning up in other major centres.

  In the fall of 1992, there were more than a hundred Nova Scotia teenagers selling sex on the streets across Canada and enduring the cruelties of their pimps. More than half of these young people responded, in some way, to task force members’ efforts to get them off the streets and their pimps behind bars. Not all of the girls who sought help from the task force remained free of The Game, but many did. In the beginning the girls shared the belief held by Annie Mae—that police were not to be trusted. That gradually changed as the task force officers got to know the girls, chatting with them on Hollis Street and north-end strolls, sympathizing with their plight over coffee (or their preferred snack, a burger and fries), and finally offering them protection in exchange for their agreement to testify against pimps who had in some cases been brutalizing them for years. The assistance ranged from witness relocation programs—the girls could opt to change their identities and start new lives in a different city—to temporary accommodation in a safe house set up on the grounds of the Nova Scotia Hospital, located in Dartmouth just up the road from the apartment where Annie Mae died. The facility, which opened near the end of 1992, housed prostitutes whose decision to testify against their former pimps—“sign” on them was the phrase pimps used—made them
vulnerable to the pimps who were still at large and were less than thrilled with these “betrayals” of their fellow players. Unlike youth facilities in the Halifax area, the safe house had no age restrictions. A seventeen-year-old, by any definition a heartbreakingly young victim of The Game, was considered too old for the protective custody of a juvenile training facility; yet such a girl, as well as much older women, desperately needed the security of a restricted environment. It was the age restrictions in many existing juvenile facilities that was in large part responsible for the establishment of the Dartmouth safe house.

  The Sullivan House—the name given the safe house—welcomed a girl like Stacey Jackson who was too old to be accepted at the youth training school in Truro where other girls were sent: when the safe house opened its doors, she was the first to enter them.

  Stacey hadn’t been doing well in the months following her return from Toronto. She had agreed to participate in the task force program and sign on her abusive pimp, but her early experiences in rejoining the “straight” world, as players refer to any social structure other than prostitution, had been disillusioning. Tense, difficult weeks in relatives’ homes; a brief and disastrous stint at school; sojourns in a women’s shelter and a psychiatric unit, Stacey rebelled in all these environments, running away from the shelter and even considering a return to the streets. The safe house was a vast improvement, offering the reassuring and helpful companionship of girls and women who understood where she was coming from and shared her fundamental desire to make sure she wasn’t going back. There were more regular visits with her task-force case officer, John Elliott, a Mountie who had been part of a 1990 investigation of the pimping problem in the Halifax area and who was deeply committed to helping its victims. Stacey had been living outside Halifax before moving to the safe house, and hadn’t met as frequently with Elliott as she would have liked. She saw him as a father figure, even telling him so on their rare visits earlier in the fall. John Elliott had not even been the case officer assigned to Stacey Jackson; he was handed the file after it became clear she had quickly developed a strong bond with him.

  The change that had come to Stacey’s life in the more tolerable confines of the safe house made her days just a little less bleak, the possibilities for a real future just a little more credible. Despite that, she hadn’t entirely closed the door on her old life when she stepped through the huge wooden door of the safe house. Some days, reminiscing with other prostitutes about street life, she succumbed to nostalgia, preferring to recall the closeness of her relationship with other girls than to remind herself of the man who had whipped both her legs into a solid mass of bloodied flesh. It did not help her resolve to put him behind bars when she received a death threat from one of his relatives, although police quickly stepped in, arresting and charging the pimp’s nephew, whose voice she had recognized during the telephone conversation in which the threat was delivered.

  In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Stacey found herself spending more and more time wishing she was back on the street with Annie Mae. They hadn’t seen each other since Toronto. Stacey knew her friend had refused to get involved with the task force and was still working the streets, despite all that had happened. She had begun to believe it hadn’t really been that bad, that maybe if they got together, they could somehow make The Game work for them. She was filled with a fear that her pimp had been right. There was nothing for her in the straight world; her real place was with her new family. The beating he had given her was severe but Stacey remembered how her real father had physically abused her mother for years, before she left him. She also remembered it was her father who had helped Stacey get her own place after the sixteen-year-old gave birth to a son, conceived in the dying days of her relationship with her childhood sweetheart. Debbie Jackson, now Debbie Howard, was happily remarried and obviously concerned about her daughter’s welfare, but Stacey and her mother were like gas and fire—a very volatile mix. Stacey had been able to forgive her father for the abuse he dished out against her mother. When Debbie finally decided to end her marriage and walk away, Stacey and her younger brother chose to stay with their dad rather than give up the stability and friendships his home provided. If she could forgive her father maybe she should give that same chance to her pimp. Stacey had begun to believe all of her problems were of her own making and not the fault of the men she had been involved with. The custody of her own son was apparently going to his father’s family. What difference did it make if she returned to the streets? That was probably where she belonged, she thought, and as for the violence, well, it probably would not have happened if she had not broken the rules.

  Stacey was in the common room of the safe house, so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t hear John Elliott approach; he was suddenly there, looking very serious. “Why don’t we go for a drive and talk, Stacey?” he suggested. “I’ve already signed you out at the desk.” She always looked forward to their conversations, but he seemed upset, his compact, muscular body held rigid as they walked towards the car. They sat in silence as the car pulled out of the hospital grounds, and then he told her. There would be no reunion with Annie Mae.

  Elliott was prepared for the angry tears, the shock, the string of obscenities, and finally the sullen silence of the emotionally devastated teenager. What he didn’t expect was the vehement fury against all pimps that poured out of her when she began to speak again. He knew Stacey would always detest the man who killed Annie Mae, but because she had been hinting to him so strongly that she could be back on the stroll soon, he anticipated a defensive reaction: not all pimps are alike; it’s possible to beat the odds, anything to justify going back to the streets despite what happened to Annie Mae. All Stacey could think about was how her friend had always been there for her, even when it meant jeopardizing her own life, back in that summer of horror they had experienced. Now she was dead, and it was with a sudden jolt of comprehension that Stacey realized it could as easily have been her, or any of the dozens of other teenagers she had met in her brief but hellish career as a prostitute. They had all been brutalized, regularly and often without provocation; it was a wonder any of them were still alive. A very powerful memory she had washed away in her self doubt sprang to the front of Stacey’s mind—it was her, lying on a bed stained with her own blood, pleading in agony to be allowed to die.

  Stacey Jackson made a commitment to herself and to John Elliott in that car. She swore she would never again work the streets and she vowed to get even with the pimps who had very nearly ended her life and who had now taken away her closest friend. John Elliott sat quietly in the car; he was happy to have Stacey back on side but he knew her moods could swing and he could lose her again.

  A happy ending, or was it? For Stacey Jackson, and for many other Nova Scotia teenagers, it certainly seemed to be. Stacey did testify against her former pimp, Michael (“Smit”) Sears, who was sentenced in 1993 to six years in prison. She did leave The Game and rejoin that straight world. Today Stacey derives great satisfaction from talking to high school students about her experiences. She has seen how young people readily accept a lesson learned in the school of real life. When Stacey visits a school she does not see that glassy eyed expression of teenage boredom that often greets a guest lecturer offering advice—even if that advice is something the teens really need.

  Stacey paid dearly for her involvement in the deadly game. She lost custody of her son to his father’s family. She also lost her home after realizing she could not stay in Halifax, as she had wished. For two years after her court appearance, she insisted on living in a small north-end apartment and maintaining her friendships with the young women she had met as a prostitute but who, unlike her, had been unable to break free. Perhaps she hoped to steer them away from The Game; certainly she felt they deserved at least her support and sympathy, but in the end she yielded to pressure from her family and from police. In early 1996, as the date for Smit’s possible parole neared, Stacey Jackson moved to another part of Canada. Th
at the location, like her name, must remain unknown is another painful consequence of her experience with the world of violent crime.

  Yet Stacey Jackson was one of the lucky ones. Other young prostitutes, like her friend Annie Mae Wilson, had paid the ultimate price. Still others stopped being juvenile prostitutes only because they turned eighteen. The Game is still being played on the streets of Halifax, although now the rules have changed. The task force has all but disappeared; before it fell victim to the budget cutter’s knife it sent a ringing message to the pimps who still ply their trade in Halifax. The brutal treatment of prostitutes, whatever their age, is not to be tolerated. Tough new federal anti-pimping legislation, carrying much longer prison sentences for pimps who prey on juveniles, has enhanced the message. Violence had been touted as the key to a pimp’s success. Today it is seen as a weakness. The Game is played for money and the players adjust to rule changes quickly. If beating girls means going to jail, then beating girls is not a smart man’s way to play. One jailed pimp recently joked about this trend, saying his colleagues now had to buy ice-cream cones for their girls to keep them happy. That change in attitude may have made life safer for the young girls in Halifax it has not stopped the brutality elsewhere. The pimps know young girls are more profitable and they are not yet willing to give up that easy money. Police in Montreal and Toronto still report serious problems of violence against underage prostitutes, and task force members still point to the east coast as the source of that violence. The major change: the victims now tend to come from northern Ontario rather than Nova Scotia.