Somebody's Daughter

by Jessome, Phonse;

  The freedom Teri and Taunya had enjoyed was short-lived, however; Greer phoned four days after leaving Toronto and told Taunya she and Teri were to join their pimps the next day. Gizelle had flown out the day before, and Lori was staying in Montreal with her pimp. Lori worked for a player who rarely went to Toronto, claiming he didn’t like the smell of that city. When they said good bye the morning before Taunya and Teri left it was their last good bye. Years later Taunya remembered, “Lori was pretty cool about it. She wanted to come but was okay with staying. As far as I know she’s still working there. I haven’t seen her since.”

  The trip to Toronto had been arranged by Greer. The Big Man was as familiar with flight schedules as a commuter would be with a bus schedule: Taunya and Teri were to show up at the airport at 2 P.M., and he would be waiting for them when the flight arrived in Toronto. He had one other bit of information for her just before he hung up: “If you don’t have that tattoo changed yet, I’ll have to kill you when you get here.”

  Taunya hung up and told Teri she was going to a tattoo parlor. There, she had Sweet Lou’s name covered in a spiraling red ribbon, on which the artist inscribed “Big Man’s Woman.” It would still be bandaged when she arrived in Toronto, but Taunya knew it would satisfy Greer. She had forgotten her intention never again to have a pimp’s name cut into her flesh.

  Part Four: From the Brink of Death

  In the spring of 1992, Detective Dave Perry of the Metro Toronto Police Force was honing in on the Scotians with increasing intensity. As a member of the Toronto Juvenile Task Force since its inception in the mid 1980s, Perry was deeply committed to tracking down and bringing to justice the pimps who were luring, and in some cases, forcing, juveniles into prostitution. Like the other officers on the new police unit, Perry learned early how violent the sex trade really was. Within months of its formation members of the Juvenile Task Force had interviewed countless young girls whose horror stories were strikingly similar. The girls told Perry and his fellow officers of being wined and dined and promised love only to be turned out into the streets and savagely beaten if they tried to break away. More than one teenage girl came to Perry for help after being whipped or burned; some had even been thrown from moving cars. Perry learned that life on the street was no life at all; it was a prelude to an early violent death. By 1989, when he first became aware of the growing presence of the Scotians, and of Manning Greer, on the streets of downtown Toronto, Perry and his task force colleagues were already experiencing some success in persuading girls to turn away from The Game—and turn on the men who tormented and exploited them. That success was slow in coming but by that time the JTF—as the girls on the street called the task force—had a well-earned reputation. The JTF was the only real way off the street. That reputation was earned one case at a time. Word spread quickly and quietly on Toronto’s prostitution strolls. Girls who said they were through with The Game and were ready to talk to the special task force disappeared from the street. Quite often their pimps disappeared soon after, having been arrested by JTF officers. The Toronto force adopted the same philosophy used in Vancouver where the Pimp Program was launched in 1988. The philosophy was simple, but differed dramatically from that adopted by the morality squads that policed prostitution strolls. The JTF officers did not consider prostitutes criminals. They were the victims of crime and the officers set out to help them, not arrest them. That simple philosophy earned JTF members the respect, and in some cases outright admiration, of the young girls they were trying to save.

  Perry knew the task force had a long way to go before he could confidently say his city was rid of the menace that was destroying young lives; and he was particularly determined to target the violent Nova Scotians, who ignored the law with an arrogance that became a point of particular frustration. These men confidently conducted their dirty business in the knowledge that the girls they controlled would never betray them; Greer’s family operated on the principle that the police sought out prostitutes, not pimps—and the prostitutes who worked for them had been so horrendously abused, physically and psychologically, that they would never rat on their overlords.

  For a while, this was true. The work of the Toronto and Vancouver task forces were affecting the approach of the justice system to juvenile prostitution, and the attitudes of the young people being drawn into this netherworld. The Vancouver experience shows clearly how this change was taking hold. From 1981 to 1987 Vancouver police laid only 12 pimping related charges against only a handful of pimps. In 1989, a year after the Pimp Program kicked into high gear, 41 people were charged with a total of 104 pimping offenses. The days of free reign for pimps were coming to an end.

  Dave Perry first learned of Manning Greer from a young Toronto prostitute he had befriended. The girl was not ready to leave The Game but she had become a valuable source of information for the officer. The girl told him about the Nova Scotia pimps and how they treated their girls, beating them for little or no reason. Perry did not like the sound of that and he decided these were the pimps he would target. The goal was admirable but proved difficult to achieve. It had been more than three years since he heard that first story of wanton abuse and he had heard many since, but he had yet to convince a girl working for the Scotians to give him a statement that would help put their pimp behind bars. By 1992 Perry began to believe his luck would change. He had a new advantage in his relationship with Constable Brad Sullivan in Halifax. The relationship had begun two years earlier and Perry had still not nailed one Nova Scotia pimp, but, like Sullivan, Dave Perry was stubborn and patient. He knew having a set of trained eyes in the Scotians own backyard would pay dividends eventually.

  Perry was especially concerned about the scope of the Scotians’ influence on prostitution in Toronto, and stepped up his daily conversations with the prostitutes whose trust he had earned after years of conversations over coffee and a smoke in downtown donut shops. By the beginning of the 1990s, these contacts were all saying the same thing: Nova Scotian pimps and Nova Scotian girls, most of them very young, pretty much owned the heart of the Toronto trade. Other players had moved to smaller strolls to avoid the Greer family’s deadly serious approach to The Game. In short, what Perry was hearing, with alarming frequency, was that the Big Man and his family represented the most violent and dangerous pimping machine ever seen on the streets of Toronto. In a small way Dave Perry may have been responsible for the sudden strength of the Scotians on the Toronto strolls. The JTF had been successful in jailing some of Toronto’s most vicious pimps; the very men who may have been tough enough to stop Manning Greer from taking over the streets of their city were in prison and could do nothing about his sudden rise to power.

  As he observed the Big Man’s ruthlessness and kept close touch with officers in Montreal and Halifax, Perry continued to chip away at the stubborn problem of juvenile prostitution, one pimp at a time. Early in 1992, he heard a remark from a pimp that gave him some hope for the task force’s future. The man, whom Perry had arrested years before, was out of prison and attending a colleague’s trial in Toronto provincial court. During a break, the detective chided him for returning to pimping. “Yeah, man, I’m back in The Game—but not here,” the player corrected him. “I’m living out west now. Things are too tough around here with JTF all over my ass all the time.” The pimp who made that comment was not part of the apparently fearless—and undoubtedly frightening—group of Maritimers who were muscling old-timers like this transplanted local off their turf. Still, his attitude encouraged Perry: if the task force could gain enough knowledge about the Scotians and their activities in the endless Toronto-Montreal-Halifax loop they traveled, with dozens of brutalized teenage girls in tow, they could make the transition from surveillance to arrest. The arrest had not yet come for several reasons; chief among them was a lack of luck. Perry knew Manning Greer was a criminal and knew he ran girls in Toronto. Greer did not live in Toronto though, and Perry often learned of his presence after he had come and gone. Without finding
a girl to make a statement against him, Perry had to catch Greer in the act and that was not going to happen. Street sources were pivotal to a police investigation, but a statement made by an informant will not stand up in court. Dave Perry had nothing more than second-hand information and rumor. Had Manning Greer made Toronto his base of operations Perry believed he would have been in jail by now. Perry also blamed senior police officers in Halifax. Until they accepted Brad Sullivan’s proposal and began a crack-down there, young pimps would continue to learn the trade on Hollis Street and then ply it in his city. Perry resented that but knew he was powerless to change it.

  Month by month, Perry tracked Manning Greer and his cohorts, staying in close touch with Halifax’s Brad Sullivan. That information was valuable, but it too was piecemeal. It was important to know how often the Scotians moved from city to city and to get a sense of how big their operation was, but it was not enough to make an arrest. Perry had derived a little satisfaction from a story he picked up early in the summer when he asked a girl about the activities of the Scotians. The girl told him Manning Greer had been beaten outside a Montreal club and was now in a turf war with some Jamaican pimps. Maybe the Jamaicans could do what the police could not, get Greer out of The Game. As summer gripped Toronto in a muggy haze, the street trade reached fever pitch; more girls from the east coast appeared on the steamy Church Street stroll—and Dave Perry watched and waited for his chance to tackle the Big Man, and waited for that thing all police officers long for—a little luck.

  That luck came on September 15 when Perry got a call from Sullivan. The Halifax police officer had received a call from a woman named Debbie Howard—a frantic call, he said; there was a seventeen-year-old daughter who’d gone missing, and maybe she was in Toronto, and possibly she had become involved in prostitution. All very speculative, Sullivan said, but this woman sounded genuinely frightened. She talked about seeing marks on her daughter’s neck that looked like the result of an assault, and she described the defiant girl’s determination to leave for Toronto with her new friend, whom Mrs. Howard felt certain was a prostitute. The teenager had been away for just over a week.

  “Do you think it’s the Scotians she’s gotten mixed up with?” asked Sullivan. “Anyone new on the street that you know of?”

  “No, but it’s very possible,” Perry said.

  “Well, I don’t even know if she’s in The Game for sure—her mom gave me a picture, and she doesn’t look familiar. I’ll try and circulate it on Hollis, see if any of the girls recognize her.”

  “Why don’t you send me a copy over the wire,” Perry said. “We’ll try to keep an eye out for her.” He paused for a moment.

  “Dave?”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking—”

  “What?”

  “Well, if it is the Scotians she’s involved with, you know they’re getting pretty spooked with all this turf-war stuff—the New York players comin’ in here as well as Montreal, maybe—”

  “Which means their girls take the brunt of it.”

  “Right, and they’re not gentle types at the best of times,” Perry said. “But maybe we can get to her—and maybe get to them, too.”

  “Gotta be one of these girls who just won’t take it anymore, decides to open up and nail them.”

  “I sure hope so, for your runaway’s sake. Or could be she’ll lead us to them. What was her name again?”

  “Stacey Jackson.”

  “Jackson?”

  “Yeah, the parents are divorced,” said Sullivan. “Tough background, though the mother seems truly concerned. She’ been there—I mean, not on the street, but she said she could recognize abuse when she saw it. Her ex, I guess.”

  “Same old story.”

  It was like old home week in Toronto that September in 1992. Stacey Jackson and Annie Mae Wilson arrived from Halifax on the sixth, and after an uneventful night on Church Street, returned to the apartment Smit and Peanut shared in the neighborhood around Maple Leaf Gardens in downtown Toronto. A few days later, the Montreal contingent arrived: Taunya Terriault and Teri MacDonald were told to change into their work clothes in the back of the rental van driven by Manning Greer. It was the middle of the afternoon and Taunya knew Greer wasn’t about to take her to the stroll but she complied. She did not want to start a fight. Greer was behaving oddly, he seemed agitated and she knew that could mean trouble for her. The Big Man had obscured several of the windows with green plastic garbage bags; so no one could see who was inside, he was definitely on edge, even irritable with his cousins Eddy and Slugger. The girls knew better than to pry; instead, after they had checked into the downtown hotel, Taunya and Teri took a deck of cards and started a game. “I’ve got things to do,” Greer said, rather mysteriously. “You be ready to go to work in a couple of hours.” Taunya was ready to go anyway, he had told her to dress in the van, but she didn’t bother to point that out.

  What the girls didn’t know was that all the intrigue—the sudden call to Toronto, the covered van windows—stemmed from the Big Man’s continuing preoccupation with the Jamaican pimps from New York and their encroachment on Scotian territory. Greer was certain that High T., Sweet Lou, and the other American players who had been giving him trouble in Montreal had plans to make a move on his Toronto turf as well. That was why he, Eddy, and Slugger had made the trip to Ontario—they could check on their stroll and let their aggressive, intimidating presence be felt. At the same time, the Big Man wanted to keep a close watch on the family’s main girls (and the new acquisition), so he wouldn’t be humiliated again as he had when Taunya took up with Sweet Low, or, more recently, when Lynn Buchanan disappeared—into the arms of one of the Jamaicans, Greer was certain. While Taunya and Teri played cards Manning Greer cruised around Toronto considering his options. He went to the apartment where Peanut and Smit were staying and told them to keep an eye out for any sign of Lynn or any sign of Sweet Lou and his crowd.

  Three friends work the Scotian stroll in Toronto. [Print from ATV video tape]

  Slugger, with Gizelle in tow, arrived at the hotel in the early evening to pick up Teri and Taunya. Teri’s pimp dropped the three girls off on Church Street. Teri immediately began waving to an attractive young woman who was just returning from a fast-food joint with a couple of cups of pop: “Look, it’s Annie Mae!” she exclaimed. “She’s from Halifax too; let’s check out how she’s doing.” They soon met Stacey, who had just returned to the stroll from a date and gratefully accepted the cold drink, chatting happily with her compatriots.

  From then on, the four Nova Scotia girls and the shy young Quebecois were inseparable—at least, while on the stroll, since their opportunities to socialize were severely limited. A day off was almost unheard of, and the girls weren’t encouraged to visit each other at their pimps’ apartments or hotels. By the weekend of the fourteenth, three more Halifax girls joined the east coast clique—two of them, Amber Borowski and Sheri Fagan, had served the Scotians for three years, the last two of those spent working together. Although the eighteen-year-olds functioned as a team, the two young women differed in many ways. Amber, the single mother of a daughter six months old, had a hefty, muscular physique; while her partner was so thin and frail looking that she seemed no more than a child. Amber and Sheri had been on the street long enough and earned enough for the family that they were allowed to work unsupervised, traveling between Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto; they had been on their way to Niagara Falls to catch the last of the tourist season when the Big Man told them to come to Toronto for a day or two to make some fast cash for him. The girls’ busy traveling schedule required special arrangements—their earnings were deposited in the Big Man’s bank account through automated teller machines; and then there was child care to consider, not a problem because the family provided baby-sitting for their teenage mothers, usually using bubble-gummers, for the “service.” If Amber had been able to consider the kind of life her child was embarking upon, she might have noted a sad parallel with her own. At
thirteen, after being shunted from group home to group home, she briefly found stability with devoted foster parents, Frank and Gloria Richardson, but by fifteen the quiet life in Dartmouth had become tedious for Amber. She fell in with a crowd connected to The Game and quickly joined in, opting for the streets when the Richardsons gave her a choice between their home and life as a prostitute. Though Amber stayed in touch with her foster parents, she didn’t return home.

  The decision to become a full-time prostitute and leave her foster parents behind was the first major mistake Amber made in her life; the second was on that first night back in Toronto. Amber was chatting with Annie Mae when a large white car slowed at the curb. She walked over and leaned into the window to see what the driver was shopping for. At first her street sense told her to back away, there were two men, not one, in the big car. She relaxed when the man on the passenger side announced, “We’re looking for a couple of girls who know how to party.” Two guys, two girls, that wasn’t unusual, so Amber motioned for Sheri to join her at the curb. The two men sized them up and appeared to be pleased with the contrast offered by the heavy set Amber and her delicately thin companion. “Jump in.” Before opening the rear door of the car Amber wanted to make sure the men knew what they were buying. “Two of us means two hundred dollars an hour.” She looked at the passenger who smiled, “No problem, get in.”

  Headed for work in Toronto. [Print from ATV video tape]

  The two men drove to a strip mall just north of the city and on the way announced they were real estate agents who had just closed a major deal. It took almost thirty minutes to get to the mall and Amber smiled in the back seat as she calculated the drive to and from this party would cost these men two hundred dollars and so far nothing had happened. The “party” the men talked about was no party at all, at least there was no crowd celebrating the “big deal” the men bragged about. Inside the office the realtors let the girls know what they wanted and it wasn’t sex. They opened a brown paper bag and spilled its contents on a desk. It was a cluster of tiny white rocks of crack cocaine. The girls watched as one of the men took the ink refill from a pen and placed the hollowed out tip over the flame of a disposable lighter. He inserted the heated pen into the side of a small plastic shampoo bottle and placed some tin foil over the top. The foil had small holes in it and the gerry rigged crack pipe was ready. Amber looked at Sheri and shrugged, why not? The girls would never have smoked crack if another girl was present but they trusted each other and had even developed the habit of skimming a little money from the Big man when they were on the road. A party tax they called it. The four spent a night smoking crack and drinking tequila, the drug giving them a high like neither had ever experienced. In the morning the men paid them for the time spent partying and gave them cab fare to return to their hotel.