It wouldn’t be the last time the task force members heard of the Nova Scotia players’ use of the wire whip that the girls described as a “pimp stick.” They also learned submersion was a common form of abuse. An errant prostitute was forced into a full bathtub and her head held underwater until her tormentor felt she was certain she would suffocate. The punishments often seemed completely unprovoked—some pimps would whip a girl because they thought she might be talking to another pimp, or because they didn’t like the way she answered when she was called. The beatings often took place in front of other girls—just as Manning Greer had alternately terrorized Taunya, Teri, and Gizelle—leaving them all feeling brutalized, demoralized, and completely powerless. Such subservience was the purpose of the torture: a passive girl tends not to struggle against her servitude in The Game. As they listened in shock, and with growing determination to put an end to such practices, the officers began to believe that many of these men had adopted the practice of beating prostitutes for fun, or to have something to tell their cohorts.
One teenager told investigators about an experience that seemed to support that theory. Her pimp had taken her to a card game, along with several other prostitutes enjoying a rare night off; the girls were drinking and joking, and the pimps were having a good time too. “I had a bit too much to drink, so he told me I couldn’t have any more; well, I just laughed at him and said he was making me ‘blue mad’—that’s something I said all the time, not an insult or anything.” She drew a deep breath and sipped at the Coke one of the officers had brought her. “But I could see he didn’t like it, because he said we were leaving.” Before returning to his apartment, the pimp stopped to pick something up at a pharmacy; when they got home, she found out what it was. “So he fills the tub and adds what he bought at the store—a bottle of blue dye. Then he tells me to get in, right up to my neck so I’m all covered with this tuff, from head to toe. After that I have to get into a bathing suit, and put my coat over it because we’re going back to the party.” There, he ordered her to remove her coat and model for the other pimps: “She’s real ‘blue mad’ now!” His buddies hooted and hollered, but the other prostitutes weren’t impressed, not only because he’d punished her for no reason, but also because he’d totally outsmarted himself. That girl would have to wear slacks on the stroll, instead of a miniskirt—and she’d be in long sleeves, too, until the dye faded—which meant she’d be pulling in a lot less cash for her pimp. “That made it a little easier to take,” she told the officers—but they surmised, with growing awareness of the methods of these players, that when the girl did come home with less money than usual, her pimp put the blame on her and probably came up with another gruesome punishment.
Blue jeans on the stroll. [Print from ATV video tape]
A critical aspect of the task force’s approach involved befriending the girls whose trust the investigators earned, and providing support to them whenever they called. Some of them simply wanted a quick chat to break up the day or relieve an unpleasant night, while others were seeking a serious discussion of the reasons for staying away from The Game. It wasn’t just phone calls, either. A number of team members were driving out to the Truro Training School for girls on an almost daily basis. This facility had quickly become a holding area for the youngest prostitutes caught up in Operation Hectic, and a safe haven for two of the teenagers whose rescue in Toronto had launched Operation Hectic—Taunya and Teri. Stacey, at seventeen, was too old for the facility and was still living with her family when the task force got its start.
It was on one of Craig Botterill’s regular visits to Truro, this time to talk to Taunya, Teri, and another girl, that the prosecutor’s last lingering doubts about the veracity of his young witnesses’ horror stories faded away entirely. Botterill picked the girls up at the training centre and took them to a local steakhouse for lunch; during the meal, face to face for the first time with the heartbreaking youth of the individuals behind the graphic words of their sworn statements, he realized with a rush of sorrow and outrage that the task force was truly dealing with children. The girls acted silly and giddy in the restaurant, three energetic and slightly unruly daughters with an indulgent dad. He began to wonder if he should be considering child abuse charges instead of pimping. That night he talked with his wife about the issue, and both felt a surge of anger at the renewed awareness that fully grown men were preying on youngsters because other fully grown men were willing to pay a lot of money to have sex with them. Craig Botterill felt a new resolve to make the justice system work for girls who had been ignored by society for so long.
What Botterill and the other investigators didn’t know was that a serious problem was beginning to develop at the school they were visiting in Truro. Taunya, Teri, and some of the other girls held fast to their decision to stay away from The Game. For them, the institution, with its rules and mandatory training programs, provided a positive experience that also allowed them leisure time in the evenings and on weekends. Others used the freedom to return to Hollis Street for a couple of nights’ work and some ready cash; they’d return to Truro fairly bursting with tales of pimps and dates that fascinated some of their schoolmates—like Keri Sherwood, a sixteen-year-old who had never been involved in prostitution. Keri was at the Truro school because of emotional problems: a foster child, she had been sexually abused by a youth at her foster home. Although she hadn’t shared the experience with her counselors, she had described it extensively in her diary. Keri was impressed with the apparent independence of the young prostitutes, and on Sunday nights she would eagerly await their return—with new stories of money, sexual aberrations, and the adrenaline rush of life on the street. She soon decided to give prostitution a try. Taunya got wise to what was going on and tried to talk Keri out of her plan, but she could see the girl’s quiet demeanor—and a confidence problem that bordered on self-hatred—made her a prime target for the pimps.
A few weeks after her first foray onto the Hollis stroll, Keri failed to return to Truro; she had been taken to Montreal by her pimp, Eric Conrad, who had spotted her freelancing downtown with some of her school friends, and claimed her as “his” girl. Actually, he had accosted her while she was making a phone call, ordering her into his shiny red sports car and informing her sternly that she owned him money for working on a corner he considered his exclusive property. The painfully introverted teenager just sat there silently, unresisting. A perfect situation for Eric, who much preferred the sound of his own voice. This was just the right girl to take on the road: Eric Conrad didn’t like to stay in one place longer than a couple of weeks, and the prostitute he was running tended to be a chatterbox, anyway. Before leaving he handed his current girl over to another pimp. He decided to waive the usual leaving fee, not as a favor to the pimp but because he simply wanted to be rid of her. Just as she’d obeyed his command to get in the car, Keri quietly accepted Eric’s announcement that they were going to Montreal. Inside, as recorded in the secret pages of her journal, Keri Sherwood was filled with excitement at Eric’s descriptions of the places and people they would see, in Montreal and other cities. The budding writer within her thrilled to the opportunity for new material, but the naive adolescent could not know that life-as-work only goes so far; the journey on which Keri was embarking would take her way over the line, into an inexpressible nightmare.
Keri and Eric spent the night at his cousin’s apartment in Dartmouth, and by noon the following day, she was on an airplane for the first time in her life. In Montreal, Eric rented a large car—the nicest Keri had ever been in—and checked them into a big, sparkling-clean hotel room. While she sat at a small writing table near the window, gazing out past the parking lot into the hot blue sky, her man phoned room service and ordered lunch. That night, her work began—and it was the beginning of the end of the daydream. The other girls working the Scotian stroll saw quickly that Keri wouldn’t offer serious competition; she was young and pretty, but terribly passive, waiting for clients to approach
her rather than accost them with the boldness she would need to develop if she was going to make enough money to satisfy her man. “You’re not gonna get a date sittin’ in Harvey’s with your head down,” one of the other girls succinctly put it.
At first, Eric didn’t seem perturbed by his new girl’s measly take. It was party time—2 A.M., and back at the hotel, a few other pimps and their girls were waiting for them. Eric and the other guys shared a few lines of pure coke, ostentatiously using a rolled fifty dollar bill for the purpose. The girls, as usual, were not invited to participate, and had to content themselves with pizza and beer. The routine continued for several nights before Eric began to get suspicious about the amount of money Keri was making; pretty and slim as she was, she ought to have been pulling in double the $400 she was averaging. First he accused her of withholding “his” money, and then he berated her for laziness. How was he supposed to pay for all these goodies if she was dragging her sorry ass around like an old nag put out to pasture? She’d just have to work longer hours. Eric’s decision meant Keri had to go to the stroll in the middle of the afternoon. The move did nothing to improve her technique, if anything it made her even more reluctant to hustle. At night she assumed every man coming to the restaurant or the curb was looking for sex. In the daylight there were too many people around and she didn’t know who to approach. She resorted to her night time habit of waiting for someone to approach her. After spending ten hours on the stroll, Keri only managed to bring in $600. The infuriated pimp turned on her, whacking her repeatedly in the head, then ordered her to spend the rest of the night on the bathroom floor. A few more nights of this, and Keri began forcing herself to hustle more actively; she hated what she was doing, but fear of Eric triumphed over her reluctance. Besides, the loathing she felt about herself was familiar territory.
Within two weeks, the “couple” was on the road again—Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, and finally Vancouver—another city, another stroll, another predawn party; Keri was amazed at the number of people Eric knew across the country, and it never occurred to her that anyone offering free coke and lots of drinks would find instant friends without too much trouble. It also didn’t occur to her that she was paying the freight on this cross-Canada party. She even started to enjoy the late-night “fun,” although in the morning, a profound depression would overcome the confused teenager; the only relief was her writing, and luckily Eric found all the poetry stuff more of a joke than a possible threat to him. He let her continue to keep her journal.
Before long, Eric’s restlessness struck again, and Keri soon found herself back on the Hollis stroll, where her shy, immature appearance caught the attention of the task force’s Mitch Ginn. The constable called her over and introduced himself, then asked her to get in the car so they could talk; as usual, she obeyed without hesitation. When Ginn asked who her man was, she refused to answer—Eric had told her countless times never, ever, to identify him to police. Ginn backed off, but he did wonder aloud whether she might be willing to go with him to Dartmouth to take part in a program the task force had set up for prostitutes; to this Keri agreed. Task force officers had started to keep a photo log of girls working on Hollis, as a way of monitoring their numbers and identifying new arrivals—and to initiate a before-and-after record, essential for Botterill’s eventual court corroboration, of any abuse their pimps might subject them to. After the photo was taken, Ginn asked Keri if she would be willing to spend the night at a new, safe place that had been opened to house some of the participants in the program. Then they could talk. That was Ginn’s plan when he dropped her off for a night at the safe house. Unfortunately, Keri was long gone by the time Ginn arrived the following morning. She had called Eric, and although she assured him she had told the police nothing, he decided to get her out of Halifax in case they tried again. He came to pick her up shortly after 9 A.M., and by early afternoon they were on a flight to Montreal. It would be more than two years before anyone in Halifax heard news of Keri Sherwood again.
The safe house that Keri never had a chance to truly take advantage of was the task force’s response to a growing awareness that its increasing number of potential witnesses were in urgent need of support services. Officers had spent weeks observing pimps and gathering evidence to lay charges against them, but by late fall, the team was spending much of its time cultivating ongoing relationships—with the girls who could eventually testify against them. As more and more teenagers expressed an interest in breaking free of violent pimps, investigators found these girls had nowhere to go where they could avoid the street life and find the kind of counseling and support they needed.
The lack of support services was clear to Brad Sullivan and John Elliott as they continued to try to work with Stacey Jackson, who continued the aggressive stance to which she’d grown accustomed on the street. She was angry about being in Halifax, she was angry that Michael wasn’t coming back to live with her right away, she was angry about almost everything. When Debbie Howard decided to move her daughter to a relative’s home in another part of the province, she began refusing to sleep at night, preferring to sit up until dawn and sleep all day. She threatened to return to Toronto and the street life whenever she felt she wasn’t getting what she wanted. Her deeply concerned relatives worked in shifts to make sure someone was around to talk to her at any time, but Stacey, far from appreciating this solicitude, felt trapped, and judged, by her “square” family. Not to mention that cop, the same one who’d been bugging her at the airport. Now here he was again in the kitchen, yapping on about his task force, how it was there to help girls like her—and there was her mom and Uncle Henry and everybody taking it all in.… “Fuck off!” she shouted at Sullivan. “If I want help, I’ve got a family to help me!” She ignored her mother’s pain, knowing Debbie Howard was well aware that “family,” in this case, meant the Scotians.
Before he left, Brad Sullivan promised to seek some support for Stacey, and some relief for her mother and other relatives. Indeed, before the day was out, the officer contacted the province’s community services department for advice, and was able to find space for her and another seventeen-year-old former prostitute at an Annapolis Valley shelter for battered women; department counselors had to bend the rules to get them in, but agreed with Sullivan that the teenagers’ treatment at the hands of their pimps certainly constituted physical abuse. Surprisingly, Stacey accepted the move and agreed to give high school another try—deep within her remained the seeds of ambition for higher education—but after only two days in a classroom with “little kids” who knew nothing of the “real world,” she and the other girl took off for the city. They were found on the outskirts of Dartmouth by a Cole Harbour RCMP officer; both of them had been drinking and were detained at the detachment overnight. The next day, the other girl agreed to return to the shelter, but Stacey insisted she would never return.
Stacey’s family was exhausted and out of answers, so Sullivan continued to try to find help through the Department of Community Services. Stacey was sent to the Princess Alexandra unit of the Nova Scotia hospital, a ward for young people who need both counseling and educational facilities. At first, Stacey exploded in another burst of rage so extreme that she had to be sedated—the hospital is a psychiatric facility, and Stacey felt the police were treating her like “a crazy person.” Within a few days, however, the unit’s experienced counselors had enabled her to realize she was there to be helped, not judged. Still, Sullivan and the other task force members needed to find a long-term solution to accommodating their potential witnesses once they were off the streets.
Finally the decision was made to establish a safe house in the Halifax area: there would be no age restrictions, and investigators would no longer have to travel to Truro to talk to the girls, although some of them, like Taunya and Teri, opted to stay at the girls’ school, a decision applauded by their parents who were beginning to believe the girls really did want help. The new safe house was located in an unused wing of the Nova Sco
tia Hospital, at the bottom of a hill just below the task force office in the Dartmouth Police Station. For the police the location was perfect. While the girls were in Truro, it took an hour to drive down and meet with them and the police were never sure what the girls were doing when they were not there. The new unit was a two minute drive from the task force office and they could see it as the drove to and from work every day.
Dave Perry, left at table, briefs Halifax reporters October 1992. [Print from ATV video tape]
The task force officers could thank their Toronto counterparts as much as anyone else for helping to get a safe house up and running. In the weeks and months following the Toronto raids Dave Perry became a regular visitor to Nova Scotia where he continued to interview his witnesses, guide the members of the new task force, and meet with the media. Perry had become a favorite of local reporters. He knew prostitution better than most people and he knew how to speak in the sound bytes that were the lifeblood of modern journalism. Perry condemned the “monsters” he said were behind the “highly organized and far reaching” Nova Scotia pimping family. He claimed his raid had “just barely reached below the tip of the iceberg.” On October seventh, Perry described the success of Moberly House, the JTF safe house in Toronto, to reporters. He told them a safe house was “essential” if the fight against the “vicious men who prey on these children” was to succeed. Perry well knew the local Task Force needed and wanted a safe house and he told the reporters as much, saying if the resources were not available “I can only humbly say that I think they should be given them. If the dollars aren’t there it can’t be done.” The following morning, the provincial justice minister announced the formation of a committee whose first priority would be to look into setting up a safe house. Hardly a firm commitment, but that came two months later when Roland Thornhill, Minister of Community Services, announced a half million dollar a year budget for the operation of the safe house.
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