Somebody's Daughter

by Jessome, Phonse;

  It was perfect; at least, for awhile. The Game’s information pipeline eventually led Jay to the truth; he caught Amber in the apartment one night passing around a pipe with another prostitute and a taxi driver she’d befriended on the crack stroll. The cabby took up Jay’s invitation for him to leave—“You, get the fuck out now!”—and the pimp turned on Amber in a wild rage, kicking her violently in the stomach and legs, cursing her as a useless crack-head who was wasting his money, and finally, exhausted by his workout, adopting his familiar line of asking his girl if she somehow needed such punishment because she only felt loved when beaten. “Most ’hos” come from broken homes and they see a beating as sign of affection: that was Jay’s rationalization for whatever viciousness he felt provoked to express. His bizarre “therapy” out of the way, Jay brought in Amber’s daughter: how would she feel to have a crack addict as a mom? He raved on, as the other prostitute sat numbly in a corner and Amber, her dizziness still making the room spin around her, wishing Jay would shut up. Finally he ordered her to dress for work; Amber obeyed sullenly, but her attitude soon changed when he casually informed her, en route downtown, that her daughter would not be coming back to the apartment that night; the child needed protection from such a drug-infested environment. Amber’s frantic tears and pleas were all Jay needed to hear; he knew he had a powerful weapon against her, and fully intended to use it. He took Amber’s baby to his apartment and found a bubble-gummer to do the babysitting.

  For three days, obedient and terrified, Amber stayed away from the crack stroll and the addictive drug; but still Jay refused to return her child. One late December night, as the emaciated, miserable teenager stood shivering on the stroll in her spandex pants and a jacket, Darrell Gaudet and his partner cruised by. The officer invited Amber to get warm in the car for awhile—and maybe she just wanted someone to chat with—and she gratefully complied. The young woman desperately wanted to ask Gaudet for help, but she didn’t dare risk Jay’s wrath; he had her baby, and the child was really all that kept her going. When Gaudet saw he wasn’t going to get anywhere, he dropped Amber off on the stroll, once again reminding her that he would be there to help any time she needed him.

  At the end of the night, Jay met Amber and Deena on Hollis and took them to his place, telling the younger girl he wanted to talk to her. Amber had fallen off the wagon and was still a little high. She had managed to sneak a hit before the end of the night—and she slumped gratefully into the sofa at Jay’s invitation, looking around with disgust at her man’s slovenly housekeeping. Like that of most pimps, his sparsely furnished apartment was a disaster area, strewn with dirty dishes, bags, cans, and fast-food wrappers. Amber and Deena settled down to watch a late-night TV talk show, and Jay joined them. He seemed affable at first, but suddenly he whipped around on the sofa and slapped Amber, then hauled her into the bathroom, where the tub was brimming.

  “Jay, what’s wrong? Why are you doing this?” She knew what was coming.

  “Gonna sign on Jay, bitch? Jay ain’t nobody’s fool, woman. Jay knows who you been talkin’ to, you stupid ’ho.” Deena had spotted her getting into the cruiser with Gaudet and had called Jay. Amber was terrified as Jay pushed her into the tub and forced her head under the water. She’d fallen in backwards and managed to drape her right arm over the side, so she pulled with all her might to stay on the surface.

  “Jay, please! I’m not signing on anyone!” she insisted. “He’s a friend of my father, and he just wanted me to leave and go home, Jay, stop pushing me—I didn’t tell him about you.” By now the pimp was too angry to placate. “Jay knows you still takin’ crack, too. That’s my fuckin’ money you been wastin’, slut. My fuckin’ money, not yours. You ain’t gonna waste no more of Jay’s money, you hear me?”

  Amber did hear him—and so did the upstairs tenant, who sat up in bed, unsure what to do next. They were arguing about money, he could hear; and you didn’t necessarily want to intervene in an argument between a couple over financial matters. He decided to wait and listen. Downstairs, Jay was still trying to get Amber’s head underwater; his hands too slippery to hold her, he tried standing and kicking her over and over in the chest, then the face. There was a terrible crash as the shower curtain and rod came down—he’d been yanking on it to stand up—but Jay just kept slamming his foot into Amber’s body. Closing her eyes, Amber tried to resist the downward slide into the water, but the arm holding her up was growing numb, and the blows to her head were weakening her resolve. Suddenly, Jay stepped away from the tub, and Amber opened her eyes to see her baby crawling towards the bathroom, gurgling happily. She wanted to call out to the child but she didn’t have the strength, and Jay had already carried the little girl back into the bedroom, where she’d been sleeping on the floor with the sitter. Amber later recalled the incident, “It was a miracle, she had never crawled before and if she didn’t do it at that moment I know I’d be dead.” Weakly, Amber hauled herself out of the tub and staggered into the living room, where she sat stiffly on the sofa, her sopping body trembling with shock and cold, her helpless tears coursing down her ravaged face. All was deathly quiet; the man upstairs drifted back to sleep and the now calm jay who’d lost his resolve at the site of the baby was rummaging through the linen closet for a bath towel. Returning to the living room, he wrapped the towel around Amber and calmly began to reprove her for “forcing” him to punish her that way—another familiar approach pimps take to avoid responsibility for their brutality, as Stacey Jackson had discovered after Smit beat her with the wire whip.

  When he got tired of talking—and that took quite some time—Jay scooped up a few blankets from the filthy floor and tossed them over Amber, who, ignoring her wet clothes, curled up and fell asleep. When she awoke, Jay and Deena were gone, and so was her daughter. She didn’t bother to look for something to change into, just staggered out into the cold, grey morning, found a pay phone, and called a friend, who agreed to let Amber come to her place for a few days.

  Darrell Gaudet had spent a sleepless night worrying about finding a way to help the badly addicted and obviously frightened Amber, but he had to put her out of his mind for the moment; the officer was about to move on a nineteen-year-old pimp who had savagely beaten a prostitute of sixteen. The girl, who had come to the task force looking for help, warned police that the man had a gun and had boasted of a black belt in Karate. “He’d rather die than get arrested,” as she put it to Gaudet. It was bullet-proof vests all round as several unmarked task-force vehicles started their pursuit early in the evening. The detectives waited for the best opportunity to make their move. It came when the pimp cruised down a quiet tree lined street. There were no pedestrians, and that reduced the risk of someone getting hurt if the pimp started shooting. Gaudet slipped the portable flashing light onto the dash of the unmarked car and watched as the pimp pulled over to the curb. As his partner covered him, Gaudet approached the car; the teenager stepped out quickly, his hands behind his head. By the time he was in the back of the cruiser, listening as Gaudet read him his rights, the dangerous martial artist with the death wish was weeping like a toddler. Gaudet and his partner exchanged disgusted glances as they headed back to Dartmouth. It was a scene that would be played out again and again, as investigators discovered many of the pimps, so fearless about brutalizing a slight teenage girl, turned to jelly when confronted with aggression. Like schoolyard bullies, or wolves, they culled the weak from the herd and only struck when they knew they had the upper hand.

  Gaudet would soon have another opportunity to test his budding theory on the psychology of bullies. In the first week of January 1993, Amber finally decided to talk to the task force investigator who had patiently held out his promise of help for almost two months. She had been working the crack stroll and getting high ever since New Year’s Eve, when Jay, once again using her child as leverage, spent what was supposed to be a celebration dinner with his family, trying to persuade Amber to return to Hollis Street as his girl. She refused, and he told
her to forget about ever seeing her daughter again. He had visited the social worker at the welfare office and told her all about Amber’s crack habit, and soon she would be declared an unfit mother and her baby placed in care. That wasn’t quite true: Jay had seen Amber’s worker—and done nothing to correct the woman’s inference that he was the child’s father—but no mention was made of action against Amber. The social worker simply told Jay that Amber would have to decide that she wanted help to break her habit. Amber knew nothing of this; when Jay left the party briefly, she met her friend the crack-addicted cabbie and made for the north-end stroll—and some all-too-temporary relief for her anguish. Four days later Amber finally made her move. She went to visit the welfare case officer.

  Amber told the understandably confused social worker that Jay had abducted her daughter in an attempt to force her to return to prostitution; the woman took in Amber’s black eye—a legacy of Jay’s submersion attempt—and gaunt, agitated appearance, then told the teenager her pimp’s version of events. Jay, who had come into the office the day before, claimed she had abandoned her child to work the streets and take drugs. With him on the visit was Amber’s daughter, who was now in care. She couldn’t promise anything, the social worker said, as gently as possible, but perhaps Amber would be willing to talk to someone from the task force on prostitution. “Darrell Gaudet—” the teenager said. “He said he would help me.” And she burst into tears.

  Later that day, Amber finally told Gaudet all about Jay, and her daughter, and the beatings. He immediately made arrangements for her to go to Sullivan House, and obtained a warrant for the pimp’s arrest. Taking Jay into custody was even easier than nailing the nineteen-year-old bully. Still obsessed with that unpaid fine but unable to come up with the cash, Jay decided to fight it out in court; an official at the provincial courthouse in downtown Halifax called Gaudet shortly after the warrant was issued, telling him the suspect was there to argue his case. When Jay finished testifying, Gaudet simply walked up to him and placed him under arrest for assault, attempted murder, and living on the avails of prostitution.

  Stacey and Amber bonded quickly at Sullivan House—hardly surprising, since they were among the oldest girls at the safe house and had already met in Toronto. They were both single mothers of very young children they faced losing to the courts. The Nova Scotia Department of Social Services sought custody of Amber’s daughter, arguing that the child deserved more stability than her mother could provide, and the family of Stacey’s former boyfriend had asked for full custody of her son. Both teenagers already sensed the inevitable—their children would be taken from them—and soon began to reconsider their decisions to leave The Game.

  Stacey openly discussed her doubts with John Elliott: Why should she leave the street for a “shit job” paying minimum wage, and live in the square world with people who could never understand what she’d been through? And yeah, she was talking to a pimp on the phone these days; why shouldn’t she? It was a free country, wasn’t it? Besides, he had promised her that he would never, ever treat her the way Smit did. And speaking of Smit, maybe she wouldn’t testify against him after all. Maybe the task force was all just about using her and the other girls—as her would-be man had told her—just to get their statement and their testimony, then the officers would move onto the next case and forget all about them. Elliott argued passionately with Stacey, who had, he told her, the talent and energy to be anything she wanted in life. She only had to be patient with herself, learn to believe in herself again. It was the pimps who were playing the manipulation game, who were using the girls—not to mention beating them within an inch of their lives, as she well knew. Sure, they were polite and gentle on the phone, but what evidence did she have that they wouldn’t turn vicious when she joined them? Hadn’t they done that in the past, to her, to her friend Amber, to her friend Annie Mae? Didn’t they deserve to be put away where they could never hurt another girl again?

  Throughout Halifax-Dartmouth, in coffees shops and parents’ homes, at Sullivan House and at the residential school in Truro, over the phone and in police cars and at the task-force office, conversations very similar to this were playing themselves out, again and again, as investigators and counselors fought to get their points across to deeply troubled young people like Stacey. The stakes were immeasurably high. Those struggling to save the girls knew there would be some lost—but Stacey Jackson would not be one of them.

  She did come precariously close to returning to The Game; John Elliott’s mention of her dear friend Annie Mae prompted a renewed bout of nostalgia for the good times and laughs they’d shared. All the terror, pain, and confusion of her experiences in Halifax and Toronto began to recede into the rosy haze of a daydream—she and Annie Mae together again, sharing a little apartment, maybe even working for themselves. Or maybe not; all pimps weren’t as screwed up as Smit, and they came and protected you when you lucked out and got stuck with a bad date. Stacey had pretty much decided to give it another go.

  On January 28 she changed her mind. It took a tragedy—a heartbreakingly ironic tragedy—to finally set Stacey free. Annie Mae was dead, slain in an apartment only a few kilometres from Sullivan House. Slain by a pimp whose anger against her decision to choose another man got out of control. She knew about that one; still had bruises on her thighs to remind her of what had happened when she tried to leave Smit for Joystick, way back in the summer. It seemed so long ago, but it was only four months. So much had happened, and so much still faced her—the custody battle, the trial, school.… But Stacey Jackson, perhaps for the first time in her life, felt a deep certainty she knew could never be destroyed: she would keep two very important promises. One she made to John Elliott, earlier in the evening, when he’d come to tell her about Annie Mae—she would testify against Smit. The other she was making to herself, now, alone in the common room at Sullivan House; never again would she work as a prostitute. Raising her glass of Coke, Stacey offered up a toast: “Here’s to you, Annie Mae.”

  Within a few days of her friend’s death, police had decided to move Stacey to Toronto pending the trial of Michael Sears—Smit. Investigators were concerned about her facing any more pressure from pimps like the one she’d been talking to (although they needn’t have worried about her yielding to the persuasion), and although Smit’s trial was still more than a month away, it was decided Stacey should be sent to the safe house Dave Perry had described to local reporters months earlier. It was in a part of the city far from the downtown stroll.

  Back in Halifax, the teenagers at the safe house and the residential school in Truro continued to develop closer bonds with the investigators handling their files. There was still the daily struggle to keep girls from returning to the street but there was also reason for the task force officers to feel a sense of accomplishment. Teri MacDonald had left the Truro training school but not for a return to The Game. Teri promised her case officer she would testify in Toronto when the time came but told him that until then she did not want to hear from him. She was not upset with the officer, she explained, she was just making a clean break from everyone and everything associated with the part of her life. Teri was returning home to live with her mother and restart her life and to do it she wanted to erase that sordid chapter completely. Teri’s mother promised to call the officer at the first sign of trouble; she never had to. Taunya was another success story; she remained at the Truro school but had shown the counselors there she was committed to remaining free of The Game.

  With new witnesses coming forward all the time, and existing ones often seeking conversations with the officers every day, task force members had their hands full. It was in the winter of 1993 that the representatives of Operation Hectic began to realize how appropriate the name was. The number of files grew steadily. Between January and March of 1993 the task force officers arrested twenty-five pimps who had not been picked up, or even identified in the statements obtained, during the Toronto bust. More importantly in the eyes of Brad Sullivan t
hey had managed to convince thirty young girls to leave the streets and take up residence in the safe house or the Truro Residential Centre. Each new case brought revelations of cruelty and violence that stunned and angered investigators all over again, strengthening the officers’ resolve to see the project through.

  The arrests continue in Halifax. [Print from ATV video tape]

  In early 1993, despite the growing number of pimps in custody at the Halifax County Correctional Centre, most of the remaining players carried on their business as freely as usual. Investigators learned that a few minor players had left The Game for other professions, but the others continued to take their chances. Other than Manning Greer’s family of players, most Nova Scotian pimps worked in small independent groups. They knew the value of the blowfish approach. Many had helped Greer when he needed it and now they joined ranks to take on this new, police threat. Ironically in their twisted logic it was not the threat of imprisonment they feared. They believed they were losing the respect of their girls and that they would not tolerate. They did not want over confident prostitutes who knew a simple call to the task force would take a player out of The Game. They needed to return fear to the streets. The newly formed cooperative of pimps decided to make an example of one of the prostitutes; fifteen-year-old Clara Ferguson was in trouble again.

  Clara, who had been forced to chose the bullet that would kill her during the incident Manning Greer’s enforcer had so readily bragged about, had returned and had managed to stay away from crack cocaine. She found a new pimp, but by January, with his demands for countless attentions and services becoming an increasing burden, she made the mistake of threatening him. She would call the task force and sign on him—then he would stop being so pushy. Her rash action was more the result of outrage than thoughtless defiance: her elder sister, who, like Clara, had run away from home in her early teens to escape sexual abuse by a family friend, had been badly beaten by the Scotian pimps as a supposed cure for her cocaine addiction. From the day she chose to become a prostitute, Clara had been following her older sister’s lead, first into the Scotian family and later into crack addiction. By January of 1993, Clara’s sister was working as a freelancer in Toronto; long after being beaten and turned loose by the family. She worked now to pay the pusher not the pimp.