Somebody's Daughter

by Jessome, Phonse;

  “Don’t know, she looks young though.” The girl did not have the crack addicted pallor that marked the other girls working the area. She still carried a healthy body weight. She did not fit the description they were given of the missing teen but she warranted a second look. There was something in the young girls’ eyes that both investigators noticed as they slowly rolled past, fear.

  “Could be a first timer, lets circle back and see if we can talk to her.” Gaudet agreed and Ginn pulled the big car back up on Gottingen Street and drove up a block and headed back down to the stroll. There were a few people standing in front of the businesses on Gottingen, and they glanced at the car as it sped past and turned back down the side street. A few may have recognized the men for what they were, but most probably thought they were simply a couple of customers window shopping the stroll from their car.

  “Hey look, she already broke.” Ginn said as they returned to the stroll. In three years of interviewing prostitutes Gaudet and Ginn had picked up the language of the streets. The officers also never used the term “John” because prostitutes preferred to call the men they serviced clients or dates. Ginn and Gaudet had long ago stopped calling the sex trade prostitution. It was The Game and everyone involved was a player.

  “Let’s see where he takes her, Darrell.” In the time it had taken the two men to circle the block a car had pulled up to the curb beside the young girl. As Gaudet and Ginn drove past a second time, she was getting inside. The car was an older model Chrysler in need of some body-work; the man behind the wheel looked to be sixty five or older. Ginn parked his car on a side street just beyond the stroll and the two officers turned to look back. Within seconds the big Chrysler rolled past.

  “She’s taking him to one of the lots.” Ginn was certain he knew the destination. Prostitutes try to work in a specific area not far from their corner. They choose a parking lot or alley nearby and instruct all of their dates to take them there. There are several parking lots down near the waterfront. A few are used by the girls working the crack stroll. Ginn slowed the police car and let the Chrysler pull away. He didn’t say anything but he already knew what he was going to do.

  The Chrysler did not pull into one of the regular parking lots; it kept driving north along the harbor and beneath the newest of the two bridges that span Halifax Harbour. The officers had allowed the car to turn onto Barrington Street while they waited on a side street to give the man time to pull into the lot they believed the girl would select. They then pulled around the corner but when they looked into the gravel parking lot it was empty.

  “Shit, she doesn’t know where to take him.” Ginn had lost too much ground and the big car was gone. His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as he took the car up over one hundred kilometers per hour. He sped beneath the bridge and headed down toward the container pier.

  “Slow down there he is.” Gaudet could see the Chrysler headed back toward them. Ginn’s anger began to build as he drove past the Chrysler. “Look at the silly old prick. He can’t wait.” The driver of the Chrysler was leaning across the seat with his left hand still holding the steering wheel. His head was positioned just below the rear view mirror as he alternately glanced at the road and into the lap of the young girl beside him. His right arm was stretched down in that direction. The man was wearing a ball cap and he must have bumped it on the mirror as he leaned across the front seat of the big car. The hat was now twisted sideways with the peak pointing back toward the driver side window. The man was grinning wildly as he slowly cruised along the road looking for a place to park. Mitch Ginn hoped the man was married. If he was, Mitch would have some fun. The officers turned their car around and headed back south along Barrington Street where they saw the Chrysler pull into a small park on the harbor side of the road. Mitch turned the car around and then slowed to a stop at the side of the road.

  “Shit, why’d she take him here.” Gaudet didn’t like what he was seeing. Although it was already dark the park was not yet empty. A man and a young boy were walking up from the water’s edge, headed back to their car. A young couple was also strolling in the park and a woman was walking with her dog.

  “We better go in,” Gaudet said. Mitch drove to the corner of the lot where the man had parked his Chrysler. The driver had backed it into the corner and he looked out as the dark green car pulled up at an angle blocking him in. He didn’t appear to realize who had found him. The two police officers stepped out of their car. They left the doors open behind them and walked toward him. The young girl knew what was happening and she hung her head.

  “You talk to her, he’s mine.” Mitch headed to the driver’s side window. He pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to expose his badge. He pressed the shiny metal crest against the window and gestured with his free hand, instructing the driver to lower the glass. As Gaudet walked toward the passenger window he realized he had left his badge in the car. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out one of the task force business cards he carried. When he reached the car Gaudet gestured for the young girl to step out. He identified himself and asked if the girl knew about the task force. The young prostitute said she did, but Gaudet gave her the speech anyway because he had never dealt with her before. He told her the task force was designed to help young prostitutes, not prosecute them, but he could see the spiel would be useless. She wasn’t even looking at him as she leaned against the car door, her arms crossed defensively. She did tell the officer she was nineteen years old, from Glace Bay, near Sydney, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, that she had just been released from prison after being convicted of breaking and entering, and that she was only working the streets to raise enough money for the trip home. After confirming her story, Gaudet let her go. Just in case, he handed her his task-force card, along with the best offer she’d probably ever had—although he doubted she would ever take him up on it: “If you ever need help, or you’re being pressured by someone to keep working, call me.”

  Meanwhile, Ginn was taking an entirely different approach with the client, intensifying his usual street-smart tone as he asked the man just what he thought he was doing with the teenager—oh, he was looking for conversation, was he? And did he happen to be married. Really? “Okay, listen,” the officer continued; “I’m really busy tonight, but I am going to have to talk to you about this. We’re trying to get these kids off the streets, so tomorrow morning around ten, I’m going to come out to your place to ask you some questions about this incident, and I’d like to talk with your wife as well.” He glanced at the man’s anxious expression with some satisfaction. “Now I’ll be back in a minute; you just stay here.” The check on the client’s license turned up nothing out of the ordinary—sixty-seven years old, no outstanding warrants, no criminal record. While he was waiting for the dispatcher’s response, Ginn saw the man step out of his car and, using a cane, limp over to an outdoor toilet nearby; this, and the elderly client’s utterly defeated look when the officer returned with his license, convinced Ginn that he should give the guy a break. He’d made his point, anyway. “Look, maybe I won’t have to talk to you about this after all,” he told the man, who looked as if he’d just been granted a reprieve from the firing squad. “You just go home, and don’t let me catch you down here again.” He didn’t have to wonder whether the guy would follow his advice; Mitch Ginn’s success rate for extracting confessions from cornered dates was unblemished.

  Whenever he and Gaudet were feeling down, Ginn would play a cassette recording of his favorite exchange with a client. This was a man of twenty-seven with a wife and baby; he had picked up an underage prostitute on Hollis Street while Ginn was on patrol. When the officer caught up, he began by insisting that the girl had jumped into his car while it was slowing down to avoid another vehicle, but quickly changed his tune and admitted what he had done. As usual, Ginn gave his speech about talking to him—and his wife—at their home in the morning. The client’s response was to follow Ginn to his car and kneel at the window, begging
him just to settle the matter right then and there; almost in tears, he implored the officer not to charge him. Ginn had no intention of charging anyone; he couldn’t. The man had not broken any laws. Driving around with a young girl is not an offense and getting a prostitute to testify that a man had “solicited” sex for money was impossible. The only real way to nail a client, and it was still done on occasion on the stroll in Dartmouth, was to send in an undercover female officer and charge the men who took the bait. The undercover officer had no qualms about testifying and new what phrases the client would have to use for the case to stand up in court. “How much for a blow job?” usually did it. That the date’s Mitch hassled didn’t know the law was their problem, and when he had one on the hook he enjoyed watching him squirm. Ginn considered the man a child abuser—the girl he was with was only fifteen years old—and it was only when he broke down entirely, repeating that he knew what he’d done was wrong and swearing never to return to the stroll, that Ginn relented. If the higher-ups wouldn’t do anything about really going after the dates, Mitch Ginn would—one at a time. He had the recording to prove it, too; he’d switched off his tiny micro cassette recorder just after letting the man go.

  After leaving the north end, Ginn and Gaudet headed downtown to Hollis Street; the girl they were seeking might be there, if the pimp had turned her out, if he had her in the first place. The officers thought the man might be back in The Game because a street source told them she thought she saw him with a girl fitting the description of the missing teen. It was slim evidence but neither officer had a great deal of faith in the rehabilitative capability of the federal prison system. When they got to the stroll, things weren’t exactly hopping. It was with considerable pleasure that the officers observed that of the only seven prostitutes out that night, not one was under the age of eighteen. In 1992, when as many as thirty females could be seen working on Hollis any night, more than half of them were underage; a few were only twelve or thirteen years old. No such sight this evening—just a few of the regulars. There was Dawn, at twenty-seven a fixture on the stroll—hefty, self-confident, and in utter contempt of the police, the pimps, and any date stupid enough to give her a hard time. Ginn and Gaudet well remembered the time she’d ordered them to piss off when they tried to help her with a client who had tried to rip her off; at five-foot-six and one hundred and seventy pounds of muscle, she could smack the guy around herself if she wanted to. Then there was Pauline, who looked like a well-turned-out business-woman in her favorite get-up, a tailored skirt suit and smart handbag. “We all need to stand out somehow,” as Gaudet put it. Yet another familiar face, a twentyish prostitute just walking back from a pay phone; she must have serviced a customer and called her pimp to report the transaction.

  Maybe they’d come back later; it was still early, and there might be more activity on the stroll around midnight—perhaps even a lead on their runaway. Meanwhile, there was paperwork to do back in Dartmouth.

  The task force office was empty, as it usually was nowadays. Once every cubicle was occupied by an investigator; dozens of teenagers were escorted through the large room by the officers assigned to their cases, and their young voices mingled with the sound of ringing phones behind the partitions that gave the cubicles their illusion of privacy. Darrell Gaudet went to his desk; there was space for three, but it was all his now, though he would have rather had the company. He glanced at the photographs on the walls around him—girls still listed as missing, believed to have been taken out of Halifax by pimps; girls like Kimberly McAndrew.

  In a neighboring cubicle, Mitch Ginn thumbed through a three-ring binder filled with more than one hundred photographs—the teenagers who had been prostitutes, or still were, and who had had some kind of contact with the task force. Like Keri, some had only been photographed; maybe they’d spoken with an officer once or twice, then returned to The Game—only to be discovered months or years later, haggard from a crack addiction, beaten by a pimp or a bad date; dead. Here, too, were success stories of girls who left prostitution and never looked back. Amber Borowski, Lydia Chiasson, Teri MacDonald, Taunya Terriault, Stacey Jackson. Mitch looked at the picture of Stacey and remembered the night Anne Mae Wilson was killed. Ginn had been in the office when John Elliott took the call, and watched as Elliott walked solemnly from the room to go to his car for the drive to Sullivan House. Breaking the news to Stacey must have been tough. Mitch Ginn would never have admitted to Elliott the extent of his sympathy; his style was to give the guy a rough time. He and Brad Sullivan, the “experts,” or as Ginn had more frequently expressed it, “those two fucks.” His crude humor wasn’t intended as disrespect for his fellow officers; it was just his way of blowing off steam. He admired the two Mounties whose only real fault, according to Ginn, was that they were Mounties. Right now he wasn’t in the mood for vulgarity or crude humor. He was overcome with sorrow, thinking of Kimberly McAndrew, of Keri Sherwood; he was struck by a painful memory, awakened by Stacey Jackson’s photo, of the day her friend Annie Mae Wilson was killed. All the young faces, and the ones still out there, like that fourteen-year-old they would undoubtedly fail to locate tonight or tomorrow night, or the next.

  At about midnight, after monitoring a suspect believed to be using juveniles in pornographic movies but who wouldn’t be arrested for at least a few weeks, the officers made the rounds of the prostitution strolls again before giving up on the fourteen-year-old, and her alleged pimp. There was always tomorrow. Maybe they would find her tomorrow. “Hey, the lights are still on,” Mitch Ginn remarked as they drove past Stacey Jackson’s north-end apartment. “I hope she doesn’t have any of the girls up there.”

  The officers cruised past Stacey’s place almost every night, and Ginn’s concern about the teenager inviting her street friends home was not so much a criticism of her choice of companions as a fear that the prostitutes could attract pimps, maybe even men connected with Michael Sears—or Smit, as he called himself. Ginn remembered with a sneer the often incomprehensible street names. As John Elliott had urged time and time again, Ginn and Gaudet felt Stacey would be much safer in the witness protection program, especially as the date for Smit’s parole neared. They hoped she would eventually agree; the chances of a reprisal weren’t worth gambling on.

  Indeed, six months later, Stacey did decide to leave Halifax. It was bittersweet for Debbie Howard who wanted her daughter away from the city and the dangers it could present but who also knew she would miss the girl she had lost once before. Stacey left Nova Scotia behind and found a job and a new life in an undisclosed city.

  As the spring of 1996 approached, Darrell Gaudet and Mitch Ginn had been reassigned to new postings with the recently created Halifax Regional Police Force. A nominal task force of four members remained in existence. The final two original members of Operation Hectic were sad to leave the unit but hoped the work they had done had been worth something. Craig Botterill whose six month posting to the special unit still had him prosecuting task force related cases almost four years later, preferred to put a positive spin on the reduced force. “It is smaller because there aren’t as many juvenile working in Halifax. The task force was a success.” He was also an optimist. “If the problem returns, we have the expertise and we will expand on the unit if we have to.” The problem may well have left Halifax, but the East Coast connection to the sex trade had not been eliminated. Police in Toronto, where even Dave Perry had also been reassigned, were now reporting a new spin on the Scotian Game. In Perry’s absence the JTF continued its work and the new members claimed pimps from the Halifax area were once again a predominant presence, now working Ontario or Quebec teenagers. Teenage girls were still being reported missing across Nova Scotia and in every other province, some of them seemingly disappearing without a trace, like that fourteen-year-old Ginn and Gaudet were seeking, like Kimberly McAndrew. Many more were simply presumed to have run away. Without a full-scale investigation of the wide range of hidden forms of prostitution, such as escort services, it w
as only possible to guess that some of these adolescents were vanishing behind brothel doors, before hitting the streets of the big city, as Taunya Terriault did at fourteen.

  Without the consistent and strong presence on the street of task-force officers, as in the heyday of Operation Hectic, the street trade in children might easily resurface. Officers like Mitch Ginn and Darrell Gaudet were not convinced, as they accepted their new assignments, that the problem had vanished. Their view was that juvenile prostitution had been driven underground—into other provinces, if not Ontario and Quebec; or into escort services. They also believed that, with time, it would return to Halifax in the absence of the full twelve member task force. That was the opinion of the final two original investigators from Operation Hectic who shared the policemen’s philosophy that only more investigators in the street can effectively reduce criminal activity. That opinion was not shared by the new front line workers who made up the true legacy of Operation Hectic.

  Shane Kirk and the other members of The Association for the Development of Children’s Residential Facilities are continuing to battle juvenile prostitution in the Halifax area. Like the officers assigned to Operation Hectic, Kirk had become an expert in the methods used by pimps and the personality traits exhibited by the girls who were most at risk. The police officers had developed the theory that sexually assaulting a young girl was the first step toward creating a juvenile prostitute but Kirk had another theory. “Many of them had suffered child abuse in some form, sexual or otherwise.… but by far the biggest factor was a lack of self-worth. All of the girls shared that trait.”

  Kirk, who continues to work at the new smaller Sullivan House in Halifax, uses the resources of a large network of child care specialists dedicated to keeping young girls from becoming prostitutes. “We take a pro-active approach now; we work with social services counselors, teachers and parents who identify girls who are at risk and we work with those girls to try to keep them from making the mistakes the girls like Stacey made.” While his background was in counseling, Kirk learned a lot from the police officers he befriended during the busy days of Operation Hectic and today he uses some of their techniques. With the pimps no longer maintaining a visible presence on the Hollis Street stroll Kirk does not hesitate to drive down there and park his car on a corner near the prostitutes in an attempt to bring them back to Sullivan House and away from The Game. “I do it if one of the girls we are working with runs and goes back to the street. I just sit there on the hood of my car and watch her.… She’s only a few metres away and the cursing begins right away. My being there is very bad for business so the girls try to chase me off. I tell the girl I’m following I just want to talk with her. Sometimes it works, she gives up and comes back to the house.”