Shady secret of the Shaky Lady (Beggar rakes in the cash, then heads home in a Lumina)
Toronto Sun ^ | By MIKE STROBEL
She wears a shabby red jacket. Her hair is grey and scraggly under a faded purple kerchief. A garbage bag covers her legs. People throw money on it.
Lots of people. Sometimes they line up.
"She got here about 11," says Const. Paul Stone, 50, on traffic duty at a construction site. "She started shaking as soon as she sat down. She's just rakin' it in now."
At Harvey's across the street, photographer Alex Urosevic and I do some figuring.
Thirty people in 15 minutes, Alex counts. Fifty in the time it takes me to eat a veggie burger and sip a coffee.
So, be very conservative and say 50 kind strangers an hour, a toonie each, five hours a day, five days a week.
That's $2,500 a week. Net. I mean, what's the overhead? How much do blue thermal pants and a garbage bag cost?
Several people in the area have told me she usually has two burly men keeping watch over her. Some think they're her sons.
If they're around, I can't spot them in the throngs.
"Please help me. I'm sick and poor. I will pray for you," says the cardboard sign around her neck.
I toss in a toonie. She gives me a toothless grin and croaks. The shaking is remarkable. How could you say no?
Shopkeepers and security staff say she has haunted Bloor between Yonge and Bay for at least a year.
"I was struck by her wretched appearance," says Agnes McKenna, 74, who lives nearby.
"I wondered, how could anybody be so heartless as to dump her on the street?
"A couple of weeks ago, coming home from a meeting, I see this woman suddenly get up, spry as a chicken. Her face becomes alive, she packs up her buggy and off she goes.
"Makes you feel like a fool, to be taken like that."
Toronto Police Const. Andrew Hassall once saw a woman so torn up about the Shaky Lady she bought her a $200 coat at The Bay. The beggar croaked her thanks, waited for the woman to leave, then threw out the coat. Hassall couldn't persuade the kind woman she'd been had.
The Shaky Lady is "the prima donna of this sort of thing," says Hassall. "She's been a thorn in our sides for years."
But the cops are stuck. Panhandling is legal.
For a while, I hide by the construction site behind the Shaky Lady. They are laying fibre-optic cable.
I can see each person approach the woman.
I see horror, pity. I see $10 bills, a few 20s. She tucks them under the bag. I think our income estimate is low.
At 4:30 p.m. she gets up, chucks the sisters' chicken fingers in the garbage and heads west on Bloor. There is no shaking. She moves faster and faster.
... I round the corner. A car, a Chevy Lumina, speeds in reverse.
A man drives, another sits in the back. The Shaky Lady, kerchief off, crouches in the passenger seat.
Caught without cover, I give chase. I can't read the plate. Alex is an alley away, trying to cut them off.
But the Lumina pulls out on Balmuto St., by the Uptown Theatre, then west on Bloor.
By the time I hail a cab and yell "follow that Lumina," it's gone.
Who knows where?
But I'm guessing it's not to a shelter for the homeless.