Rosie Dimanno

Inquiry hears Junger's version of sex-sale tale

Gordon Junger and Roma Langford. A disgraced cop who resigned from the Metro force after he was captured on a police video accepting money for sex, and the call girl ex-lover who helped set him up for the fall. Together, they are the authors of wildly divergent stories about what really went on in the weeks before and after Junger was caught in a hotel room sting.

When they were a couple, they used to play this unacknowledged game: who was the more adept manipulator? Now, facing the heat of a provincial inquiry into how the internal affairs department of the Metro police handled the Junger investigation, they spit and snarl at each other from the witness chair. Even though they are never in the same room at the same time.

Yesterday, Langford's testimony was cut short after she became ill during cross-examination. Excused temporarily, she could be overheard retching in the hallway. During the luncheon break, an ambulance was called and Langford -- who has a heart problem - was taken to hospital where, according to her lawyer, an electrocardiogram showed she had an irregular heartbeat.

And that set the stage for 30-year-old Junger's initial appearance at the inquiry. Smiling broadly and pursued by a phalanx of TV cameras, he looked confident and relaxed. Waiting his turn, he assumed the familiar cop's stance -- hands clasped behind his back, legs spread apart. Wearing an olive-colored double breast suit, yellow shirt and paisley tie. A big guy, built like a linebacker, with a thick neck and a barrel chest. Pudgy cheeks, weak chin, deep-set eyes. Giving curt, crisp constable-ish answers.

And the thrust of his testimony came down to this: like a woman who is just a little bit pregnant, he was just a little bit of a male prostitute at the same time that he was a Metro police officer in 52 Division, occasionally seconded to the morality squad.

Yes, he paid (50 per cent) for the ad that was taken out in NOW magazine, to publicize the agency called Pleasure Can Be Yours. But he did it, well, to make Langford happy. To get her off his back. Because by that time -- about eight month after he had been introduced to Langford by another officer -- he'd had enough of her. Wanted out. Most of all, he didn't want her to have the child which she was expecting and which she claimed was his.

"During this period, our relationship had soured. I felt I was placed into a position by Franklina, or Roma, where she wanted me to support and ultimately be responsible for a future child. I was trying to ease out of it. "I suppose I was going along with her basically in the hopes that she would consider not going along with this pregnancy. That was my main concern."

Besides, she had him by the short hairs. She had threatened to go to his superiors and tell them that Junger was living with her, a well-known off-and-on prostitute.

But no, Junger insisted, he did not flash his badge around town to get police perks. No, he did not drink on the job. No, he did not have other officers sign him in and out at work. Except when he was detailed to morality, where partners sometimes do that for each other. No, he did not chauffeur Langford to her tricks in an unmarked police car.

And most adamantly: "I did not make any profit from this escort service."

There is that police video, however, where Junger can be seen and heard making a deal for sex with a female undercover officer. The one that Langford - from spite? from jealousy? -- helped arrange.

That was, says Junger, the first and only time that he had ever gone on a "sex call." On that day , Junger testified, Langford had phoned him at 52 Division and indicated that she would "do something" about the pregnancy. He was elated. "I was having a good day," he said. So relieved in fact, in such a good mood, that he agreed to go out on a job for the agency.

"She had someone for me to see that evening. She said (she would) be perfect for me. I asked her, "What do I do?" What he did off the top, was use the police computer to run a check on the names of two prospective employees (prostitutes) for the agency, which Langford gave him, to make sure that they had no criminal records. Then he called the woman he was to meet that evening at the Sheraton Hotel, to ask how she would be paying for his service. Then he went to a drugstore to buy "some prophylactics and some baby oil, because Franklina told me that's what you need to do."

He made his way to the hotel, went into the washroom, looked at his reflection in the mirror and said to himself: "Let's see what it's all about. Let's do it."

What he did was place his head in a neatly knotted noose. And that's why yesterday, when asked his profession, Gordon Junger stated: "Unemployed."