Rosie DiManno

Toronto's affair with pal Gordie has just started

And, truthfully, there are far more pungent descriptions for the gruesome twosome who are at the heart -- or more aptly, the groin -- of the long-awaited report from the public inquiry into the Metro police internal affairs unit.

It is revealing, though, what the main players have managed to extrapolate from this brave, hard-nosed document: a damning indictment of the moral fungus at the top and in the dank core of a self-policing procedure gone terribly wrong, abetted by a meekly compliant police service board.

Junger still cavils whenever he is referred to as a prostitute, though how else would you describe what the odious former constable was doing with a bottle of baby oil and a handful of condoms in a hotel room with an undercover female police officer from whom he accepted $200? "It's just a vulgar word, prostitute," Junger told The Star's Andrew Duffy a few days ago.

Langford, Junger's former girlfriend and his one-time partner in the Pleasure Can Be Yours Escort Service, is the lady who blew the whistle on the man she claims is the father of her 2-year-old son. But she also rejects the notion that she was ever a hooker: "I wasn't a prostitute, I wasn't a call girl. I was a kept woman," she points out.

They have so much in common, still. these two. They were made for each other. It is somewhat of a shame that the romance didn't last. (Langford is now involved with a man in New York city where she says she has been recording an album of music that she wrote in the past few months. which is appropriate, since Langford sang so sweetly to police investigators before recanting and then unrecanting. She may have started out on her back, but she has ended up on her feet.)

Junger, it would seem, feels that he has been vindicated by the report, which admonishes internal affairs investigators, police Chief William McCormack and the police services board. All were, ultimately, conspirators in the secret deal that was arranged to get Junger removed from the force without the messy spectacle of a disciplinary hearing.

In his remarks to The Star, Junger sounds downright heroic about the role he played in this whole sorry and sordid tale. As if we should somehow be grateful to him for being the catalyst which exposed the Machiavellian machinations within the internal affairs bureau. Commenting on the public inquiry's recommendations, Junger opined: "I am very pleased with their recommendations -- I think they are definitely advantageous to the citizens of Toronto."

Oh. thank you ever so much, Gordie. We, the citizens of Toronto, are grateful. We, of course, are the same citizens of Toronto that you swore to serve and protect when you first became a cop -- though who could have imagined that you planned to serve us sexually in the bargain?

Alas, it is true that Junger has been wronged here. He never got his day in court, or at least the quasi-judicial surroundings of a police disciplinary hearing. One can only wonder how anxious he was back in early 1990, to face such a hearing. Certainly he seemed to waste no time in signing the infamous secret agreement that neatly excised him from the force. (A $4.7 million wrongful dismissal suit was put on hold, pending the outcome of the provincial inquiry.)

But Junger's astonishing claims to public service, in the aftermath of the report's publication, are no more repugnant than the reaction from June Rowlands, former chair of the police services board. Rowlands emerged from whatever bomb shelter she had been hiding in since winning the Toronto mayoral campaign to fulminate about the report's findings.

The woman who could never grasp that police board members are there to represent the interests of the community and not to function as hand servants to the police force, has been quarrelsome and unrepentant since the report was made public.

"It's always easy to criticize after the fact," she sniffed. "It's easy to second-guess." Which is an altogether niggardly description of the exhaustive inquiry that would never have been necessary if she had done her job with even a modicum of integrity.

What has been equally surprising, in recent days, has been the soothing noises coming from present police services board chair Susan Eng and aimed at police Chief McCormack. One can only assume that there is some furious politicking going on behind closed doors at 40 College St.

According to the chief, this whole distasteful Junger affair is "over and done with." But it sounds like it has only just begun.