Secretary details escort agency operation

A former Calgary firefighter charged with being a pimp handled all the cash, told escorts how to dress and frequently placed managerial phone calls to the Liaisons escort agency while working at the fire hall, according to a former employee.

One of the agency’s secretaries told a Calgary court Wednesday that the accused, would call a couple of times a day to see how the business was doing.

“It would come up at the fire station,” testified the woman, who can’t be identified the woman, who can’t be identified because of a court order.

“Management-type questions, if I might say?” asked Crown prosecutor David Torske.

“Yes,” said the now 34-year-old.

She added that on the accused days off, he could be found at the agency’s office at 5th Street and 17th Avenue S.W. answering e-mails, giving escorts fashion advice, including the importance of matching bras and panties, driving them on dates or interviewing potential employees.

During her five months at Liaisons in 2002, she told the court, she would take calls from clients, call one of the agency’s 10 escorts and, once an appointment was booked, fill out a receipt with the name of the client, the escort a location, a phone number, the digits _ and a letter code. The letter of the alphabet stood for the amount of the time the escort spent on a date – A for a half-hour, B for an hour, C for two and D for anything over that.

Copies of the receipts were given to the escorts to turn in with their cash, which they either gave to the accused or put in a lock box in the office so he could collect it later.

Torske asked what the significance of the “1/2” was on the receipts.

“If the vice ever came in, it would look like they were all half-hour dates, so it looked like there was less money going in than there really was,” she answered, adding that two sets of books were kept for the same reason.

She said the accused always feared that police or bylaw officers would show up at Liaisons, so he told all of the employees to be careful about what they said and to stress there was no sex involved.

“What was happening on those dates?” asked Torske of the secretary.

“Sexual intercourse.”

“Were they anything other than that?”

“Not to my knowledge,” she responded.

The accused faced 15 charges, including living off the avails of prostitution, procuring and keeping a common bawdy-house.

His lawyer, Patrick Fagan, has applied for a stay of all the charges against the 40-year-old. He’s trying to persuade Justice Patrick Sullivan that the city has legalized the sex trade because it requires all escorts to be licensed and, therefore, the accused should never have been charged.

The trial continues today at Court of Queen’s Bench.