OSWEGO, N.Y. - An Oswego High School employee says then - Mayor John Gosek asked her last year to recruit schoolgirls to have
sex with him.
Jacqueline Lundy was a school monitor in September 2004 when Gosek said he'd pay her to find high school girls for him, she
said in an interview last week. Gosek offered to give the girls cocaine, ecstasy and alcohol if they had sex with him, Lundy said. Instead, she arranged for Gosek to meet a woman he believed was 14, but who was actually 20 years old, Lundy said. Lundy
secretly tape-recorded phone calls with him and provided the tapes to state police, she said.
Those tapes, which have not been made public, helped lead to a federal grand jury indictment charging Gosek with arranging to
have sex with someone he thought was underage.
Lundy is the third woman who has said publicly that Gosek enlisted her help in finding women or girls with whom he could have
sex.
Gosek's lawyer, James Eby, has said the former mayor never had sex with a minor. Eby did not return calls last week to respond to
Lundy's allegations.
Neither Assistant U.S. Attorney John Katko nor state police investigators would comment on the information Lundy provided to
The Post-Standard.
Gosek, 58, resigned in September after he was arrested on a charge of paying $250 to a woman for arranging a sexual liaison with
two 15-year-old girls in a Salina motel room. The FBI and state police arrested him before he ever met the girls.
More than a year before the arrest, Lundy began gathering evidence for police, she said.
She went to the Oswego County Drug Task Force in the summer of 2004 with concerns about other plans Gosek had for sex acts,
and investigators asked her to start taping his calls. Lundy said she'd known Gosek for years.
Among his offers was to give Lundy cocaine or money in exchange for sex, she said. Lundy said she never had an affair with
Gosek, never took drugs or money from him, and never saw him with drugs.
"I told them, "Hey, the mayor's out of control here, "' Lundy said of her call to police. A few weeks later, after she'd started taping
Gosek's calls, he surprised her with the proposition to recruit Oswego High School girls, Lundy said.
"He said that since I worked at the high school and had access to troubled young girls who were probably into drugs, I could set
him up with those girls, " Lundy said in an interview Tuesday night at her home in Oswego.
"He said he'd pay me and provide cocaine, ecstasy, alcohol whatever the girls wanted, " she said.
Lundy, 41, said she was so taken aback that she let down the facade she'd been using to keep him talking for the police
investigation.
"When he first asked me, I said, "I can't do that. Are you crazy? What are you talking about?"' Lundy said. "When he first came up
with that idea, I snapped back into my real self. I was just stunned. I never thought in a million years that it would take that turn."
Gosek specified for Lundy the attributes he wanted in the girls, describing them in graphic detail, she said.
"The younger the better, " Gosek said in a phone conversation, according to Lundy.
She gave state police at least five tapes of her phone conversations with Gosek, she said. She never helped Gosek meet
schoolgirls, she said.
Gosek told Lundy he'd had sex with at least two high school girls before he asked for her help, she said.
Lundy taped him from September through December, then became upset with police for not moving fast enough, she said. But
she's learned in recent weeks that she was wrong and no longer has any complaints about the investigation, she said.
"I now know the police did a wonderful job, " she said. She would not say whether she testified before the grand jury.
Lundy, who's been out of work for a year because of an injury she suffered on the job, said she hopes any girls Gosek may have
victimized come forward by calling the FBI or state police.
He targeted girls with drug addictions and troubled backgrounds, she said. He knew Lundy's job as school monitor, which she's
had since 1986, put her in touch with students who were frequently in trouble, she said.
"He coached me on which girls to look for from broken homes, in trouble, " she said. "When children are sexually abused and
exploited like that, they feel like they have no voice and are powerless to do anything about it."
School officials were unaware of Gosek's requests or that Lundy was working with police, she said.
Lundy is the ex-wife of Oswego Deputy Police Chief George Lundy, who only recently became aware that Gosek had contacted her
and that she was involved in the investigation, she said. Two months after Gosek took office in 2000, he appointed George Lundy
deputy chief. The next year, Gosek named him acting police chief for four months.
George Lundy could not be reached for comment.
Jacqueline Lundy wrote last month about her role in the Gosek investigation on an Oswego politicalinterest Web site,
www.oswegonylion.com, under a fake name. The entry is no longer on the site.
Lundy, writing under the pseudonym "Monique, " said in the Web entry that she watched Gosek "lunge at" and "make out" with
the 20-year-old he believed was 14. Gosek told Lundy he wanted her to get girls out of school during the day and use them as his
sex toys, she said on the Web site.
The drug task force in Oswego first learned of Gosek's offers of drugs for sex with women at least three years before Lundy came
to them.
An Oswego woman, Gina Wallace, said she tipped off the task force in 2001 and started secretly taping Gosek's phone calls to her.
Former Oswego County District Attorney Dennis Hawthorne recently confirmed Wallace's account.
Court records allege Gosek was going through a third woman to use drugs to lure women into sex. That woman eventually
cooperated with investigators in a sting operation that resulted in Gosek's arrest at the motel in Salina. Her name has not been
made public.
Lundy's statements provide the earliest evidence that Gosek became interested in having sex with underage girls, not just
women, according to police and court records.
Staff writer John O'Brien can be reached at jobrien@syracuse.com and 470-2187.
Staff researcher Jan Dempsey contributed to this report.
Crime of intention
One of the two charges against former Oswego Mayor John Gosek is that tried by phone to solicit sex from someone he thought
was under 18. But the woman was actually 20 years old, according to Jacqueline Lundy, who says she provided Gosek access to
the woman while secretly working with state police.
The female's actual age doesn't matter in a case where someone is charged with using a phone to attempt to have sex with a
minor, as opposed to actually having sex with a minor, according to Syracuse defense lawyer Edward Z. Menkin.
Menkin, speaking in general and not specifically about Gosek's case, compared it to someone charged with soliciting sex over the
Internet from someone the defendant believes is a minor. It doesn't matter if the alleged victim turns out to be a 50yearold
undercover police officer, Menkin said.
When someone's charged with attempting to commit that crime, prosecutors only have to prove his intention, Menkin said.
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