Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

  CRAZY TOWN

  For my parents

  CONTENTS

  TIMELINE

  PROLOGUE

  1 Respect the Taxpayer

  2 Dougie Loved Politics

  3 The Canadian Kennedys

  4 Councillor Ford to Speak

  5 The Gravy Train

  6 He Won’t Give Up the Blow

  7 The Bier Markt

  8 The Dirty Dozen

  9 The Garrison Ball

  10 Pathological Liars

  11 For Sale

  12 Anything Else?

  13 Video, Schmideo

  14 Project Traveller

  15 Outright War

  16 Ford More Years

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  TIMELINE

  1956

  September 1

  Doug Ford Sr. and Diane Campbell are married.

  1962

  Doug Ford Sr. and Ted Herriott start Deco Adhesive Products.

  1969

  May 28

  Robert Bruce Ford is born at Humber Memorial Hospital in Etobicoke.

  1983/1984

  Rob Ford is a first-year student at Scarlett Heights Collegiate Institute. This is also his brother Doug Ford Jr.’s graduating year.

  1995

  June 8

  Doug Ford Sr. is elected in Etobicoke-Humber as a Progressive Conservative MPP in the Ontario government under Premier Mike Harris.

  1997

  November 10

  Rob Ford runs for Toronto City Council in Ward 3 Kingsway Humber. He finishes fourth with 9,366 votes.

  1998

  January 1

  The “megacity” is born. Seven municipal governments amalgamate to form the new City of Toronto.

  July 25

  Kathy Ford’s boyfriend, Michael Kiklas, dies after being gunned down by Kathy’s estranged husband, Ennio Stirpe.

  1999

  February 15

  Rob Ford is charged with drunk driving and possession of marijuana in Miami, Florida. (The drug charge would later be dropped.)

  May

  Doug Ford Sr. finishes his term as an MPP.

  2000

  August 12

  Rob Ford marries Renata Brejniak at All Saints Roman Catholic Church in Etobicoke.

  November 13

  Rob Ford is elected to Toronto City Council in Ward 2 Etobicoke North with 5,750 votes.

  2001

  Rob Ford is told he is no longer welcome to coach football at Newtonbrook Secondary School in North York after a heated altercation with a player.

  August

  Rookie councillor Rob Ford makes headlines after it is revealed that he spent just ten dollars of his office budget after six months in office. By contrast, Giorgio Mammoliti, the biggest spender on council, spent $43,150.

  2002

  March 6

  Councillor Rob Ford allegedly calls Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti a “Gino boy.”

  2003

  November 10

  Rob Ford is re-elected in Ward 2 with 79 percent of the vote.

  2005

  Rob and Renata Ford have a daughter, Stephanie.

  March 31

  Kathy Ford is accidentally shot in the head at her parents’ home by her boyfriend, Scott MacIntyre.

  July 19

  Councillor Rob Ford calls Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby a “waste of skin.” She calls him a “jerk.”

  2006

  April 15

  Security removes Rob Ford from a Toronto Maple Leafs NHL game after he drunkenly berates a couple in the crowd. When news of the incident breaks, Ford initially lies and says he wasn’t at the game. He later admits to having been there and apologizes.

  June 28

  During a council debate on grants for AIDS programs, Rob Ford says, “If you’re not doing needles and you’re not gay, you won’t get AIDS, probably.”

  September 22

  Doug Ford Sr. dies of cancer at the age of seventy-three.

  November 13

  Rob Ford is re-elected in Ward 2 with 66 percent of the vote.

  2007

  March 7

  Rob Ford tells council that cycling in a bike lane is like swimming with sharks. “Roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks. Not for people on bikes. And, you know, my heart bleeds for them when I hear someone gets killed, but it’s their own fault at the end of the day.”

  2008

  Rob and Renata Ford have their second child, a son named Douglas.

  March 5

  Rob Ford controversially suggests that “Oriental” people are “slowly taking over” because they work so hard. “Those Oriental people work like dogs,” he says.

  March 26

  Rob Ford is arrested and charged with domestic assault and threatening death against his wife, Renata. The charges are later dropped due to inconsistencies in Renata Ford’s testimony.

  2010

  March 25

  Rob Ford declares his candidacy for mayor.

  June 17

  News breaks that Rob Ford offered to help a man named Dieter Doneit-Henderson “score” OxyContin on the street. Doneit-Henderson secretly recorded their phone conversation.

  August 18

  The Toronto Sun reports that Rob Ford was charged with marijuana possession in Florida a decade earlier. The drunk driving charge comes out. Ford apologizes for his mistakes and his poll numbers go up.

  August 25

  City council orders Rob Ford to repay $3,150 he solicited from lobbyists for his private football foundation.

  October 25

  Rob Ford is elected mayor with 383,501 votes, or 47 percent of the total cast.

  December 7

  Hockey personality Don Cherry criticizes “pinkos” in a speech at Rob Ford’s inauguration ceremony.

  2011

  May 13

  Toronto’s audit committee votes to review Rob Ford’s campaign expenses.

  October 24

  The mayor calls 911 after a comedian from CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes shows up in his driveway.

  December 30

  The Toronto Star reveals police have been called to the mayor’s home for a handful of domestic incidents in recent months.

  2012

  January 11

  Kathy Ford’s estranged boyfriend, Scott MacIntyre, is arrested after walking into the mayor’s home, demanding Rob Ford pay back money MacIntyre says he is owed, and then threatening to kill him.

  January 17

  City council revolts against the mayor’s budget cuts in a 23–21 vote.

  February 7

  Mayor Rob Ford speaks, and then votes, on a motion to overturn the order requiring him to pay back $3,150 in football donations.

  March 12

  Lawyer Clayton Ruby announces he is filing a conflict-of-interest lawsuit against the mayor because of the February 7 vote. Ruby argues that Rob Ford broke the law when he spoke to, and then voted on, an item at council where he stood to benefit financially.

  March 17

  On St. Patrick’s Day, Rob Ford spends the night partying with friends, first at City Hall and then at a downtown bar called the Bier Markt. A waiter at the Bier Markt thinks he might have seen the mayor snort cocaine in a private room. A member of Ford’s staff later tells police he thought he saw Ford take an OxyContin pill.

  May 2

  Rob Ford confronts Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale in a public park behind his home.

  November 26

  A judge concludes that Rob Ford did violate the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act. He orders Ford out of office.

  2013

  January 25

  Rob Ford wins his confli
ct-of-interest appeal on a technicality. He remains as mayor.

  February 23

  The mayor shows up at a military ball impaired.

  He is asked to leave by a member of the organizing committee.

  March 7

  Former mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson accuses the mayor of groping her at an event.

  March 26

  The Toronto Star reports that the mayor’s staff want him to seek treatment for an alcohol issue. The paper reveals that Ford had been asked to leave the military ball after showing up “intoxicated.” The mayor calls the paper “pathological liars.”

  May 16

  The Toronto Star and Gawker reveal that Mayor Rob Ford has been filmed smoking what looks like crack cocaine. A drug dealer tried to sell the footage to both outlets for one hundred thousand dollars. Both publications reveal a photo of Ford standing in front of a yellow-brick house alongside three young men, one of whom had recently been shot dead. (The house would later be revealed as 15 Windsor Road, a suspected crack den.)

  May 24

  After eight days, the mayor makes an official first statement about the video story: “I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.” Rob Ford blames the Star for going after him.

  May 25

  The Globe and Mail publishes a story that alleges Councillor Doug Ford Jr. was a hash dealer in high school. The mayor’s brother denies this.

  June 1

  An Ipsos Reid poll shows that half of Toronto residents don’t believe the video story.

  June 13

  Police across Ontario launch a series of pre-dawn raids as part of Project Traveller, a massive investigation into drug and gun smuggling. The dealer who tried to sell the Star and Gawker the video is arrested, as are the two surviving men pictured alongside Ford in the infamous 15 Windsor Road photo.

  August 16

  The Star reports that Alexander “Sandro” Lisi, a friend of, and occasional driver for, the mayor, is under police investigation for trying to obtain the video.

  October 1

  Sandro Lisi is arrested and charged with drug offences, including trafficking marijuana. His arrest is part of a covert police investigation dubbed Project Brazen 2, a probe aimed at the mayor’s activities.

  October 31

  On the day that hundreds of pages of search warrant documents connected to Project Brazen 2 are released—documents that show suspicious package handoffs between Sandro Lisi and Rob Ford—Police Chief Bill Blair reveals that Toronto police have recovered the “crack video.” Lisi is charged with extortion in connection with attempts to recover the video.

  November 5

  Rob Ford admits to having smoked crack while in “one of my drunken stupors.” He says he won’t resign or take health leave.

  November 7

  A second video of Rob Ford surfaces. The mayor appears impaired and in a rage, pacing around a room and punching the air, saying, “I’m gonna kill that fucking guy. I’m telling you, it’s first-degree murder.” The mayor maintains he will not resign.

  November 18

  Toronto City Council strips Mayor Rob Ford of most of his powers, reducing his budget, staff, and authority to develop policy. The mayor declares “war.”

  PROLOGUE

  Mohamed Farah was an hour late.

  Once more, I scanned the dimly lit plaza trying to spot him. Maybe he was hiding somewhere, watching us, making sure we had indeed come alone.

  I tried to make out the faces of the young men smoking in front of Istar Restaurant, a popular halal joint where diners could see out but you couldn’t see in. None of them looked familiar.

  Maybe he was inside? It was about 10:30 P.M. Our car was parked at the far end, in front of a bank, as instructed.

  “God, he better show up this time,” I said to my colleague Kevin Donovan.

  This would be our third attempt at seeing the video.

  It had been a month, almost to the day, since Farah called me on my cell phone with a cryptic news tip. It was 9 A.M. on Easter Monday 2013, and I’d been trying to sleep in. I shuffled out of bed, irritated that someone was calling so early on a holiday.

  “Robyn speaking,” I said.

  “Robyn Doolittle, from the Toronto Star?”

  I didn’t recognize the man’s voice. It was deep and had that nonchalant drawl that young cool guys tend to use.

  “Yep. Who am I speaking with?”

  “I have some information I think you’d like to see,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone … it’s about a prominent Toronto politician.”

  A week earlier, I’d co-written a controversial piece with Kevin Donovan about the mayor of Toronto’s struggle with alcohol. I suspected the caller was talking about Rob Ford.

  He claimed to be in possession of a very incriminating video, but he refused to say anything more on the phone. He wanted to meet as soon as possible. “I’ll come to you,” he offered.

  That was encouraging. If he was willing to make the trip, odds were he wasn’t completely without credibility.

  Shortly before noon, I arrived at a crowded Starbucks in a hipster neighbourhood just outside of downtown Toronto.

  “Robyn?”

  I spun around to see a clean-cut East African–looking guy who seemed about my age, somewhere in his late twenties, maybe early thirties.

  “I’m Mohamed,” he said, extending a hand.

  He was thickly built, like a football player, and a good head taller than me, wearing a button-up shirt and dark baggy jeans that had a bit of a shimmer to them—hip hop meets business casual. We headed to a nearby park and settled on a bench by the soccer field.

  Farah told me he volunteered with Somali youth up in Rexdale—a troubled neighbourhood in Toronto’s northwest end not far from where Ford lived—and that he’d read my story about the mayor and alcohol.

  “It’s much worse than that,” Farah said.

  I knew this was true. For a year and a half I’d been investigating whether the mayor had a substance abuse issue. To an outsider, what Farah said next might have sounded unbelievable. But not to me.

  “The mayor is smoking drugs. Crack cocaine.” Farah searched my face to see if I believed him, but I kept a blank expression. “And I have a video of it.”

  “Did you bring it?”

  “I can’t let you see it yet. But I brought this.” He pulled out a silver iPad.

  He thumbed around for a few seconds, then turned it towards me. There was a photo of Ford, grinning and flushed, his blond hair matted and messy, with three men who looked to be in their early twenties. Ford, who was wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt, had his arms around two of them. One of the guys was making a “west side” gesture. Another in a dark hood was flashing his middle finger while gripping a beer bottle. It was shot outside at night. The group was standing in front of a yellow-brick garage with a big black door. There was snow on the ground.

  Was this photo part of the video?

  No, Farah said, but it showed the mayor in front of a crack house with men connected to the drug trade. And “that one,” he continued, pointing to the hooded man with the beer bottle, “is Anthony Smith. He was killed outside Loki nightclub last week.”

  Farah had my attention.

  He put the iPad away and the conversation returned to the video. Farah claimed the footage was shot by a young crack dealer. He swore that it clearly showed the mayor inhaling from a crack pipe, complaining about minorities, and calling Justin Trudeau, the leader of the federal Liberal Party, “a fag.” Farah alleged that his friends had been selling drugs to the mayor for a long time, but Smith’s death had everyone scared. The dealer wanted out. He wanted to move to Alberta and start over. Farah told me he had agreed to help.

  Here came the catch.

  They wanted a hundred thousand dollars for the footage.

  THAT WAS thirty-three days earlier.

  Now, I was waiting in a grungy plaza parking lot in a bad part of town with Kevin Donova
n, passing the time by theorizing what was going to happen—if anything. Would they show us the video right there in the car? Would it be a group of people? Or just Farah and the dealer? What if they wanted to drive us somewhere?

  The later it got, the more I was convinced we were waiting for no one. Then out of nowhere a black sedan pulled up beside us. It was Farah. He wasn’t getting out of the car.

  He phoned me from feet away. “Leave your cell phones. No bags. No purses. And get in.”

  I sat in the front. Donovan climbed into the back. Farah was breathing quickly. He didn’t say anything as we turned left onto Dixon Road, a busy street in a part of Toronto called Etobicoke. A few minutes later, he pulled into a dark parking lot behind a six-tower condo complex that looked worse than some subsidized housing in the city. We parked behind 320 Dixon.

  Farah called his guy. “He’s coming,” he told us.

  A skinny Somali-looking man in a wrinkled black T-shirt appeared out of the darkness. He got in the back with Donovan. I guessed he wasn’t much older than twenty-five. He had a peculiar look about him, his face sort of caved in on itself, with

  his eyes, nose, and mouth squishing together between a large forehead and pointy jawline. His black hair was cut close to his head, and his arms were pocked with thick scabs. Donovan and I introduced ourselves, but he didn’t want to talk and never gave his name. He pulled out an iPhone and hit play.