Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Page 10

  It would be a fleeting moment of calm.

  One morning in early June, Kouvalis was out jogging with Ford as part of a new routine. Kouvalis wanted Ford to lose weight for the sake of his health, so he was making him exercise. It helped anchor the day, and it gave Kouvalis quality one-on-one time with the candidate. On this particular run, Ford confided that he’d been talking again to Doneit-Henderson, and that the Star’s City Hall bureau chief, David Rider, seemed to know about it. Rider had been the one who wrote the original story with Doneit-Henderson.

  “Why would Rider give a shit?” Kouvalis asked suspiciously. Ford shrugged.

  Kouvalis got worried. That day, he asked around the press gallery, tested the waters with Rider, pressed Ford some more. By the end of the day, he was able to put it together. And what he saw meant serious trouble for Rob Ford.

  The campaign was now operating out of a plaza at 245 Dixon Road in Etobicoke. The office was loud, so Kouvalis liked to sit outside in his car to make calls. “Hey, Fraser, can you come see me?” Kouvalis asked the young communications staffer. When Fraser Macdonald got to the car, Kouvalis was smoking with the windows down. The music was on. This was Nick’s office.

  Kouvalis looked sombre. “This is serious,” he said as Macdonald climbed into the passenger seat. Kouvalis said he believed that that HIV-positive man from the paper, Doneit-Henderson, had been phoning Rob since the interview. Kouvalis suspected they’d been discussing Doneit-Henderson’s drug use and that the man had secretly recorded one of those talks, a conversation that may have included their candidate offering to help buy Doneit-Henderson drugs. Macdonald sat wide-eyed. But there was more. It looked like the Star had a copy of it. “You’ve gotta get that tape. I need to hear what’s on it,” Kouvalis said. “I don’t care what you do.”

  Macdonald went home and got to work. Doneit-Henderson had a Twitter account and had alluded to the recording in his updates. He’d been boasting that he had “engh 2 destroy th entire Ford Family Legacy.” Macdonald decided to befriend him online. He knew Doneit-Henderson wasn’t going to open up to a Ford staffer, so he created a fake persona. He pulled a random photo of a woman off the internet and put a Smitherman “twibbon”—a digital campaign button you can pin to a profile photo—on it. She needed a name. He wanted it to sound quintessentially downtown. Someone who would vote for George Smitherman. “Queens Quay” popped into his head, the street that ran along the waterfront at the foot of Yonge Street, the home of the Toronto Star. With that, @QueensQuayKaren was born. Macdonald wrote a bio: “Downtown Toronto gal who likes politics, my cat Mittens, and a good book.” He started the account that night, June 11. It was duplicitous, yes. But politics was a blood sport and espionage was part of the game.

  After posting a few tweets to attract followers and so make the account look more legitimate, Macdonald moved in on his quarry. “@DeiterDH What have you got on @robfordteam? Nothing I’d like to see more than to bring him down!”

  Doneit-Henderson responded, and the two started to exchange private messages. Doneit-Henderson told “Karen” about the tape and forwarded a link to a hosting site where the audio could be downloaded.

  “I got it—just starting to listen! Who else has heard this???!?” @QueensQuayKaren replied.

  Most of the fifty-two-minute recording was rambling and nonsensical. And then Macdonald heard it. Sitting alone in a secluded office at Deco, he put his head in his hands. Ford—a 2010 mayoral candidate—could clearly be heard offering to help Doneit-Henderson “score” OxyContin on the street.

  It’s over, he thought.

  Macdonald called Kouvalis on his cell phone, then Adrienne Batra, newly hired as head of communications. She was downtown with Ford at the time. Kouvalis told him, “Talk to no one about this.” Macdonald was to wait at Deco and the other two would meet him there, away from the rest of the staff at the official campaign office. Both arrived within an hour.

  The audio file indicated the tape was made on June 4. Doneit-Henderson, who suffered from fibromyalgia, had called Ford for help finding OxyContin, a time-release painkiller that when taken incorrectly can be highly addictive. On the street it’s called hillbilly heroin.

  DONEIT-HENDERSON: Can you find OxyContin for me,

  Rob?

  FORD: Huh?

  DONEIT-HENDERSON: Can you find OxyContin, so I can get on the medication? …

  FORD: I’ll try, buddy, I’ll try. I don’t know this shit, but I’ll fucking try to find it.

  DONEIT-HENDERSON: How about your brother mentioned your guys’ doctor. Did you guys ever look … go into … look into that?

  FORD: He said that you’ve got to come personally.

  DONEIT-HENDERSON: Oh, well. Hey, listen, I’m ready to go. I mean, I’d even go down there now in all this pain.

  FORD: How much does OxyContin go for on the street— so I have an idea?

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  FORD: Leave this with me. Call Doug tomorrow, we’ll see if I can’t, uh, I know I won’t be able to. But I have no idea. Fuck, you know, I don’t know any drug dealers at all.

  Batra sighed. “Oh, you can’t spin that.”

  But they had to try something. They went over the facts. If the Star had this tape, why wasn’t it publishing the story? Was it possible the paper was saving it for closer to the election? In fact, there was no Star plot to drop the Dieter bomb right before election day. The Star’s city editor was uncomfortable about the paper having introduced Doneit-Henderson to Ford. The story had been axed. But the Ford camp didn’t know that.

  On the surface, things were going well. Ford had just caught Smitherman in the polls, though a good chunk of voters remained undecided. It made the tape seem even more like an unexploded bomb.

  Ford took the matter to his lawyer. Was there any legal recourse to prevent it from being published, given that he had been recorded without knowing it? Nope. In Canada, as long as one person was aware a conversation was being recorded, it was legally admissible.

  They knew what they had to do. “We’ll have to get ahead of it, then,” Kouvalis said. If he couldn’t prevent the recording from coming out, then the best option would be to orchestrate its release. The Ford brothers were dead against this strategy. They wanted to test their luck. Maybe it would never come out. And in fact, Rob Ford was still denying he’d even made the comments, even though he knew Kouvalis had listened to the tape. Eventually, Kouvalis played it for the entire family— Diane, Randy, and Doug. Rob was embarrassed. The Fords still wanted to let it go.

  Kouvalis wasn’t having it. The Ford camp leaked it to a friendly news organization. Toronto Sun columnist Sue-Ann Levy was the obvious choice. She was one of Ford’s biggest cheerleaders.

  The play would be to frame him as the victim. He was just trying to be nice to an emotionally unstable person. He never intended to buy the man drugs. And look how he was repaid. A set-up.

  Levy’s article, published on June 17, was written with a predictably sympathetic spin.

  City hall’s “enfant terrible”—mayoralty candidate Rob Ford—insists he only was trying to help someone in trouble when he offered to try to find an HIV-positive man some OxyContin on the street.

  “I personally feel sorry for him … he needs help … he needs something,” Ford said Wednesday.

  The highly questionable offer comes out in a 52-minute conversation Ford had with Dieter Doneit-Henderson on the evening of June 4, a tape of which was obtained by the Toronto Sun.

  The campaign held a press conference in front of Deco’s office building the morning the story ran. Up until that point, Randy had kept a low profile on the campaign, helping with strategy and signage and volunteering at events. Given the severity of the situation, Doug wanted his oldest brother involved, to show the Fords were standing together. So when the candidate emerged, he was accompanied by both of his brothers as well as Batra. (There had actually been a big fight with Randy—who we
nt by the nickname Blackjack—over his cowboy hat. Ford’s staff told him it wasn’t appropriate for the event. But he wore it everywhere except in the shower and in bed. Eventually, Randy gave in.)

  “I feel that I have been set up,” Ford told reporters. “There are people out there that will do everything in their power to make sure that I’m not mayor of this great city.… I said what I needed to say to get this person off the phone without provoking him.… His tenor became threatening. I feared for my family. He clearly said on the tape that he could see my house.” The matter was now in the hands of the police, Ford concluded.

  The public gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  No charges were ever laid.

  THE FORD CAMPAIGN had cleared one big hurdle, just in time for another.

  In mid-July, Toronto Star investigative reporter Robert Cribb and education reporter Kristin Rushowy learned that Ford had “quietly [been] asked to stop coaching” football at a Toronto high school after an incident with a player. This was the confrontation at Newtonbrook Secondary School back in 2001, when Ford got into it with a player he thought wasn’t performing well. Witnesses disagreed about whether the altercation was physical. The story explained: “Ford, one of his players and an assistant coach at the time deny any physical contact took place. But a parent and another player say Ford aggressively manhandled the student in anger. Ford vigorously denied the allegations saying he’s never assaulted a player and called the claims a ‘political’ attack on his candidacy.”

  Ford was furious with the story. It went after the thing he cared about most: his work coaching football. The Ford team drummed up a brilliant rebuttal. They completely ignored the substance of the article—that Rob had been fired from the job for losing his temper—and fixated on the physical aspect, which was always in dispute. Adrienne Batra told the National Post the story was “outrageous, it’s slanderous and patently incorrect.”

  The campaign team tracked down the former player at a military base and put him in touch with The Globe and Mail. “That’s completely untrue,” Jonathan Gordon, then twenty-five, told the Globe when asked if Ford had shaken or slapped him. “Trust me, if he had slapped me I would have beat the crap out of him. No word of a lie.” Gordon said Ford had given a halftime speech that he didn’t like. He deliberately blew the next play then walked off the field. “Ford lost his temper, started yelling at me,” Gordon told the Globe. “I took my helmet off, threw it off the field [and] basically told him he ‘can go fuck himself.’ We got into a heated argument. We were pretty close, face to face, and then we got separated by the assistant coach and that was it.”

  Ford sent a notice of libel to the Star—the first step in a lawsuit, which he never pursued—and an edict was issued to his campaign staff that no one should speak to the paper from then on. Canada’s largest newspaper stopped receiving Ford’s press releases. It was the beginning of what would become known as the Ford Freeze. According to sources within the campaign, the Freeze was never meant to be permanent, but Ford fans seemed to love it. The man of the people was taking on the elites. The Ford campaign raised tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of days.

  Hurdles kept appearing as the weeks went by, and Ford cleared every one.

  When John Tory announced he was reconsidering a run, Kouvalis whipped up a cartoon attack ad, partly to try to shake the conservative radio host’s confidence and partly to placate Doug, who was demanding the campaign go on the offensive. Tory could have derailed Ford’s campaign. The former leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party had all the right-wing bona fides, plus he looked and acted mayoral. Ford had actually been one of Tory’s biggest supporters in 2003. “If Tory had got in, he would have won,” Kouvalis said. The video started with a speeding gravy train whipping past the CN Tower and knocking out a wimpylooking Tory, who was trying in vain to stop it. Then superhero Rob Ford swooped in to save the day. It was sort of lame, but it got news coverage. Next, Kouvalis had a staffer anonymously call in to Tory’s radio show to question the host’s integrity. Looking back, Tory tells me the character attacks had nothing to do with his decision to stay out of the race. “If you look at the campaigns I’ve been through, my skin has thickened up,” he said. The real thing that gave Tory pause was his numbers in the inner suburbs.

  Internal polling showed Tory was neck-and-neck with Ford in Etobicoke. Tory had appeal across the city, including in the core, but he wasn’t far enough ahead in the old boroughs.

  This was what had done him in in the 2003 race against David Miller. Tory had carried twenty-one of the forty-four wards, including most of the suburban terrain, but he didn’t win by high enough margins. When the ballots were counted, Miller had edged him out after taking twenty-two wards, with support concentrated in the old City of Toronto. (The fourthplace candidate, John Nunziata, won one ward.)

  As veteran political operative John Laschinger explains, conservative candidates running in Toronto need to own the suburban vote, but left-wingers can’t build a winning coalition with the downtown alone. “In order to win an election in Toronto, you have to do reasonably well in Scarborough and North York. That’s just over half of the total population. You don’t have to win them, but you can’t lose by more than 20 to 25 points. In Scarborough, you have to win at least 30 to 35 percent or you’re toast.” (Laschinger, who has worked on dozens of campaigns at every level of government, is the man who delivered Miller’s victory in 2003.)

  For Tory, his 2010 numbers looked even less favourable. In August he made it clear he was definitely staying out.

  With three months to go, the polls on his side, and no John Tory to worry about, it was now Ford’s race to lose. This was the time when a typical candidate would ease off and play it safe to avoid making unforced errors.

  But the missteps kept coming.

  There was the hasty endorsement of a Christian fundamentalist, Pastor Wendell Brereton, who was running for council and believed that same-sex marriage could “dismantle” democratic civilization. In a press conference with Ford and Brereton outside City Hall, reporters asked Ford if that meant he opposed gay marriage. “We’re together. We have the same thoughts.… I support traditional marriage. I always have. But if people want to, to each their own. I’m not worried about what people do in their private life. I look out for taxpayers’ money.”

  Sources on Ford’s staff say the event was “a bad one for us.” Most of the staff heard about the endorsement an hour before the press conference. The Ford brothers had done it on their own. Brereton had not been vetted.

  A week later, Ford seemed to step in it again. During a televised debate on CP24, a Tamil in the audience asked how the city should handle immigrant refugees. Ford responded, “We can’t even deal with the 2.5 million people in the city. I think it’s more important that we take care of the people now before we start bringing in more.” His campaign office was inundated with calls and emails. They were messages of support—many from immigrants.

  When Ford suggested to the Toronto Sun’s editorial board— without any specific proof—that council was corrupt, many voters ate it up. The allegation infuriated sitting mayor David Miller and numerous councillors from across the spectrum. Even Doug Holyday, the Fords’ old family friend and future deputy mayor, took issue. “Corruption is a strong term, and I think in order to use it, you have to have proof,” he said. “I really don’t have proof of corruption here and I don’t know that anybody else has.” It didn’t matter. Ford’s supporters loved it.

  For anyone else, these could have been major gaffes. But the regular rules didn’t apply to Rob Ford. On August 12, a week after the Brereton press conference, a telephone survey from Pollstra Research showed Ford had pulled way ahead. He was at 37.6 percent, while Smitherman was barely treading water at 28.7 percent.

  A week later, when Ford’s 1999 drunk driving and marijuana story surfaced, an Ipsos Reid poll showed he had widened his lead to 11 points. This was when Kouvalis knew they’d won. The mom
entum continued to election day.

  Torontonians knew Ford was flawed, but enough of them were prepared to accept his rough edges because his message of ending City Hall waste was clear. George Smitherman’s director of communications says that focus groups and polling revealed that no one had any idea what their candidate stood for. “We had enough policy to run a small country. There was a substantive plan behind George, but there was also too much policy. It confused our key messages with voters,” said Baranski. “We lost the outsider [status]. The ‘agent of change’ mantra belonged to Rob Ford, and this guy had been on council a number of terms.”

  Smitherman’s campaign manager, Bruce Davis, said he knew they were in serious trouble when at a focus group a woman announced, “If I have to choose between someone who wastes our money and someone who beats their wife, I’ll choose the person who beats their wife.” Even a last-ditch attempt in which Smitherman scrapped every message except “I’m not Rob Ford” couldn’t slow the Etobicoke juggernaut.

  In the end, it wasn’t even close.

  On October 25, 2010, Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto in a landslide.

  INAUGURATION DAY at City Hall, December 7, 2010.

  Hundreds of visitors, mostly of the Ford Nation persuasion, had crowded around a giant projector screen in the groundfloor rotunda to watch the ceremony. Many had camped out for hours. They were wearing Ford campaign buttons and T-shirts. They’d fashioned hats out of “Ford for Mayor” bumper stickers. They were waving Canadian flags, sometimes also decorated with “Ford for Mayor” bumper stickers.

  “He’s the best Christmas present Toronto could get.… I’m just so excited to be here,” gushed Antionette Wassilyn, who had taken the day off work to attend.