Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

  Dale started at the beginning.

  Earlier that day, probably around the time I was taping those sheets of paper to the boardroom walls, one of Dale’s sources called with a story idea. The mayor was trying to buy a chunk of city parkland that was next to his Etobicoke property. It was an unusual request. In a letter to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, Rob and Renata Ford had said they needed it to build a fence around their home for “safety” reasons. This perplexed Dale. The Fords’ backyard was already fenced. He wondered how the parcel of land would help with security.

  Most reporters would have just written around that hole in the logic. But Dale isn’t most reporters. He wrote an early story to be posted on the Star’s website and drove to Etobicoke to see for himself the land Ford wanted to buy. He was irritated about having to miss a documentary he’d bought tickets to weeks before.

  It was 7:30 P.M. and Dale was in the park behind the Fords’ fenced backyard, trying to identify the piece of parkland in question. The summer sun meant it was still bright. Standing about fifteen metres from the back of the Fords’ property, Dale tried to take a photo of a group of trees he thought might be on the right spot—maybe he would post it on Twitter—but his BlackBerry died before the photo saved. Moments later, the mayor came barrelling around the corner, wearing a white Team Ford campaign T-shirt, sweatpants, and flip-flops. “Hey, buddy,” he hollered. “What are you doing? Are you spying on me? Are you spying on me? Are you spying on me?”

  Dale was confused. Astonished. He explained that he was there to look at the parkland Ford had applied to purchase. The mayor kept coming at him, screaming about him spying. Then Ford cocked his fist and charged in a full-out sprint.

  “Mayor Ford,” Dale yelled, “I’m writing about the land! I’m just looking at the land! You’re trying to buy the TRCA land!”

  Dale fumbled for his recorder. He wanted to document whatever was about to happen.

  Ford yelled, “Drop your phone! Drop your phone now!”

  Dale tried to run, but Ford shuffled left, then right, blocking his path as if it were some sort of football game. Finally, Dale threw his phone and recorder to the ground—“Take them!”— and made a break for it.

  The moment Dale fled, Ford went back to his house and called staff. They saw an opportunity and began calling friendly media. Ford held a press conference in his front yard to announce he had caught Dale standing on cinder blocks, looking into his backyard, taking photos of his children. “It was, like, unbelievable what he was doing. And I caught the guy cold. It’s unbelievable what he did. And I’m not gonna put up with it. I’ve got the police here, and if I have to press charges I will. And it’s pretty emotional. It’s tough on my neighbour. It’s tough on my family.”

  The next morning, Ford elaborated on Jerry Agar’s Newstalk 1010 radio show. “My neighbour knocked on my door at about eight o’clock. I was helping my daughter with her homework, and he said—my neighbour’s a senior, he’s about seventy-five years old—and he said, ‘There’s some guy taking pictures out in your backyard.’”

  In the mayor’s version, he had calmly asked Dale what he was doing. “He starts throwing everything on the ground. ‘Oh, don’t hit me, don’t hit me.’ He was, like, in panic mode. Like a deer caught in the headlights.… [I said], ‘Hey, I’m not touching ya.… But what are you doing? Like, you know, taking pictures of my kids? Of my family? You know, are you a sicko? What’s your problem?’… He was standing on cinder blocks. Up against my, the back of my fence.”

  Ford claimed he had security footage that showed Dale’s “head bopping up and down.” Agar asked the mayor about Dale’s claim that Ford had ordered him to drop his phone. “He voluntarily gave this stuff up. So, it wasn’t like I, you know, stole his money or his keys,” Ford said. “Honestly, I was so upset, I didn’t know if I was gonna hit him or not. And I said, No, no, keep your cool, Rob.… As the mayor, you can’t do that. You have to have control.”

  The bottom line, Ford concluded, was that the Toronto Star couldn’t be trusted. “They are liars.”

  The Twittersphere dubbed the fiasco #Fencegate. (Most of Ford’s scandals earned a Watergate-inspired name on Twitter. There would later be #Assgate, when former mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson accused Ford of groping her, and, of course, #Crackgate.)

  Back at the paper, Dale wrote a first-person account which was posted online that same night. But almost all of the coverage went with the mayor’s inaccurate version. The headline on the Toronto Sun’s story was “Mayor Nabs Reporter: Ford Furious After Catching Star Correspondent Taking Pictures of His House from Backyard.” Respected CBC anchor Anne-Marie Mediwake asked the mayor the next day, “I want to start with the issue of private security. You’ve said in the past that you don’t want it. But do incidents like this prove that maybe you need it?” Global TV anchor Kris Reyes tweeted, “Your reaction to Daniel Dale and the Rob Ford story. Mayor’s reax, justified?”

  Given Ford’s history of taking liberties with the truth when his back was against a wall—the Maple Leafs game, the marijuana charge, for example—the media coverage was exceptionally frustrating.

  A week after the incident, the police closed the case. The police found no photos of the mayor’s family—or his backyard, for that matter—on Dale’s phone, which had been in their possession since that evening. Security footage proved that Dale did not look over the fence. In fact, he’d never been close to it.

  Dale had been completely exonerated, but it didn’t get the same coverage. A lot of people tuned in only to that first press conference in the mayor’s front yard, where Ford’s account had gone unchallenged. For the next year, many pundits, columnists, and Ford supporters were still talking about Dale snooping around the mayor’s backyard. (In December 2013, a year and a half after the fence incident, Ford was forced to admit he’d made it all up.)

  The furor was strong enough that my story about staff counselling the mayor to enter an alcohol rehab program was shelved. Dale felt awful; he’d guessed from the start what the result would be. With the Star a player in the latest mayoral controversy, it wasn’t the right time. “It will run eventually. Something else will happen,” my editor, Graham Parley, predicted.

  I whittled my investigation down to a piece about the mayor’s dwindling workload, with the “why” left unanswered.

  Meanwhile, the night after Ford confronted Dale, the mayor went down to Sullie Gorman’s pub at the Royal York Plaza, near his mother’s home. It was the kind of tucked-away watering hole where everyone knew everybody, and people, usually, kept their mouths shut.

  According to someone who was there that night, Ford started the evening at a Bank of Montreal ATM. He was meeting a well-known cocaine dealer in Etobicoke. “He was trying to take out five hundred dollars, but it wouldn’t let him. He was getting really, really angry.” Next, the patron says, Ford was inside, offering to buy shots for a group of women.

  He was “dancing up a storm” and kept making trips to the washroom. Outside the bar, Ford was stumbling and rambling— mostly about wanting to fight a Star reporter. He lit up a joint in the parking lot.

  “It wasn’t like he was hiding it or anything,” said the patron.

  EIGHT

  THE DIRTY

  DOZEN

  With two minutes until showtime, Councillor Doug Ford bounded into the Newstalk 1010 studio, giddily clutching a newspaper article he had torn out of the National Post. He pushed it up against the glass for the half-dozen reporters who had made the trip uptown to watch the show live from the control room. Satisfied that everyone had their shot, Doug Jr. settled into his black swivel chair beside the mayor and popped on his headphones.

  At 1:06 P.M., the familiar jingle boomed from the speakers and the smooth-talking radio announcer introduced the pair: “You’re listening to The City with Mayor Rob Ford and Councillor Doug Ford on Newstalk 1010.” It was their first show back after a nearly three-month hiatus.

  “Well, Rob,” Dou
g said, “how was the summer? Uneventful?”

  The quip earned a chuckle from those looking on.

  It was September 16, 2012, and Rob Ford was in all kinds of trouble. His job was in jeopardy. Earlier in the year, Clayton Ruby had taken him to court for allegedly violating municipal conflict-of-interest laws. As a councillor, Ford had used city letterhead to solicit donations from lobbyists for his football charity. He had been ordered by the previous council to repay that money, but never did. As mayor, he had asked the current council to undo that penalty, and it obliged. However, Ford had cast a vote in his own favour, and if a judge agreed that his vote constituted a conflict of interest, the penalty was mandatory removal from office. The trial had just finished, and Ford’s testimony had not gone well.

  That was just one of the problems the mayor was dealing with. Days earlier, The Globe and Mail had revealed that Ford was using his staff and city cell phones to help run his football team. Never mind that this use of taxpayers’ dollars undermined the bedrock of the Ford platform, the mayor’s bigger problem was that a week earlier he had testified under oath that he no longer used city resources for football activities. The mayor was also embroiled in a six-million-dollar defamation lawsuit, a case that would soon be in court. Plus, his campaign finances were being audited.

  It was all too much for brother Doug. “You know, folks, let’s jump on this right from the get-go,” he said into the radio microphone. “There’s a double standard now.” In his garbled fashion, Doug said that environmentalists—“the tree huggers association”—had lost their grants and were bent on revenge. They were to blame for Rob’s court problems.

  He held up the National Post article. “They’re all interconnected here, folks. It’s the unions,” he said. “It’s just a big circle. I call ’em the dirty dozen.”

  The Fords had a habit of blaming the media for their troubles. But on this front, the councillor had a point. Most of Rob Ford’s legal problems did in fact intersect with a small group of brainy left-wing activists who knew the city bylaws, understood the mechanisms to have them enforced, and revelled in any opportunity to use those rules against the mayor.

  Leading that charge was a twenty-something labour relations officer with a mouthful for a last name. Or, as Doug Ford calls him, “that little prick.”

  ADAM CHALEFF-FREUDENTHALER was not a typical twenty-six-year-old. By early 2011, he had been taking on people in power for the last decade, and he understood how to work the media. As a teenager, Chaleff-Freudenthaler was a member of the Toronto Youth Cabinet. He parlayed that experience into a position on the Toronto Library Board. In 2010, Chaleff-Freudenthaler had run, unsuccessfully, to be a school board trustee. In high school, he co-founded a province-wide network of student activists. By sixteen, he had been arrested with three others while protesting against then-premier Mike Harris. Police tossed the group in the back of a van and held them for more than nine hours without charge, including three hours in a cell. After a formal complaint, the police service was forced to apologize and Chaleff-Freudenthaler was awarded twenty thousand dollars. Chances are, between 2001 and 2006, if students were fighting against something—Pepsi in public school vending machines, the invasion of Iraq, loopholes in tobacco advertising laws, raises in tuition fees, school funding cuts, public space restrictions—Chaleff-Freudenthaler had a hand in it. A decade ago, Toronto’s left-wing weekly NOW magazine named him one of “10 Teens Taking Over.” In the magazine’s Q&A, he was asked, “Why are people over 20 full of shit?” Chaleff-Freudenthaler answered, “They’re not full of shit. They’re just broken by the myths and lies used to oppress Joe/Jane Citizen.” He was exactly the kind of “left-wing kook” Don Cherry had been talking about. And he was one of the “dirty dozen” included in that National Post clipping Doug Ford had been waving around at the radio studio.

  He had begun his journey onto Doug Ford’s so-called dirty dozen list the morning of April 6, 2011, when he read a Globe and Mail story by freelance writer John Lorinc which claimed that the Ford family corporation, Doug Ford Holdings, had spent $69,722.31 on mayoral campaign expenses such as salaries, polling, and fundraising overhead. Corporations and unions are not allowed to donate to municipal campaigns, and candidates are allowed to borrow money only from banks or other recognized lending institutions. What troubled Chaleff-Freudenthaler most was the possibility that Deco Labels had given Ford’s mayoralty campaign an improper loan.

  Chaleff-Freudenthaler was intrigued. He emailed his friend Max Reed, who had recently graduated from law school. “Any interest in making [an] application to the Ontario Superior Court on Rob Ford’s improper campaign finance accounting tricks?” Reed replied twenty minutes later: “Sounds like fun. Can you send me the name of the relevant bylaws? If you’re serious, there’s a number of things to talk about.”

  The pair headed to City Hall to sign out the Ford campaign’s thick stack of financial records. They sat at a small wooden table in the clerk’s office and spent two hours rifling through pages of receipts, invoices, time sheets, donor records, and official paperwork, and checked them against the monthly spreadsheets. They researched the Municipal Elections Act and realized what they were dealing with: penalties for some of the alleged offences included removal from office. Neither of these rabble-rousers thought that would ever happen, but it could generate some headlines.

  In May 2011, Chaleff-Freudenthaler and Reed submitted their findings to the compliance audit committee, a panel of three citizen experts. To the immense annoyance of the mayor, the three-member panel voted unanimously to audit Ford’s campaign expenses.

  Chaleff-Freudenthaler and Reed ended up filing eight other audit requests against four councillors—including Doug Ford for his councillor campaign, a request that the compliance audit committee rejected—and four unelected candidates. The duo’s work inspired them to co-found the accountability watchdog Fair Elections Toronto.

  ON JULY 13, 2011, two months after filing the audit requests, Chaleff-Freudenthaler was at City Hall to watch a council meeting. He had just finished chatting with a councillor near the entrance to the council chamber and was making his way to the elevator when an angry Doug Ford spotted him.

  “Hey, you’re the guy with the audits,” Doug said. Chaleff-Freudenthaler just stood there, startled. “Well, buddy, [you] better make sure you get your facts right.”

  Chaleff-Freudenthaler tried to walk away, but Doug kept at him, demanding to know if he was the person launching all the campaign audits. Chaleff-Freudenthaler said he was.

  “What goes around comes around,” Doug said.

  “[Are you] threatening me?” Chaleff-Freudenthaler asked.

  The councillor seemed to realize he had crossed a line. He turned and walked away.

  Chaleff-Freudenthaler, true to form, responded. He wrote a letter to the integrity commissioner in which he accused the mayor’s brother of violating the Code of Conduct for members of council. “All members of Council have a duty to treat members of the public, one another, and staff appropriately and without abuse, bullying or intimidation, and to ensure that their work environment is free from discrimination and harassment,” the Code of Conduct reads. Six months later, on January 30, 2012, Integrity Commissioner Janet Leiper concluded that the mayor’s brother should formally apologize. It was one of those little Ford sideshows that gets a lot of attention on Twitter. But something much more serious came out of the integrity commissioner’s office that day. Something that would set off a chain of events that, briefly, cost Rob Ford his job.

  The same day Leiper slapped Doug Ford on the wrist, essentially for his aggressiveness, she released a separate report reprimanding the mayor. In a meeting in August 2010, at the integrity commissioner’s request, city council had ordered Councillor Rob Ford to repay the $3,150 in donations he had solicited from lobbyists for his football foundation. Over the next thirteen months Leiper contacted Ford six times to see if this had been done. Ford finally responded in late October 2011 with l
etters from three donors indicating they didn’t want their money back. Leiper was not impressed. She wanted to bring the issue back up at the next council meeting and demand Ford “provide proof of reimbursement” by the beginning of March 2012. But there was one big difference between the council meeting in August 2010 and the one coming up in February 2012. Rob Ford was now the mayor.

  It’s important to note that the City of Toronto has a fraught history with lobbyists. In the aftermath of the MFP computer leasing scandal, a public inquiry revealed that city officials were being wined and dined—with lavish dinners, golf games, expensive hockey tickets—by MFP salesman Dash Domi, the brother of hockey star Tie Domi, the famous Toronto Maple Leaf. Madam Justice Denise Bellamy concluded that there had been “inappropriately close relationships” between lobbyists and public office holders. As noted earlier, MFP is the reason Toronto now has an integrity commissioner and strict rules about accepting gifts from lobbyists. That’s why Ford was sanctioned in the first place.

  At the February 7 council meeting, Doug Ford was up first with item CC16.5, his forced apology to Chaleff-Freudenthaler. The young activist was watching in the chamber’s upper decks near the media. Doug grimaced as he stood up. He spoke directly to the speaker. “Just so this won’t continue on and it won’t drag out forever and ever and ever … I apologize if I acted unparliamentary. If I offended the complainant. Doug Ford apologizes.” The room applauded. Chaleff-Freudenthaler felt two hundred pairs of eyes on him—although none belonged to Doug Ford— and was eager for the moment to be over.

  Now it was Rob’s turn, item CC16.6, which concerned his refusal to repay $3,150 in lobbyist donations.

  “I want to explain how my charity works, because I think a lot of people don’t understand it. I—and it’s not about me, this is about kids, more specifically teenagers between the ages of fourteen and eighteen—I’m very, very passionate about helping these kids. And I will do anything for these kids. And my foundation was set up to help these kids play football. And it’s not— We don’t pay coaches, we don’t pay gas, we don’t pay food. It goes for the football equipment itself. And it costs about four hundred dollars to outfit one player.… So a team starts off with about fifty kids. So therefore fifty times four hundred, you’re looking at twenty thousand dollars. I go approach the school, any school.… If you wanna start a football team, I will pay between five thousand and ten thousand dollars to help you out.”