Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

Wrote Marcus Gee from The Globe and Mail, “Rob Ford says ‘left-wing politics’ are to blame for his ouster as mayor of Toronto. Nonsense. This wound was entirely self-inflicted. If he had paid even the slightest attention to the rules—if he had even bothered to learn them—he would not be in the fix he is today.”

  Others were uncomfortable with the fact that an elected mayor had been removed by a judge because of a few thousand dollars. Said Simon Kent of the Toronto Sun, “The judiciary being asked to decide a matter involving an amount of petty cash going to charity is taking an elephant gun to hunt a field mouse.… This matter should have been decided at City Hall. It was not a serious or systemic case of corruption under investigation, just one man’s vote.”

  The next day, the Toronto Star ran a profile of Chaleff-Freudenthaler. “History will write him up as a hero,” said left-wing city councillor Joe Mihevc, who had known him since he was a kid.

  Shaken, Ford spoke to a horde of reporters camped outside his office. “It’s more disappointing than surprising.… I’m going to appeal it and carry on with my job. I’m a fighter.” Ontario Superior Court Justice Gladys Pardu agreed to let him keep his job until that appeal was settled. Those close to Ford, including staff, confidants, and allies on council, say he was devastated and convinced he would never win his appeal. “I know the stress affected him,” said Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday.

  BACK IN MID-NOVEMBER, when Ford was waiting for Judge Hackland to render his decision, the mayor was dealing with a different matter at another University Avenue courthouse. The libel suit launched by restaurateur George Foulidis had made it to trial. This time, Ford was being represented by Toronto lawyer Gavin Tighe.

  Tighe’s battle plan was to argue that the law gave politicians considerable leeway to speak freely on controversial issues with significant public interest. In his opening arguments, Tighe said, “It is critical, in my submission, to a free and democratic society that people know frankly where candidates stand on issues.” This time, Ford’s team would use the MFP case to its advantage. “We can’t divorce ourselves from the historical perspective,” Tighe said. “All of this comes in light of the Bellamy report and the MFP scandal, where sole-source contracts and non-competitive bid processes dealing with the City of Toronto were the subject of substantial political and public issue.”

  Taking him on was Clayton Ruby’s colleague Brian Shiller, a highly regarded constitutional lawyer in his own right, with a hefty résumé of libel and defamation experience.

  Shiller painted his client, George Foulidis, as a hard-working entrepreneur who became a political football during a divisive election campaign. His business had suffered. His family was being harassed. Strangers would show up at the restaurant wearing T-shirts that said “Bribe.” All so Rob Ford could score political points. “Mr. Foulidis was left with no choice but to go public” following the “blatant attacks on his integrity,” Shiller said. The plaintiff gave emotional testimony. In tears, Foulidis said, “My wife was distraught over it … my daughter was ten at the time. She asked me if I had done anything wrong.” Referring to the Sun’s article in which Ford was quoted as saying the Tuggs deal “stinks to high heaven,” Foulidis said he felt “humiliated. I felt like a criminal.”

  Shiller’s main hurdle was convincing Judge John Macdonald that Ford had in fact accused George Foulidis of corruption. The most damaging sentence in the Sun article, the one with the c word, was paraphrased by the reporter. Tighe argued that “we don’t really know” what was said, since there was no tape of the interview. With the evidence as it was, the dots weren’t quite connected.

  And then, on the second day of the trial, Foulidis caught a huge break. A former editor at the Sun had located a tape of the interview, and it was clear that Ford had in fact suggested the deal was corrupt. It was a “curveball,” Tighe admitted at the time.

  The mayor stuck to his guns. He testified that he had never specifically accused Foulidis—a man he had never met—of corruption. Just the deal itself. He’d received some anonymous phone calls that “money was being exchanged.” For two merciless hours, Shiller poked, provoked, and attempted to unnerve the mayor.

  Was he accusing Tuggs Inc. of corruption?

  Ford: “The deal in general.”

  By “corruption,” did he mean something that could attract jail time?

  Ford: “Not following the process, to me, is corrupt. However you want to define that, that’s how I’m defining that.”

  Shiller pressed harder, and the mayor started to crack.

  Ford: “They [councillors] don’t follow the process. So staff said, ‘You should go out on the Tuggs deal for competitive bids.’ They said no. I saw the local councillors work the room to try to get the votes to give the sole-source contract to Tuggs.… At council there was a lot of rumours going around that this deal does not smell right. Other councillors were saying it. The public was— I was getting called. I heard it over and over again, numerous times.”

  Shiller: “My question is … when you say, ‘and if Tuggs isn’t, I don’t know what is,’ what [you’re] saying is, ‘if Tuggs isn’t an example of corruption and skullduggery,’ I don’t know what is?”

  Tighe objected, but the judge said he wanted to hear the answer.

  Ford: “I’m going to repeat myself the best I can to explain and answer you. Here, I don’t agree with how the Tuggs deal was done and I used the word, when they don’t follow the process, and when staff recommends a [request for proposal] and you ignore it, I call that skullduggery and corruption, that’s the answer.”

  On December 27, 2012, Judge Macdonald ruled in favour of the mayor, saying Foulidis had not proved that Ford’s comments were directed at him. Foulidis was ordered to pay a portion of Ford’s legal bills, which is customary in Canadian civil cases and intended to help discourage frivolous lawsuits. Foulidis has appealed, and at the time of publication that case is still working its way through the system.

  THE NEWS THAT HE HAD WON the libel lawsuit failed to lift Rob Ford’s spirits. He was still facing removal from office over alleged conflict-of-interest violations and was due back in court on January 7, 2013, for the appeal.

  This time, the backdrop was an opulent courtroom at Osgoode Hall, where a three-judge Divisional Court panel was hearing the case. Chaleff-Freudenthaler snuck in at the last minute, taking a spot in the back.

  This arena wouldn’t feature the colourful back-and-forth of the trial. The mayor would not testify and it would last only a day. This was a battle rooted in legal minutiae. Lenczner once again made his argument that council had no authority to impose a financial penalty, that it had acted “ultra vires,” beyond its power, and so everything Ford did after that was “a nullity” and could not be used against him. (One municipal lawyer watching the case likened the rationale to that of a criminal investigation, where police can’t use evidence if it was obtained improperly.) Ruby fought back with an equally technical argument. The mayor was trying to mount a “collateral attack,” which essentially meant challenging an earlier decision to win a current one. If the mayor believed council had overstepped back in August 2010, he should have said so at the time. He couldn’t go back now and say it was wrong.

  Regional Senior Justice Edward Then promised a prompt decision.

  Less than three weeks later, on the morning of January 25, 2013, the mayor was summoned to Lenczner’s downtown office at 130 Adelaide Street West. The verdict was to be released at 9:30 A.M. Both Rob and Doug Ford arrived, along with a few select staff members. The small group made nervous chit-chat as the minutes ticked by and they lost track of time. Lenczner was out, and his colleague Andrew Parley, who had helped argue the case, was watching the firm’s email inbox.

  The decision arrived unbeknownst to the others. Parley scrolled to the bottom. “We won,” he said.

  The appeal judges had agreed that council overstepped its authority.

  Ford froze in disbelief then looked around the room. The group exploded in cheers,
hugs, and high-fives. The mayor was essentially let off on a technicality. Even though it was a conflict of interest for him to have voted at council that day, the penalty should never have been handed down in the first place. Everything he did after that was, legally, null and void.

  Soon after, the mayor headed to City Hall to give a statement. The experience had been “very, very humbling,” he said.

  A month later, the city’s compliance audit committee voted 2–1 not to pursue non-criminal charges against the mayor. An auditor did find that the Ford campaign appeared to have broken the law in numerous instances, including when it accepted a $77,722 interest-free loan from Doug Ford Holdings, the company that runs Deco Labels, but the panel didn’t think the contraventions were serious enough to call in a special prosecutor.

  Apart from the slim-chance libel appeal, Ford cleared his final legal hurdle in June 2013, when the Supreme Court turned down a request from Clayton Ruby and his client Paul Magder to get involved in the conflict of interest case.

  Miraculously, it seemed, Mayor Ford had survived three serious court challenges to his leadership. It was his personal demons that would soon lead him into deep trouble once more.

  NINE

  THE GARRISON

  BALL

  It was business as usual in the City Hall press gallery. The Ford administration had won its fight with the unions, but lost a vote on a Scarborough subway, and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority rejected Ford’s request to buy the land adjoining his property. I kept adding to my just-in-case folder when stuff popped up online, but the off-hour sightings of Ford dropped off dramatically. Staff sources told me the special assistants were now making the mayor’s runs to the liquor store.

  In July 2012, I was sent to cover the Summer Olympics in London. The Star’s editor-in-chief, Michael Cooke, who is from England, was also there for a few days. One night, the whole Star Olympic team and Cooke went out to the pub.

  “So where are we at with that Ford story?” he asked me.

  A THING OR TWO about the editor of the Toronto Star.

  Michael Cooke is a tabloid man. He came to Toronto in 2009 after stints running the New York Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times. With his arrival, the Star changed almost overnight. Cooke loves exclusives and investigations, splashy stories that demand attention. To me, he has always seemed better suited to an era when newspapers were sold on street corners by kids hollering, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” Cooke, now in his early sixties, cut his teeth on London’s famous Fleet Street. In 1974, he took a trip to Toronto, stopped by the Star newsroom, and was offered a job.

  From the Star, he moved to increasingly senior positions at three major Canadian dailies in three provinces before heading south to become editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. In 2005, Cooke took over the Daily News in New York, where he went head to head with Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. After about a year, he was back in Chicago. And that’s where he stayed until 2009, when he was lured back to the place his North American career began, the Toronto Star.

  Almost every profile I’ve ever read about Cooke describes him as being ruthless in pursuit of a story. That partly comes from his time at the helm of the New York Daily News. While there, he was part of a short-lived Bravo TV reality show called Tabloid Wars, which documented the battle between the Daily News and the New York Post. In one of Cooke’s more spectacular quotes, he described the rivalry with the Post as follows: “We put our foot on their throat every day and press down till their eyes bulge and leak blood, but still they won’t die. We just have to keep at it until they do die.”

  OVER BEERS THAT NIGHT in the London pub, I promised Cooke I’d stay on the Ford story. I arrived back in Toronto in late August 2012. I hadn’t missed much.

  The mayor’s various court dramas occupied the press gallery until the end of January 2013. Former staffers say Ford spent these months crippled by stress. He believed he was going to lose his case and be removed from office. In that event, council would either have to appoint a new mayor or hold a by-election, and Ford was focused on winning his seat back should that happen. (If for some reason Ford was banned from running in a by-election, which was one possible punishment, brother Doug was ready to step in and hold the seat until the 2014 election.) Every scenario meant that Ford needed to act mayoral. He switched to campaign mode. He made a point of being seen at City Hall in the morning and afternoon. He began routinely making himself available to answer questions from the press. And while I’d still get the odd tip about the mayor being spotted out on the town, information I continued to file away, things were mostly quiet on the after-hours front. The threat of losing his job seemed to have scared Ford straight. But once that threat was gone, things unravelled.

  The first sign came on March 7, 2013, when former mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson made an astounding claim on her Facebook page. “Thought it was a friendly hello to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford at the CJPAC [Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee] Action Party tonight until he suggested I should have been in Florida with him last week because his wife wasn’t there. Seriously wanted to punch him in the face. Happy International Women’s Day!” She posted a blurry photo of the two of them from the event. Ford looked like a frat boy at his first keg party. His mouth was hanging open, his eyes were shut, his cheeks, chin, and forehead were glowing red, and there was a big wet stain on the front of his white shirt.

  The story got worse. “He told me he was in Florida and I should have been with him because his wife wasn’t there,” Thomson told the Star the next day. “I didn’t expect that. Rob doesn’t normally act that way towards women, so I was a little bit shocked, and then we posed to get our picture taken and he grabbed my ass during the pose.”

  The mayor’s office issued a press release addressing the allegations. “I can say without hesitation that they are absolutely, completely false. What is more surprising is that a woman who has aspired to be a civic leader would cry wolf on a day where we should be celebrating women across the globe.” On his Sunday radio show, Ford added, “I’ve always said, I don’t know if she’s playing with a full deck.”

  It was hard to know what to believe. Thomson was the forty-five-year-old publisher of Women’s Post magazine and a married mother of two. When she had announced she was running for mayor in 2010, she had little presence. Rightly or wrongly, she was rescued from the fringes because she was a credible woman in a field of middle-aged white men. Her gender got her in the door, but her impressive campaign kept her there. Thomson was likeable and had a plucky charisma. She did well at the debates. And she presented the most realistic plan, by far, to build transit in Toronto. Alas, Thomson never stood a real chance of winning, and towards the end she bowed out to join George Smitherman’s anyone-but-Ford campaign. She impressed the provincial Liberals, and in October 2011 ran as their candidate in a downtown riding against the long-time New Democrat incumbent. Thomson narrowly lost, which was sort of a victory. The near miss solidified her position as a player in Ontario politics.

  But almost as soon as people started to take her seriously, Thomson seemed to go a bit loopy. She replaced her French roll with Rasta dreadlocks, traded in the power suit for hippie skirts, and began speaking a bit too freely, posting a bit too much personal stuff online for someone with political ambitions. She seemed to be chasing the spotlight. The medium she used to make the allegation against Ford didn’t sit well with people. Why did she use Facebook to broadcast the incident? Why didn’t she make a formal complaint through the proper channels, by calling the integrity commissioner or even the police?

  Over the next few days, Thomson escalated her claims. In an interview with KiSS 92.5 radio, she said that Ford had been “completely wasted.” In a pre-interview, she told a producer she thought the mayor had been high on cocaine. The host asked her about this. “Did you think that he was on cocaine? Is that what you had said to our producer?” Thomson replied, “I thought he was, yes. But I don’t know.… I went back and looked
up, you know, what are the signs of cocaine use. I looked it up [on Google]. And, you know—sweaty, talking quickly, out of it … all these things were on there.”

  It was bizarre. Groping and cocaine aside, it did seem that the mayor had shown up at a political event in a state unbecoming of an elected official. People at the fundraiser confirmed that much. Ford once again avoided the press. That day, he brought his son and daughter to City Hall. Come evening he walked out of his office, past the waiting reporters, trailing his two young children behind him. It was as if he was daring someone to ask him about cocaine in front of them.

  That afternoon, I saw the editor-in-chief in the newsroom.

  “You know,” I said, “if we’re ever going to resuscitate the Ford drinking story, now might be the time.”

  The whole team was back around a conference-room table later that week. The Bier Markt piece was almost a year old. We would need to return to the original sources. The Thomson story was too shaky for a news hook, but it was useful in the sense that it had people talking.

  Then we got the tip we needed. Through a source, the Star learned that Ford had shown up at a military gala rambling, sweaty, and stumbling. But the information was second-hand. I needed to find one of the players involved.

  The Garrison Ball is the kind of black-tie affair that makes the society pages. In 2013, it was held on the last Saturday in February at the elegant Liberty Grand banquet hall near the western waterfront. The minister of national defence, Peter MacKay, the chief of defence staff, General Tom Lawson, and the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, Paul Maddison, were among the distinguished guests. The invite list was a who’s who of Bay Street and Toronto money, but mainly it was a night to honour a few hundred members of the military and their families, including soldiers, sailors, and air force personnel. The gala was also a fundraiser for the Wounded Warriors charity. Mayor Ford had been expected the year before but never showed. It was a snub that had irked many of those involved. For the 2013 gala, one of Ford’s closest political allies and a friend, Councillor Paul Ainslie, was on the organizing committee. Ainslie convinced the other organizers to give the mayor a second chance. They agreed.