Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

  He was not going to address any of the specifics. He was not going to talk about the Bier Markt, or his staff’s concerns, or the photos on Twitter. Ford retreated to his comfort zone— campaigning—framing the Star as a political opponent rather than a newspaper.

  “Just let’s wait, let’s just wait until the election … and then we’ll see what happens,” he fumed, getting more and more worked up with each passing sentence. “I’m sick of— It’s patho— It’s just lies after lies and lies! And I’ve called you pathological liars and you are! So why don’t you take me to court?” Ford paused as if to consider his own suggestion, then, apparently deciding it was in fact a good idea, puffed out his chest and added, “Let the courts decide. You guys are liars. It’s about George Chuvalo today, guys. Have some respect.”

  The Fords were always being asked why they didn’t sue for libel if the Star was lying. Now the mayor was flipping it around. If he was wrong in calling the Star liars, why didn’t they sue him? It seemed like a clever strategy. Ford Nation was going to eat that up, I thought. And at the end of the day, winning over the public was what mattered.

  Later that day at City Hall, two councillors broke their silence on the long-held concerns about the mayor’s health.

  Councillor Joe Mihevc, who despite leaning to the left had a friendly relationship with the Ford administration, told 680News, “I think many of us have witnessed things that the Toronto Star has reported.” Mihevc said he was worried about the city and about the mayor himself. “There is clearly some work that he needs to do. It is simply not accurate that the whole world is lying.”

  Well-liked rookie councillor Sarah Doucette—a progressive whom Doug Ford had described as one of his favourite councillors—told the Star, “It has been known at City Hall for quite a while that he may have a drinking problem.” Doucette clarified that she had personally never seen anything, but that some of her colleagues had witnessed the mayor appearing impaired at “festivals, galas and other events” during the past year. “In some respects, I wish this had gotten out earlier, because if he needs help, please do it now,” she said.

  After the Star posted Doucette’s comments online, the National Post tried to talk to her. “Ms. Doucette confirmed making the statement,” it reported, “but refused to repeat it to the Post and other media outlets later in the day, after members of the mayor’s staff left her City Hall office.” She had been advised to keep quiet.

  The usual suspects were slamming the Star on talk radio and Twitter, but otherwise reaction seemed fair. The CBC confirmed a big component of the Star’s story—that staff in Ford’s office wanted the mayor to go to rehab.

  Paul Ainslie was having a harder time. The Globe and Mail quoted a Ford ally questioning Ainslie’s motives for saying what he had. Councillor Mike Del Grande called it “sour grapes” because the administration had not made Ainslie chair of the budget committee. The Toronto Sun printed something similar. Ford’s chief of staff, Mark Towhey, told the Globe, “No one asked the mayor to leave and no one asked me to ask the mayor to leave.” Ainslie stuck by his comments.

  With all the interviews and press scrums that day, around the time I should have been eating dinner I realized I had missed lunch. It was getting late, and the editors still weren’t sure what the main Ford story would be the next day. Then Garrison Ball co-chair Mark McQueen decided for us.

  Six members of the thirteen-person Garrison Ball committee—not including Ainslie or the military personnel— signed a letter stating, “As a civilian member of the volunteer organizing committee of the 2013 Toronto Garrison Ball, I can confirm that I did not ask Rob Ford, Mayor of Toronto, to leave the event on February 23, 2013, for any reason. To my knowledge, no member of the event’s organizing committee, including Councillor Paul Ainslie, directed the Mayor to leave the event that night.”

  One of the signatories later told me it felt like an attempt to smoke out the Star’s sources by seeing if anyone refused to sign. Except the wording of the letter missed the point; no one had directly asked Ford to leave. It was Towhey whom Ainslie had spoken with, and everyone knew that. Ainslie had publicly said so in the Star that morning. Given that, the wording of the letter seemed duplicitous. Organizers signed it feeling that technically it wasn’t a lie. That nuance seemed to escape the public. On Twitter—an unscientific real-time gauge of public opinion— people seemed to be taking the committee’s letter as some sort of proof that the Star story was off-base. Even some mainstream print and TV outlets were reporting on the letter in a way that suggested our story had been refuted. The facts were on our side, but the perception seemed to be that we’d gotten it wrong.

  With deadline fast approaching, Donovan and I went back to our sources. It turned out Ainslie had sent out a statement of his own to the committee after our investigation. At the last possible moment, the Star got its hands on the email.

  I think it’s safe to say I was the only person who spoke with Mayor’s Chief of Staff Mark Towhey. This was after being approached by @ least 8 people who were concerned about the Mayor’s state.

  I spoke briefly with the Mayor to see if there were any issues. He seemed to be somewhat incoherent. I told Mark Towhey, “I think it would be a good idea for the Mayor to leave.”

  I’m not aware of anyone else speaking to Mark Towhey.

  I know it was me who pushed to have the Mayor attend the Ball. I’m very embarrassed about the media attention which the event has received.

  With Ainslie’s unequivocal admission that he’d asked the mayor’s staff to get Ford to leave the Garrison Ball because people felt he was impaired, the Star was able to push the story forward again on Wednesday’s front page.

  Ford showed up at City Hall at noon and refused to answer any questions.

  ELEVEN

  FOR

  SALE

  Last call had come and gone when twenty-one-year-old Anthony Smith and a nineteen-year-old friend left Loki Lounge in downtown Toronto on March 28, 2013. The popular nightclub in the King Street West bar district was the kind of place where men wore sunglasses inside, women teetered on heels they couldn’t walk in, and most of the furniture was upholstered in velvet.

  Smith and his friend had known each other since they were about ten years old. They used to play on the same basketball team. Now, according to police, they were both members of the Dixon City Bloods street gang.

  At 2:30 A.M., they crossed to the north side of the street. The gunshots came out of nowhere.

  A bullet went through the back of Smith’s head. His friend was hit in the arm and back. When the sun came up, two crimson pools of blood were still on the sidewalk. Smith was pronounced dead before the morning was over. The friend barely survived.

  Four days later, my cell phone rang just after 9 A.M. It was a man named Mohamed Farah. He wanted to meet.

  “I have some information I think you’d like to see,” he said. “It’s about a prominent Toronto politician.”

  IT WAS AROUND NOON on Easter Monday. I was standing on a soccer field in a west-end Toronto park, talking on the phone to the Star’s editor-in-chief, Michael Cooke. Farah was waiting out of earshot on a nearby bench, holding his iPad.

  “He says they want a hundred thousand dollars,” I told Cooke. “I tried to explain that’s a completely crazy number, but he seems set on it.”

  “Can you bring him to the newsroom?” Cooke asked.

  Farah offered to drive. He was parked in an alley behind a Starbucks. I had three seconds to weigh the pros and cons of going with him or taking a cab. Pro: I could see his licence plate, run a check, and get his name and address. Con: I was alone, and any idiot knew not to get in a car with a stranger. Pro: It would build trust, provided he wasn’t a rapist. Con: He might be a rapist.

  “Sure, that’d be great if you could drive,” I said.

  The moment I spotted Farah’s black sedan, I sent Cooke an email with a description of the vehicle and the plate number— just in case. I climbed into the pas
senger side. The car was clean and obviously quite new. I didn’t see a scrap of trash.

  The Star was fifteen minutes of city driving away. I used the time to get to know Farah a little better. I asked him about his job, his friends and hobbies. He seemed like a decent person. Smart and thoughtful, although he was definitely misrepresenting his altruism.

  “It’s not right what’s happening,” Farah told me. “I just really want the story out there. It has to get out there. People need to know about this.”

  “If you really want the story out there, why not just give us the video?” I asked.

  He told me he was acting on behalf of a dealer, a young man he’d met through his work in the community. (Occasionally he would refer to two people. Maybe there was another dealer— maybe a girlfriend. It was hard to know.) Farah told me that this dealer was a good kid but had gotten messed up in the drug culture. He wanted out. Anthony Smith’s recent murder had been a wake-up call. Smith had been a good friend. But the kid needed money to build a new life. The video was his ticket. Farah told me he had offered to help because he knew people in the media. One of them, he said, worked in New York—he would not tell me who it was, where they worked, or what they did— and that their organization was considering buying the footage.

  “But I’d like for you guys to have it. The Star deserves to get the story. You’ve done the work.”

  “One hundred thousand dollars is way too much,” I said.

  “It’s worth a million. They wanted a million. I told them that was too much.”

  “Mohamed, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Canada. We buy videos and photos from freelancers, yes, but that’s like five hundred dollars. Maybe a thousand. I don’t know if you follow this stuff, but it’s not exactly a great time financially for the newspaper industry.”

  “The video will make you guys a lot of money. People would have to come to your site to see it. You could charge people to watch it.”

  I tried to explain that it didn’t work like that. Someone would just make a copy and post it online.

  “It’s not just the cost. There are ethical issues here,” I said. “Anyway, I’m at the bottom of the totem pole. It’s not going to be my call. I’m just warning you—I don’t think a hundred thousand dollars is going to happen.”

  We turned onto Yonge Street and followed it down to the lake, stopping outside the Toronto Star office tower. I phoned security to raise the gate so that we could park in the front lot, then sent Cooke a two-minute warning. He, along with city editor Irene Gentle, would be in the northwest conference room. Farah collected his iPad, cell phone, and keys. Everything was shut down because of the holiday. I had to swipe my security pass to get inside, then again to activate the elevator. We got off on the fifth floor and turned left at the wall where photos of the Star’s publishers, past and present, are displayed. Only a skeleton staff was in the newsroom. I doubt anyone even noticed us. We went straight to the conference room.

  I introduced Cooke and Gentle to Farah. Everyone shook hands, and then we got to it.

  Farah gave them the same spiel he had given me in the park. Using his iPad, he showed them the photo of Rob Ford with Anthony Smith and two others in front of the yellow-brick bungalow—a crack house, he said. Smith was dead, shot to death just four days earlier. Another of the men had been seriously wounded in the same incident. Next, he described the video. Farah claimed that it clearly showed Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine while uttering racist and homophobic slurs.

  Then came the price tag: one hundred thousand dollars. Non-negotiable.

  “Well, let’s get one thing straight right now,” Cooke said. “You’re not going to get a hundred thousand dollars. Not even close. Now, there might be some price, but before we even talk about what it’s worth, we need to see the video.”

  Farah said he needed time. He did not have a copy. The guy he was helping did not trust him with it, but he would let the dealer know we were interested.

  Gentle and Cooke quizzed Farah about the video’s contents.

  How was the photo connected to the video?

  It wasn’t. Except that the dealer was friends with Anthony Smith.

  When was the video shot?

  Within the last six months.

  Where?

  Farah wouldn’t say.

  Was Ford alone in the footage?

  Yes.

  After twenty minutes of grilling, I walked Farah to his car and made plans to touch base later that day to set up our next meeting.

  TUESDAY MORNING, APRIL 2, 2013, I was back in the conference room with Cooke and Gentle as well as the Star’s long-time newsroom lawyer, Bert Bruser, and its managing editor, Jane Davenport. Kevin Donovan was on vacation. Everyone had been briefed on Farah’s astonishing claim, but Cooke asked me to recount the story in detail, from the first phone call to our last text message, once more for the group. When I got to the part about a hundred thousand dollars, everyone seemed to collectively cringe.

  “Now he’s supposed to go back to his guy and sort out how we can see the video,” I said. “He texted me last night and we’re going to meet around six o’clock today up in Etobicoke.”

  There was silence for a few moments as the editors looked around the room, weighing the gravity of what we were dealing with. Bruser rubbed his bearded chin and shook his head. His face is always impossible to read. I couldn’t tell if he was taking in the magnitude of the allegations or trying to figure out a damage-control strategy for this hoax I had gotten us involved in.

  “So,” Davenport said, “are we considering paying a hundred thousand dollars for this video?”

  Davenport was just thirty-six when in June 2012 the Star named her managing editor, Michael Cooke’s second-incommand. Together, they were the perfect pair. Davenport was the calculated and cautious yin to Cooke’s aggressive and spontaneous yang. When Davenport spoke, she gave the impression that every word had been chosen deliberately.

  “We’re not going to pay that,” Cooke replied. “But, if it’s real, and that’s a big if, and if we can confirm that it’s real, we might pay something.”

  The Toronto Star does not pay for stories. It is explicitly stated in the newspaper’s code of conduct: “The Star does not pay for information.” But it does pay for commodities such as photos and video. If Farah had come to the Star asking for five hundred dollars, my guess is we would have paid him on the spot. The issue here was the size of the ransom and the people we would be giving it to. What would a self-described drug dealer do with that kind of money? Did we believe he wanted to turn his life around? On the other hand, if this video did exist, if it proved that the mayor of Toronto was smoking crack cocaine, the implications for the city were enormous. Given the immense public interest of a story like that, maybe it was worth paying a hundred thousand dollars to drug dealers.

  But there were other problems. How would we be able to tell if Ford was smoking drugs? How could we even be sure it was him? Could the video be doctored? Everyone agreed we needed to see the thing before we could assess its value. Besides, there was another, more pressing question to deal with: What if this was a set-up?

  The day before Farah had called, Doug Ford devoted the first part of the brothers’ weekly radio show to the Star and its supposed vendetta, suggesting the paper would go to any length to “politically kill Rob Ford.” He targeted Cooke specifically, talking about his days as editor-in-chief of the New York Daily News, and in particular his role in the reality TV show Tabloid Wars. He had found and quoted Cooke’s colourful statement about pressing one’s foot on the competition’s throat “till their eyes bulge and leak blood.”

  Was it possible someone was trying to embarrass us with a fake story, baiting the hook with the kind of over-the-top yarn they thought Cooke would do anything to get?

  “It’s possible,” I told my editors. “It would be a pretty elaborate hoax, but it’s certainly possible. I’m just assuming everything I say is being recorded.”


  I’d try to get a better feel for the situation when I saw Farah that night. Lawyer Bert Bruser said I should have someone with me for physical and journalistic protection. With Donovan still gone, the group selected Jesse McLean, a young and talented reporter on Donovan’s investigative team. McLean and I had known each other for years, having worked together at our campus newspaper.

  Before I left, Cooke looked me in the eye. “I know you know this, but I’m going to say it anyway. No one can know about this. Not anyone outside this room—even your friends in the newsroom.”

  “Got it.”

  It was the start of a lonely six weeks.

  JESSE MCLEAN AND I pulled onto the highway just in time for rush-hour traffic. We were going to meet Farah at a Country Style doughnut shop in a north Etobicoke plaza on Dixon Road near the airport. The neighbourhood was sometimes called Little Mogadishu, sometimes Rexdale. By the mid-1990s, half the population in the area was Somali. In fact, according to some of the people who lived there, Canada was known simply as “Dixon” in Somali refugee camps across East Africa. It was a lower-income part of town, as communities with large immigrant populations tend to be.

  The community centred on six high-rises on the north side of Dixon, which stood like fortresses around two courtyards. These grey towers were actually condos, although they looked a lot more like subsidized housing, especially on the inside. The stairwells reeked of urine. Walls were etched with gang graffiti, carpets were old and stained, and there were signs of disrepair on every floor. One tower had a serious rodent infestation. The average price of a condo in Toronto was more than three hundred thousand dollars. In Dixon, you could find two-bedrooms for under sixty thousand—half of what they used to be worth. Crime was a problem, especially of late. A gang known as the Dixon City Bloods had a foothold in the complex, especially the 320 building. Shootings and robberies were frequent in Rexdale. Frustrated community leaders were constantly fighting to get media coverage for all the good things happening in the otherwise vibrant neighbourhood.