Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

  We pulled into the plaza parking lot across from the towers at about 6 P.M. There were hardly any free tables at the doughnut shop, which was the case all day most every day. The people who hung around were usually middle-aged to elderly men from the neighbourhood. They sat in clusters, chatting with friends, reading the paper, and watching the CP24 news channel on a big flat-screen TV.

  McLean and I slid into a booth. I texted Farah a few minutes before he was supposed to arrive: “Hey you want a coffee?” He wrote back, “Tea please—medium sugar 2 milk.” A few minutes later, he phoned from somewhere in the parking lot. He didn’t want to sit or be seen with us. We could go for a drive, but not in his car. So we took ours.

  He got in the front with me, McLean sat in the back, and we went on a little tour for the next hour. We drove along Dixon Road, through the tower parking lots, to the high school and the surrounding neighbourhood. We asked Farah a lot of the same questions I had asked him on that first ride to the Star. His answers were all the same, which was a good sign. We went to a community basketball game and met some of Farah’s friends. We covertly fact-checked what he’d been telling us. Everything matched up. Back in the car, we asked Farah more about the video and the circumstances in which it had been taken. And what about the photo? Where was that house?

  “It’s around here. That’s all I’m going to say. You’ve got to be patient,” Farah said. “This is about building trust.”

  Trust seemed to mean our willingness to pay. The conversation always curled back to money.

  “This is about protection,” Farah said. Could we help the dealer’s family if the government tried to deport them after the story ran? Would we protect Farah’s and the dealer’s identity?

  McLean and I explained how confidential sources worked, that we would never reveal their identities even if compelled to do so by a court. If we made a promise of anonymity, we would keep it. This seemed to satisfy him. We said if someone was being unlawfully deported, that would certainly be a story the Star would cover, and the press had great influence. We could also try to hook the dealer up with our lawyer to answer any questions. Farah nodded approvingly. (In the end, the Star agreed to keep Farah’s name secret, until he revealed himself as “the broker” to two media outlets in November 2013. As for the dealer, the Star never granted him anonymity. We learned his name—Mohamed Siad—only after reporter Jayme Poisson spent months uncovering it.)

  We dropped Farah off about 7:30 P.M. We were no closer to the video, but more convinced that there was one. I told him I would get in touch after we’d had a chance to relay some of his concerns to the editors.

  THE NEXT DAY AT THE Toronto Star offices, the same group plus Jesse McLean was back in the northwest boardroom.

  “Farah told me he turned down twenty thousand dollars from another outlet,” I said. “Although he’s likely just bargaining; I guess that was an indication of what he won’t accept.”

  We debated whether there was a way to set up some sort of scholarship fund. If they actually just wanted to start over, maybe we could help without handing over cash? But how would that work? Would we pay their rent? Their food? Would they give status reports? It seemed complicated. We got back to the idea of just buying it.

  Jane Davenport spoke up.

  “I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of paying for it,” she said. “How do we know what they’ll do with the money? What if they buy a gun and kill someone?”

  It was a sobering thought.

  Then again, if the mayor really was smoking crack cocaine, the city needed to know. Nothing like this had ever happened in Canada, but there were precedents in the US and the UK of news outlets paying big money for exclusive footage. We were unanimous that, no matter what we decided, we would disclose what we did and why.

  From where I was sitting, it felt like the editors’ problem with the dollar amount was not so much about the Star’s bottom line as the ethical concerns. (Contrary to what some critics have suggested, the Star actually lost several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of subscriptions from people who believed the Fords. It would have been far cheaper to have bought the video.) Yes, there was an awareness that breaking this story would be huge for the Toronto Star, a big win in a crowded newspaper town. But no one was willing to compromise the integrity of the paper—even for the scoop of the century.

  McLean and I headed back to Etobicoke that afternoon to look for the house in the photo before meeting again with Farah. It had been a few days since I’d seen the picture, and Farah was more and more reluctant to let us see it again. He didn’t want us finding the place. All we had to go on was my memory and his claim that it was a place where people smoked crack. The brick was light, and the house was somewhere near Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School, which was about five minutes from the Dixon towers. We drove up and down each street, looking for unkempt lawns, broken windows, and chipped paint, jotting down a few licence plate numbers to check later.

  Then we met Farah for another long conversation that ended up the same place it began.

  Such was the dance for the next twenty days. We’d talk to Farah, then meet in the northwest conference room. The Star’s executive editor, Murdoch Davis, the man who watched the newsroom’s money, was added to the roster. Donovan got back from vacation and was extremely apprehensive. “I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I can’t believe that the mayor would let himself be videotaped doing this. I just have a hard time believing these guys.”

  Farah wasn’t helping the skepticism. One weekend, he promised to let us see the video but then never responded to any messages when the time came close. Another time, we showed up thinking we could see the footage, only to have the same conversation over again. Farah was also becoming frustrated. We were not budging on the cash issue. He stopped talking to me for ten days in mid-April.

  McLean and I kept up the search for the house in the photo. We talked to a few locals who had also heard about the video and the crack house, but they wouldn’t share anything more than that. Meanwhile, Donovan worked his sources for information about Ford’s activities in the area.

  On April 22, I sent Farah a text message: “Hey dude. Whether there’s video or not I still want to do this story. I thought you did too.”

  He finally wrote back: “I’m trying my best, I will reach out when I have something or when I’m done. All the best.”

  Shortly after, I approached senior editors at the paper. “They’re never going to let us see it if we don’t at least say we might buy it,” I said.

  It was a sentence we had been avoiding, but it seemed like the only way. I got the go-ahead to tell Farah we would be open to negotiating a price—if we could see it.

  I called him that night. We could see the video by the end of the week.

  IT’S ABOUT 11 P.M. on May 3, 2013. Donovan and I are sitting in a parked car near the Dixon towers, not speaking, just writing; writing down everything we can remember.

  “Mo took us 320 Dixon lot. Left car to get dealer. Man returned. Lanky. Somali? Scabs on arms. Bulging eyes. Looked nervous. Black T-shirt. Short hair. Big forehead. Didn’t want to talk. Pulled out iPhone—black. Hit play. Definitely Ford. White button-up T-shirt. Buttons open at neck. Holding glass pipe— dark at the end.”

  And so on.

  At first the dealer had wanted to play the video with no volume. “Sound’s extra,” he told us. But we convinced him we needed to hear what was being said in order to assess the value. He eventually relented.

  The video was about a minute and a half long. Rob Ford was sitting on a chair beside a small table. To me, there was no question it was him. He was sitting against a white wall in sunshine, no more than seven feet from the camera. It looked like it had been shot on an iPhone in high definition. Ford had his eyes closed the way he does when he’s answering questions in a press conference. He was bobbing around on his chair, slurring, swaying, and rambling. At points, he lifted up his arms, bent at the elbow like a chicken, and then he so
rt of squirmed all over. He was talking, but it was hard to remember any of the words, because they didn’t connect. At one point, someone off-camera says something like, “You love football. That’s what you should be doing.”

  In my notes, I wrote that Ford responds, “Yeah, I take these kids … (something) minorities,” maybe “fucking minorities.”

  After that, Ford starts to talk politics. He says something like, “Everyone expects me to be right-wing, I’m supposed to be this great …” but then he loses his train of thought. Offcamera, the person says something like, “I wanna shove my foot up Justin Trudeau’s ass so far it comes out the other end.” Both the voice and Ford are yelling, although the person off-screen doesn’t seem impaired. Ford seems to chuckle at the comment. “Justin Trudeau’s a fag,” he says. Shortly after, a cell phone rings. Ford looks directly at the camera filming him and says, “That phone better not be on.” Then the screen goes dark.

  We watched the footage three times, committing the details to memory. Remember, we’d been instructed to leave all our stuff back in our car, including my purse with my notebook. During one pass, I kept the phone four inches from my face to look at the clear stem of the glass pipe. It was definitely black at the end, as crack pipes tend to be. I checked to see if smoke came out of Ford’s mouth. It did. I wanted to see if he held the lighter below the tube rather than curl the flame above, the way you would with a tobacco or marijuana pipe. It was definitely being lit underneath.

  “It’s crack,” the dealer said. He was becoming more and more agitated the longer he sat in the car. Of course, there was no way to know for sure what Ford was smoking. All we could tell was that it looked like a crack pipe. And he looked impaired.

  “Are you worried, if this comes out, about your safety? Will the mayor know it’s you?” I asked the dealer.

  “Money is safety.”

  Farah drove us back to our car. I told him I’d call the next day, after we had a chance to speak with our editors.

  Donovan and I didn’t say anything as we pulled out of the plaza. We parked in a lot one block west and pulled out our notebooks. Once we had written down everything we could remember, we compared notes. They were more or less the same, although Donovan had more detail in some parts and I had more in others. About the person off-camera, we were split. My impression was that it was a woman with a really gruff, masculine voice. Donovan thought it was a man. Donovan had also heard “fucking minorities,” while I remembered more about the comment “I wanna shove my foot up Justin Trudeau’s ass.” We both picked up on the “fag” reference. We had both seen a clear tube with black at the end and smoke. And we were both positive it was Ford.

  Donovan phoned Cooke, Davenport, and Bruser and put them on speakerphone. The trio was at the National Newspaper Awards in Ottawa, where Jesse McLean had just won the top prize for investigations with another Star reporter.

  “It’s real,” Donovan said.

  MONDAY MORNING WE WERE BACK in the conference room for a conversation that was no longer hypothetical. Were we going to pay for this? Some people in the room wanted to buy it. Others did not.

  As the head of the Star’s investigative unit, Donovan took the lead on the story.

  We met with Farah in the same west-end park I had taken him to a month earlier.

  “We’re not going to pay a hundred thousand,” Donovan said.

  “This is worth a million. It’s gotta be a hundred thousand,” Farah said.

  “You need to come back with something more reasonable,” Donovan said.

  Farah said the dealer wasn’t going to accept anything lower than the asking price.

  Now that Donovan and I had seen the footage, there was going to be a story at some point, whether we got the video or not. Maybe it made sense to pay their price just for the legal protection alone, in case Ford sued the Star. My opinion changed numerous times. On the one hand, I desperately wanted Toronto to see what Donovan and I had seen. On the other, I shared the concerns about where the money was going. More selfishly, I didn’t want my whole career to be defined by a story for which the Star had paid one hundred thousand dollars to make happen.

  The only thing I knew for sure was that if we wanted that tape, we should be prepared to pay the six figures. I had the sense that these guys were doing something that their friends either did not know about or did not approve of. It didn’t seem inconceivable that if the video came out it could put them—and maybe their families—at serious risk. I didn’t know how many ways the money was being split. I suspected Farah was going to get a cut, although he denied it. At the very least, he’d made reference to two other people. So, assuming the total payment was going to at least be split in half, I sort of understood the large price tag. If they did intend to completely uproot their lives and move, that wasn’t something that could easily be done for a share of twenty thousand dollars.

  In a final big meeting at the Star, we decided the paper would not pay for the video.

  “I have confidence that Kevin and Robyn can get this story through old-fashioned reporting,” Davenport said. Cooke agreed.

  Part of me was relieved. Part of me felt nauseated at the prospect of another year on this investigation. But it was the right call.

  Donovan and I met that afternoon. He drew up a battle plan and gave me a list of people he had been pursuing with ties to Ford and drugs. The rest of the investigative team would be getting involved. This was going to be a long slog. But it would be worth it. And in the meantime we would leave Farah to think things over.

  KEEPING A SECRET IS TOUGH. Keeping a secret that I’d seen the mayor of Toronto smoking from what looked like a crack pipe was exhausting. My Star friends knew not to ask what I was working on. My mom called to see if everything was okay— she’d noticed I hadn’t been writing much. “Oh, you know, just taking some time off after the big Garrison story,” I said, lying to my own mother.

  Donovan was never a fan of concentrating on just one thing. “You should spend some days at City Hall. Let people see you there,” he told me. So I went back to the beat.

  The day before my life changed forever, I covered a story about some activist foodies who had decided to protest Toronto’s perplexing street-food bylaws. A group called Food Forward had set up a “guerrilla food cart” in front of City Hall, handing out apples to passersby, I wrote. The next morning, one of the organizers called to complain that I had used the word guerilla. I had apparently insinuated that they were gun-wielding rebel fighters. “I was just trying to use an interesting word to describe your fruit protest,” I sighed. “I don’t think anyone would read that and actually think you were holding AK-47s.” She wanted a correction. I referred her to the Star’s public editor, then put my head down on my desk. I’d seen video of the mayor maybe smoking crack cocaine, and I was spending my morning dealing with aggravated food cart protestors.

  At 12:02 P.M., my cell phone rang again. I didn’t recognize the number. Not more Food Forward people, I thought.

  “Hey, Robyn!” It was a TV news producer I knew. “I have to ask you something, but please keep it confidential.… We just got a call from CNN. Have you heard anything about a video of the mayor smoking crack?”

  I almost hit the floor. I managed to chuckle nonchalantly, “Nope, but if you hear anything more about that, I’d certainly like to know.”

  “Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. I just figured, if somebody knew it would be you.”

  “Okay, talk soon,” I said, while typing out an email to the editors, subject line: “ALERT!—CNN may have our video.”

  I left City Hall and headed to the Star, texting Farah on the way. He told me he had shown the video to an editor at the American gossip website Gawker, and that Gawker was trying to broker a deal with CNN to buy the video. By 4:30 P.M., we learned that CNN had called the mayor’s office to see if they knew about it. I called Farah again to warn him. He was panicking.

  Back in the conference room, we discussed our options. If CNN and
Gawker were going to buy the video, that was not such a bad thing. At least the story would get out.

  “Do we think Gawker isn’t just going to write a story?” I asked.

  “They might,” Cooke said.

  That night, Cooke and I were at a third-floor dim sum restaurant in Chinatown for a Star food writer’s book launch. I noticed Cooke sneak out about 8:25 P.M. Seconds later, my friend Jonathan Goldsbie ran over to me with his cell phone. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be looking at their phones.

  “Robyn, did you see this?” he said. Gawker had posted the photo of Ford with Anthony Smith and two other men in front of the yellow-brick house. The headline: “For Sale: A Video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smoking Crack Cocaine.”

  I’m pretty sure I yelled “Fuck!”

  I dove under a table where I had been hiding my purse. I tried Cooke’s cell. No answer. In my four-inch heels, I sprinted to the stairwell, hoping I hadn’t missed him. I rounded the steps to the second floor. I could see him hailing a cab. I started banging like a crazy person on the full-length Plexiglas window. He spotted me. “Stay there!” I gestured. Six seconds later, I was on the street.

  “Gawker just published the story,” I heaved.

  A taxi pulled up.

  We got in the cab.

  “One Yonge Street, please,” Cooke said.

  TWELVE

  ANYTHING

  ELSE?

  Michael Cooke and I arrived at the Star building about fifteen minutes after the Gawker story went online. In the taxi ride back to the office, Cooke had called in the troops. Kevin Donovan was coaching a girls’ soccer practice. Cooke texted him a simple “Get in.” It was 8:45 P.M., May 16, 2013.

  “Just start to write,” Cooke said as we entered the newsroom. I headed to my desk and pulled out my notes from the night in the car.