Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Page 23

  Hers was one of forty-one similar grievances received by the press council. A dozen had arrived right after the Star’s “crack video” story appeared. A few dozen more arrived a week later, when The Globe and Mail ran its investigation about Doug Ford’s years as an alleged high school drug dealer. Now, both papers had been hauled in front of the province’s media ethics watchdog to explain themselves.

  It was a remarkable moment. The press council, an independent agency established in 1972 and funded by newspapers, was created to investigate accusations of unsavoury journalistic practices and ethics. About one hundred complaints are received each year, and only a handful make it to the public hearing stage. The threshold is supposed to be high. Cases that get adjudicated typically involve allegations of plagiarism, established factual errors, or contentious editorial positions—such as the 2001 case in which a national newspaper, according to the ruling, “appeared to suggest every person living in Germany during the Second World War was an active agent in Hitler’s genocide.”

  The story Donovan and I had written, while a huge news event in Toronto, was actually quite basic: two journalists had seen something and then written about it. That was the job stripped down to its simplest form. We went out, observed, asked questions, tried to get answers, and reported back. That the press council had decided to adjudicate Donley’s complaint seemed to lend credence to the notion that this was no longer good enough.

  The stakes were high. Despite the amount of evidence in our favour, the Star was suffering in the court of public opinion. The attacks came from every angle—letters, email, phone, Twitter, texts, Facebook, talk radio, and conservative columnists. Four months later, and they were still coming. Donovan and I were getting death threats and harassing calls at all hours of the night. The paper was under siege with complaints.

  But for me the most upsetting thing was the June poll that showed nearly half of the city thought we were lying. Seeing those numbers knocked the wind out of me. On more than one occasion that summer, I had been out at a bar or restaurant around the city and heard people talking. Many just couldn’t believe Rob Ford might be smoking crack. Which meant that nothing the Star said about it could be true.

  Had journalists made things up before? Yes. We’ve all heard about The New York Times’s Jayson Blair, USA Today’s Jack Kelley, and The New Republic’s Stephen Glass. Canadian publications, including the National Post, The Globe and Mail, and, yes, the Toronto Star, have also dealt with fabrication and plagiarism scandals. But these were cases of lone individuals bent on deceiving their colleagues, not an entire newsroom conspiring to deceive the public. Because if Kevin Donovan and I had made up the story, a dozen senior people in the newsroom—including the publisher, the editor-in-chief, the managing editor, the city editor, and our lawyer—had to have been in on it. We’d told our editors about the video footage two weeks before Gawker’s story ran. Were all those people at the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, lying?

  Half of Toronto seemed to think this was possible. It was very clear that many did not understand what we do, how we do it, and the rigorous checks in place to keep us accountable. This press council hearing was our chance to enlighten.

  Shortly after 10 A.M., panel chair George Thomson—a former provincial court judge, law professor, and provincial deputy minister—called the meeting to order. The press council, Thomson explained, was an independent agency with fifteen council members, the majority of whom were professionals not affiliated with news media. On this day, the council would be looking at three questions concerning the Star’s story. Did the Star article deal with a matter that was in the public interest? Were adequate efforts made to verify allegations? And was the mayor given a reasonable opportunity to respond and had the paper printed that response? Thomson turned to the complainant first to see if she had an opening statement. Darylle Donley softly shook her head.

  Now it was our turn. Michael Cooke leaned in to the microphone.

  “The Toronto Star is glad to be sitting in front of you today and to be given the opportunity to talk about the front page of Friday, the seventeenth of May,” he began. “The press council has said in a letter to us that we at the Star are not to concern ourselves this morning on whether that story is true or not. I’m going to tell you now, with great emphasis, that that story is true. Every word of it.

  “I ask for your indulgence here as I read just a little in the story. This is how it began: ‘A cellphone video that appears to show Mayor Ford smoking crack cocaine is being shopped around Toronto by a group of Somali men involved in the drug trade. Two Toronto Star reporters have viewed the video three times. It appears to show Ford in a room, sitting in a chair, wearing a white shirt, top buttons open, inhaling from what appears to be a glass crack pipe. Ford is incoherent, trading jibes with an off-camera speaker who goads the clearly impaired mayor by raising topics including Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and the Don Bosco high school football team that Ford coaches.’

  “Those are the opening paragraphs, which were true then, they’re true now, and every word in that story is true this morning,” Cooke said.

  ON OCTOBER 16, 2013, the Ontario Press Council dismissed the complaints against the Star and the Globe. The panel found that both papers had acted responsibly while reporting on a matter of significant public interest.

  In the case of the Star, the panel concluded, “Council does not agree with the position that the story could not be written unless the newspaper had the video in its possession or that it could not publish without naming its sources.”

  Before most people even had a chance to read the full decision, Doug Ford was on AM640.

  “Who is the press council?” he complained to host John Oakley. “They are a bunch of cronies, all of the insiders trying to make judgments on the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail and a lot of them probably worked for the Toronto Star at some point.”

  In fact, in addition to George Thomson, the cases were heard by Joanne De Laurentiis, the chief executive officer of the Investment Funds Institute of Canada, and the deputy editor of the Ottawa Citizen, Drew Gragg.

  FOURTEEN

  PROJECT

  TRAVELLER

  Thirteen-year-old Connor Stevenson was looking for Nikes that day in the mall. His older sister, Taylor, wanted a pair of Toms.

  It was Saturday, June 2, 2012, and the Toronto Eaton Centre was packed. Thousands of people were wandering around the six-storey shopping centre that day, as bright summer sun streamed in through the vaulted glass ceiling. The Eaton Centre takes up two city blocks on the west side of Yonge Street, smack in the centre of downtown, bordered by City Hall, the financial district, Ryerson University, and a crowded public square.

  Around 6:20 P.M., Connor and Taylor’s mother, Jo-Anne Finney, suggested they grab a bite to eat before the long drive back to Port Hope, Ontario.

  The trio headed to the Eaton Centre’s lower-level food court, then managed to scope out an empty table in the bustling eatery. They’d barely been sitting a minute when the shots started. It sounded like fireworks.

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

  A man collapsed. He’d soon be dead. People were screaming, diving under tables, knocking over chairs as they bolted for the escalators, leaving cell phones and purses and clothing behind. A twenty-eight-year-old pregnant woman was knocked over. She went into labour.

  Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Taylor looked over at her brother. His face was frozen. Blood was pooling around his hairline. It started to drip down his face. “Call 911!” Taylor started to scream. She grabbed her little brother and dragged him to the wall as the shots continued.

  “Oh, I love you so much, Connor!” she said as he slipped out of consciousness.

  After what felt like hours but was really just minutes, two paramedics were at the teen’s side.

  “Save my boy!” Jo-Anne Finney wailed as police, with guns drawn, sprinted throughout the mall, searching for the shooter.

  In the end, tw
o men, both alleged gang members, were dead. And five innocent people were wounded.

  After numerous harrowing surgeries, Connor Stevenson survived, though doctors weren’t able to remove all of the shrapnel from his head.

  It was one of the worst mass shootings in Canada’s history. Compared to other major cities, Toronto is remarkably safe. By the end of 2012, there would be just fifty-four homicides. Chicago, a city of similar size, recorded 506 over the same period. But the brazenness of the Eaton Centre attack—that it had happened in a popular indoor mall and tourist destination—left people shaken and afraid.

  On June 5, the day the food court reopened, Mayor Rob Ford toured the area with members of his staff and the media, reassuring Toronto residents that the city was still safe.

  In truth, there was cause for concern. By May 2012, the Toronto Police Service’s 23 Division in north Etobicoke—an area that included the six Dixon high-rise towers—was recording a 133 percent increase in gun violence. And then in July, more tragedy. Across town in Scarborough, a gunfight broke out at a community barbecue on Danzig Street. Two innocent people were killed and twenty-three injured, including a toddler.

  The mayor released a statement declaring “war on these violent gangs.”

  The next day he told CP24 news host Stephen LeDrew, “I want something to be done. I want these people out of the city. And I’m not going to stop. Not put ’em in jail, then come back and you can live in the city. No. I want ’em out of the city. Go somewhere else. I don’t want ’em living in the city anymore.”

  What Ford didn’t know was that the chief of police was already doing something. In June 2012, the service launched what would become Project Traveller, a massive investigation into a north Etobicoke gang that police suspected was smuggling guns into the city from the United States. The group called itself the Dixon City Bloods, a.k.a. Dixon Goonies, and its members were operating primarily out of the six towers at the corner of Dixon Road and Kipling Avenue. Project Traveller would last a year and involve extensive ground surveillance, wiretaps, and use of police informants. It would culminate in a dramatic pre-dawn raid in June 2013. Dozens of people in Ontario, Alberta, and Michigan would be arrested. A total of twenty-eight search warrants would be executed in Toronto, with police seizing any electronic devices—cell phones, computer equipment, and hard drives—connected to the suspects.

  Of all the gangs, in all the city, Rob Ford had to walk into theirs.

  Mayor Ford had at some point gotten mixed up with one of the most closely watched group of drug dealers in Toronto. What were the odds that police would be wiretapping the cell phone of a man who had covertly filmed Ford smoking crack? Or that police would happen to be watching the brick bungalow at 15 Windsor Road where Ford would party with Fabio Basso and members of the Dixon City Bloods?

  Toronto police knew about the crack video long before it hit the papers. But once the Star and Gawker reported on the footage, the second, spin-off probe was created: Project Brazen 2. It was launched two days after the crack video story went live. Detectives started with Project Traveller intelligence, of which there was an abundance. They began going through Toronto Star stories, and they tracked down Leo Navarro at the Bier Markt to talk about St. Patrick’s Day 2012. Police interviewed numerous former and current staff members in the mayor’s office about Ford’s alleged drug use. They monitored the phone activity of the mayor, his associates, and his staff. And—in what would become most damaging to Ford—police began following Ford’s driver, Sandro Lisi, the man who had driven the mayor to the Garrison Ball.

  For the next six months, the Toronto Star and the Toronto Police Service were doing more or less the same job: investigating the mayor of Toronto.

  IN THE FIRST FEW DAYS after the crack story broke, the public was divided on what to believe.

  For many, the possibility that Ford might be using drugs was too bizarre to accept, given that he’d called the Star news team “pathological liars” for suggesting he had problems with alcohol.

  People wanted to see the video. And the Star couldn’t give it to them. We had to push the story forward the old-fashioned way, with on-the-ground reporting. The photo was the best place to start.

  The Star had to find that house.

  THERE IT WAS … Or at least, there it might be, Tim Alamenciak thought. He stopped the car and held up the photo, looked at the house, then back to the photo, then back at the house again.

  It was like one of those spot-the-difference games that children play. The light fixture matched. Both had white glass, black edges, and the same unusual boxy shape, like upside-down pyramids with the pointed part cut off. Both houses had the same dark garage doors, the same white trim, and the same yellow brick.

  Yes, the search was over. Finally.

  Alamenciak was about to grab his camera to send a shot back to the Star newsroom. But then he spotted the difference. The garage was on the wrong side. In the Ford photo, the edge of the house wasn’t visible, but a utility meter was poking out on the far left. Presumably, it was attached to a wall of the house. That would put the garage on the right, and at this house it was on the left.

  Damn, he thought.

  Alamenciak shifted the car into gear and kept going.

  For days, the Star had been searching for the mysterious house behind Rob Ford and three young men in the photograph given to me by Mohamed Farah, the broker of the crack video. If we could locate the house, then perhaps we could start to learn why the mayor had been there with Anthony Smith, the young man later shot to death.

  On May 21, it was Alamenciak, a twenty-eight-year-old intern reporter, who had printed off an enlarged copy of the photo and set out for north Etobicoke. There wasn’t much to go on. We believed the house was somewhere in the residential neighbourhood just behind the six Dixon towers, but not much of it was visible in the photo, and Farah had refused to help us. We also didn’t know how long ago the photo had been taken, although there was snow on the ground. It was dark outside, and Ford and the other three occupied most of the frame. Behind them you could see the black garage door with white trim, the light-yellow brick. Garbage, or maybe yard equipment, had been dumped at the top of the driveway.

  Alamenciak started on a road running parallel to Dixon Road just north of the towers. He kept the car moving fast enough to avoid suspicion, although anyone looking closely would have wondered why the same Ford Fusion was looping up and down every street on the block. On each street he saw similar houses, but the brick would be too dark, the garage light too round, or the door the wrong colour. And when he thought he had a match, it turned out the garage was on the wrong side. An hour went by.

  And then Alamenciak turned onto Windsor Road. As soon as he spotted number 15, he hit the brakes. It was identical to the one in the photo in every way. The wire, the junk on the driveway, the utility meter. The Dixon towers were less than two hundred feet away, separated from the house by a grassy walkway at the foot of the road and a chain-link fence.

  Alamenciak needed to get photos to take back to the newsroom, but a man was mowing the lawn. He parked the car a few doors down and waited. Forty-five minutes went by before the man went inside. Alamenciak pulled up out front, fired off a dozen shots with his long lens, and drove off.

  Back at the Star, reporter Jesse McLean and Alamenciak put the new shot beside the old one. They looked at the pattern of the bricks along the trim. They examined the gap between the top of the garage and the light. In the Ford photo, there seemed to be little grooves along the very top where the roof soffit seemed to start. These were obvious in the new photo.

  It was a match.

  FIFTEEN WINDSOR ROAD belonged to a woman named Lina Basso, property records showed. She and her husband, Elio, had lived on the street since at least the 1970s. Elio, a bricklayer, had died in 2009, and according to his obituary the couple had four children—a daughter, Elena, and three sons, Mario, Enzo, and Fabio, the quiet stoner who had befriended Rob Ford back in high school�
��as well as two grandchildren. Lina Basso was elderly, and we believed she was living in the house. It was perplexing. There was no obvious link between her and three men with connections to a violent street gang. Maybe there was a basement apartment she was renting out. Could the men be friends of her grandchildren? We started to watch the house.

  During the previous week, a group of Star reporters, including Amy Dempsey, Arshy Mann, and Tim Alamenciak, had been sifting through social media sites looking for clues to why the three men in the photo were hanging out with Ford. Anthony Smith was a good jumping-off point. Smith had been fatally shot on March 28. A friend of his was hit in the same incident but survived. We believed that the friend was one of the two unidentified people in the Ford photo. Now we needed a name. Since Smith’s death, his friends had been regularly posting tributes on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. There were dozens of messages, such as “RIP Rondo”—Smith’s alias— and references to the Dixon City Bloods. The Star reporters were going through each and tracing the author.

  Arshy Mann, an intern, had been working on the Star’s police scanner desk, which we call the radio room, the day before Tim Alamenciak found the house. With an ear on the crackling cop chatter, Mann spent his shift digging around Facebook for links to Smith. He came across an account for someone who called himself Sosa Grindhard and saw that the Facebook address for this person was facebook.com/RealDixon. Sosa looked fresh out of high school. His face still carried some baby fat in the cheeks, and his beard was patchy. He looked exactly like the bearded figure on the far right of the Ford photo. The more Mann searched, the more evidence piled up. The page included photos of Anthony Smith that had never been made public. “RIP Big Bro,” said one caption. “Forever In My Heart Mourn Till We Join You General ...” There was also a Twitter account for SosaDoubleUp, and this was the most interesting lead. Shortly after the March 28 shooting, people were tweeting at Sosa to get better. “Inshallah You Get A Fast Recovery Blood @SosaDoubleUp” and “Good seeing my brother @SosaDoubleUp insha’Allah speedy recovery ahh” were among the well wishes.