Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Page 24

  This looked like our guy, but what was Sosa’s real name?

  After another week of mining social media sites, we strongly believed Sosa was a nineteen-year-old living in north Etobicoke named Muhammad Khattak. We ran a property search in the area and located what we believed to be his home. It was a ten-minute drive north of Dixon.

  On May 27, I knocked on the front door. A woman answered who identified herself as Zen, Khattak’s mother. Her eyes were pink and puffy. She was clearly going through a rough time. I held up the photo and told her that we knew the man in the hooded sweatshirt was her son. I asked why he was with the mayor. At first, Zen tried to lie, but she eventually broke down. She told me she had recognized her son as soon as the photo was published—even though his face had been blurred. She said she had confronted Khattak.

  “Was I drinking? Was I smoking? Did you see anything with me?,” had been his response, she said.

  She also confirmed that Khattak had been shot twice the night Smith was killed and that he remained disabled. “I’m still in shock. I’m still dead. Brain is dead. Because my son, he is traumatized.” Zen said that Khattak’s arm was basically useless and that he limped.

  Smith and Khattak had been friends since they were young, she said. They played on the same basketball team and both were good kids. “My son, I know him, he’s a very innocent kid. They’re friends. They’re having fun, whatever they’re doing outside. But I know them—they are nice kids. They are very nice.”

  I could not speak with Khattak, she said, because he wasn’t home. He had left Toronto as soon as the video story ran, in case the media came knocking.

  Amy Dempsey and I wrote Khattak’s story the next day. We now had confirmation that two of the three young men pictured with Ford had ties to gun violence.

  Meanwhile, Gawker was still trying to raise two hundred thousand dollars for the video through crowdsourcing. In such a circuslike atmosphere, there was little we could do to get the video. Astonishingly, it looked like the Crackstarter campaign was going to hit its goal. But not long after Gawker launched it, the dealer seemed to get cold feet. He was telling kids in Dixon that the video was gone. According to Farah, they were worried about moving that kind of money across the border. They thought the police were watching. Farah wanted me to give him advice. I explained that it was not my place to get involved. He was getting irritated. At one point Farah tried to tell me that the Star should give him some money for all the work he had done.

  It had been nearly two weeks since Toronto had learned about the video, and the police were still keeping quiet. I had met with a few police sources and was told something was coming, but no one would give me details.

  Star reporter Jayme Poisson was also going through her contacts—and she hit the motherlode.

  Poisson, along with reporter David Bruser, had recently finished an investigative series about the illegal gun pipeline between the United States and Canada. Their stories tracked how cheaply purchased handguns were moving up Interstate 75 into the border city of Windsor, Ontario, and eventually landing on Toronto streets, where a hundred-and-fifty-dollar firearm could be sold for more than two thousand. It turned out that investigators believed a north Etobicoke gang played a big role in the network. The gang? The Dixon City Bloods. The very gang Anthony Smith and maybe Muhammad Khattak belonged to.

  Poisson learned that Toronto police were part of a sweeping gun- and drug-smuggling probe called Project Traveller, which included police services from across Canada.

  On June 13, at 5 A.M., police across the province and as far away as Alberta would move in. Were the Star’s contacts involved? Would police get the crack video? Would Ford be implicated?

  It was possible. Poisson learned that the Bloods were being wiretapped and investigators knew all about the crack video.

  GAWKER’S CRACKSTARTER CAMPAIGN reached the two-hundredthousand-dollar goal on May 27. The week before, Gawker editor John Cook revealed that their contact had lost touch with the dealer. “Our confidence that we can consummate this transaction has diminished,” he announced. Gawker decided to give the dealer a few weeks to come forward; otherwise the money would be donated to a Canadian charity dealing with drug addiction. This news emboldened our skeptics, who questioned why the dealer, who’d once agreed to sell the footage for one hundred thousand dollars, was now prepared to walk away from twice that.

  The Star began regularly watching the house on Windsor Road. It looked like the old woman did in fact live there. Grown children, maybe in their forties, were often at the house—but no young men in their late teens or twenties.

  On June 3, I tried the old-fashioned knock-on-the-door tactic. I’d sent Kevin Donovan an email so the newsroom would know where I was.

  It was early afternoon, and there were no cars in the driveway. From the street, 15 Windsor Road looked like an average brick bungalow, a simple place with three front windows, a little walk-up front door, and some potted flowers by the steps. There were two big trees in the front yard and a well-groomed hedge around the perimeter. There were no broken windows, and apart from a little shopping trolley and two corn brooms, there was no clutter out front. My grandmother could have lived here, I thought. But then I noticed the cats. I counted seven, but there could have been more. They seemed to be living in the garage, and I noticed the big black door was raised half a foot off the ground. They were running in and out, watching me. I headed up the brown tiled steps to the front door. A little white kitten with brown spots was at the top. It got scared and ran away. As soon as I was on the doorstep, I smelled it. Thick and pungent. Something between cigarette smoke and unwashed bedsheets. This place was not as it seemed.

  I rapped on the front door and turned on my recorder. There was a rustle inside. I thought I saw the white curtains move. A frail-looking woman, about five feet tall, slowly opened the door. Her grey hair was pulled back in a messy bun and she looked at me suspiciously.

  I introduced myself, but I wasn’t sure she spoke English. She looked confused. “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “Lina Basso.”

  “Lina, do you recognize your driveway in this picture?” I said, holding up the Rob Ford photo, pointing to the yellow brick and garage door. “It looks like your house in the background.”

  She studied the photo for a few moments, then turned to look back inside.

  “Fabio!” she called down the hallway behind her.

  “Do you have a grandson?” I asked.

  “I have my son. He’s over forty.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  Lina nodded and turned around. She walked as if every step was a struggle. With the door open, the stench was even stronger.

  “Fabio?” Lina said, turning around a corner at the end of the short hallway. I could hear a man whispering. He sounded agitated, but I couldn’t make out any words. A few seconds later, Lina returned.

  “He’s in the shower. I talked to him in the shower,” she said in a thick accent.

  “Okay. I will come back, then? Or what’s a good way to get in touch with Fabio? I’ll just wait?”

  Lina reached for the photo again. “This is all together, they were?”

  I didn’t quite understand what she meant, but I let her talk. She told me she had three sons and one was at work. What that had to do with the photo she was staring at, I didn’t know. Before I could ask, someone started yelling from inside the house.

  There was a commotion, and a woman with wild curly brown hair and tanned leathery skin came storming down the hallway. She was in a long dark skirt and looked rail thin. She grabbed Lina’s shoulders and shoved her down the hallway, slamming the front door.

  “Don’t you ever come back!” she screamed at me through a closed window, although I could hear her fine. Her voice was deep and raspy. It was hard to know how old she was. She could have been forty or sixty.

  “Are you hurting her?” I yelled at th
e glass.

  “You fucking— You scavengers!”

  “Why was the mayor here?” I yelled back.

  “You come back to my house, I’ll call the police!”

  Kevin Donovan reached the woman on the phone later that night.

  “Rob Ford’s the greatest mayor ever. You guys are scavengers,” she said. “You come back to my house, I’ll call the police.”

  That was Elena.

  THE NEXT MORNING, a team of Star reporters spread out across various Toronto courthouses to check whether any of the Bassos had ever been charged. Ontario records are not kept in a central database. The paperwork is almost always stored at the court where the case was handled. It turned out that both Fabio and Elena had spent time in front of a judge. Jayme Poisson was downtown at the Old City Hall courthouse. I was up at 2201 Finch Avenue West, the north Etobicoke courthouse. I didn’t have any dates or the exact charges, but fortunately the court clerk was feeling generous. I filled out some incomplete forms and he said he would be in touch. It could take a few days or, if the documents were in storage, maybe weeks.

  That afternoon, Kevin Donovan and Poisson went back to Windsor Road to talk to neighbours. Four residents on the street said the house was known for drug activity. People were always going in and out, they said. Some visitors seemed to come from the Dixon towers. This unwanted traffic had been a sore point in the community for years. In 2011, the city installed the chain-link fence between the Windsor Road cul-de-sac and the apartments after residents repeatedly complained to the local councillor about the drug and gun problems. The councillor? Doug Ford.

  On June 5, I went back to Windsor Road and was watching the house from down the street. A slate-blue truck was out front, and a black SUV I didn’t recognize was in the driveway. I jotted down the licence plates and sent them to the Star’s library research staff so they could run a check. I decided it was probably better to try to catch the visitors on their way out. Maybe more people would arrive. About twenty minutes later, a tall man in sunglasses headed down the driveway. At that same moment, an orange taxi pulled into the driveway, then back out, then parked by the curb in front of the truck. A young woman with a notepad got out and walked up to the man. (I later learned she was a Globe reporter.)

  This stakeout was over. I walked over with tape recorder in hand.

  The man’s name was David Profitt. He was forty-five and he’d known both Ford and Fabio Basso for years.

  “I know all these guys. I grew up in Etobicoke,” Profitt said. According to him, Ford and Fabio had met in high school. Fabio went to Don Bosco, which was just around the corner from Windsor Road, but had spent a semester at Scarlett Heights.

  Profitt said he didn’t want to get involved in the story. He’d just stopped in on his way to the airport and he was late for his flight.

  The conversation lasted only about two minutes, but it was an important one. Other sources had told us that Rob Ford and Fabio Basso had been friends since they were teenagers. And now we had someone we could name linking the two.

  POISSON, DONOVAN, AND I PUBLISHED our story about the house on June 5. Two days later, when our court documents came back, we were able to shed more light on the people Ford was spending time with.

  Elena Basso Johnson—nickname Princess—was fifty-one and had been found guilty of trafficking cocaine. Her brother Fabio, forty-five, had been convicted of possessing a prohibited weapon—a spring-activated knife—in 2005. Both had been found guilty of theft, Fabio for shoplifting “blue-ray DVDs and TV wall mounts” from Walmart, and Johnson for stealing lipstick from the Bay. Johnson’s cocaine charge was in February 2006. She pleaded guilty in 2011. After our story ran, we learned that Johnson in particular had been cycling in and out of the court system for years, including convictions for “communicate for the purpose of prostitution” (1998 and 2002), multiple drug offences (1994, 1996, and 2004), and obstruction of a peace officer (1998 and 2000). In 2002, Johnson was convicted of performing an indecent act—“fellatio in a public place”—and received a suspended sentence. Fabio Basso had been convicted of drug offences in 1990 and 2002, as well as impaired driving in 1993.

  We’d also been able to confirm that Toronto police had been called to 15 Windsor for a break-and-enter and assault the same night the man was shot on the seventeenth floor of 320 Dixon. (By this point, we were pretty sure 15 Windsor was also where the crack video had been filmed.)

  Most damningly, the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau chief, Robert Benzie, and Kevin Donovan learned about the meeting Ford had with his staff about the two units at Dixon where he believed the video might be. This was the video that supposedly did not exist. Their story ran on the front page.

  With each new development the link between the mayor and drug activity was growing stronger, but the public still wasn’t sure what to believe. We did win over one skeptic. On June 10, the mayor fired Councillor Jaye Robinson from the executive committee after Robinson called for Ford to take time off and get help for his “personal issues.” When I interviewed Robinson for this book, she made a confession. “I’m embarrassed, but actually I didn’t believe you guys after the Garrison Ball story,” she said. “I guess I was wearing rose-coloured glasses. I kinda was buying the story that you were after him and he really wasn’t doing these things. I thought the Star was picking on the mayor, and the mayor’s office perpetuated that idea.” Robinson had come to realize that wasn’t true. “There obviously is a problem.”

  Until that point, the Toronto police had been able to watch our investigation unfold with each new story. We were about to learn what they’d been up to.

  AT 4 A.M. ON JUNE 13, 2013, six police officers on motorcycles blocked off the intersection beside the six Dixon towers. Cruisers with darkened headlights sped silently towards the condo complex. The buildings are arranged in two clusters of three. There’s the 320-330-340 group and the 370-380-390 group. Both encircle grassy courtyards. A curving laneway connects each building for pick-up and drop-off, and a giant parking lot runs along the north end of each cluster.

  On the morning of the Project Traveller raids, because of Jayme Poisson’s excellent information, a dozen Star reporters and photographers left for Etobicoke around 2 A.M., hours before forty-two tactical teams in riot gear would descend on the neighbourhood. Two groups of us were stationed at the towers. Another was in front of the mayor’s home—just in case. And two more roved the area, keeping an eye on the local police detachment, Muhammad Khattak’s home, and 15 Windsor.

  I was sitting in a parked car in front of 320 Dixon, not far from where I’d watched the video a month earlier. A group of kids, probably in their late teens or early twenties, were partying on a twelfth-floor balcony, smoking, drinking, and taking photos of themselves with their cell phones. Their laughter echoed between the towers. They had no idea what was coming. I’d later learn that the unit they were in was one of the apartments to get raided.

  I, on the other hand, did know what was coming, but the scope of it still caught me off guard. At 5 A.M., to the minute, a convoy of white cube vans rolled into the Dixon lot. Before the vans even stopped, the rear doors were sliding open revealing what looked like well over one hundred police officers in riot gear, with black vests, helmets, and knee pads. Some were wearing black masks. They marched silently into the buildings, carrying guns and battering rams. The parking lot changed from being nearly empty to a war zone in less than fifteen seconds.

  Once the officers were inside, my colleagues and I got out of the car for a better look, keeping a safe distance so as not to interfere. Suddenly, there was a blast and a flicker of light from inside the 320 tower. A woman screamed. Lights in the dark towers started coming on as people went to their windows to investigate. Another crack split the air. The police were using percussion grenades, otherwise known as “flashbangs.” After smashing in a door, officers use them to disorient the people inside. They’re mostly safe, although they will leave a black scorch mark on the floor. For the
next hour, police led half a dozen people out of the towers in handcuffs. Investigators seized various electronics from many of the units.

  Anthony Smith’s friend Muhammad Khattak was among those arrested. So was a man named Monir Kassim, who we soon learned was the remaining man in the Ford photo. Kassim, twenty, was charged with trafficking in weapons and drugs—cocaine and marijuana, specifically—for the benefit of a criminal organization and a firearm offence. Khattak was also charged with trafficking cocaine for the gang, as well as dealing marijuana. This was a key development in the story. People said they didn’t believe us because we couldn’t produce a video. Yet here we had a photo that showed the mayor with a dead man and two men arrested for dealing cocaine. (Mohamed Farah, the broker, was also swept up in the raid on charges of possessing the proceeds of crime and several gun-related offences.)

  At a noon press conference, Toronto police announced that they’d made nineteen arrests in Toronto and that dozens of others had taken place across the country. The year-long probe, which had involved seventeen police agencies, had netted drugs worth three million dollars, forty firearms, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

  The Star played the story huge. We had live coverage on our website, a live blog, videos, photos, and frequently updated stories. As for the connection to the mayor, we decided to let readers connect the dots. That morning, we reported that Toronto police were executing raids in an Etobicoke neighbourhood that was “ground zero for the alleged Rob Ford crack cocaine video scandal.” CTV News took it further. By lunch, they were reporting that a “highly placed source” had confirmed to the network that individuals being targeted in Project Traveller had been heard discussing the crack video on wiretaps.

  “CTV News has learned that Toronto police were investigating the existence of an alleged video involving Mayor Rob Ford, several weeks before the story first appeared in the Toronto Star. As part of the investigation leading to the raids on Thursday, officers obtained telephone wire-tap evidence,” the story said. In Canada, it is illegal to write about an active wiretap. It is not unusual for police to leave wiretaps in place for several days after arrests take place to capture reaction from people of interest.