Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Page 3

  When the Toronto Star revealed that in 2001 Ford had been banned from coaching football at a Toronto high school following a heated altercation with a player, he supposedly raised close to twenty-five thousand dollars overnight in campaign donations. When Ford suggested that Toronto close its doors to immigrants until it could fix its current citizens’ problems, his office was inundated with calls of support, including from immigrants already here. Meanwhile, former frontrunner George Smitherman was blowing it. His campaign stood for nothing. To voters, he came across as angry and entitled. The Smitherman platform seemed to be built on one thing: he wasn’t Rob Ford.

  By mid-June, Ford was tied for first. And the momentum continued. He took the lead in August and stayed there until election night. The polls were barely closed before the TV networks announced that Rob Ford would be Toronto’s sixtyfourth mayor. A little over half of the city’s eligible voters had cast a ballot, and 47 percent of them ticked off Ford’s name. The penny-pincher from Etobicoke hadn’t just won, he had crushed the competition. Ford finished with 383,501 votes, nearly 100,000 more than sure-thing Smitherman. Deputy mayor Joe Pantalone—who had parachuted in as the progressive candidate after Giambrone’s implosion—came in a distant third. Ford won thirty-one of forty-four wards, including every one of the pre-amalgamation suburbs. And while the old City of Toronto electorate stuck with Smitherman, they did it while holding their noses. In fact, Ford had significant support in the land of lattes. The true geographic downtowners went 60 percent Smitherman. But in plenty of old Toronto neighbourhoods, such as Parkdale–High Park, Toronto-Danforth, and Davenport, Ford scooped up more than a third of the vote.

  His victory left residents of Toronto’s core stunned. In those first days after the election, the confusion was everywhere. On the streetcar heading to work, in line at Starbucks, at the bank, the flower shop, the grocery store, the pub. The most discombobulated were staggering around the corridors of City Hall. One prominent Toronto politics professor sent me a note of apology, having dismissively brushed off my suggestion a month earlier that Ford would win. It was as if a giant protective bubble containing everyone who lived within fifteen kilometres of the CN Tower had been popped.

  What it meant to be a “Torontonian” was no longer clear. Three years later—with Ford known the world over as the mayor whose approval rating stayed unchanged after he admitted to smoking crack cocaine—it was even less apparent.

  What follows is the story of Rob Ford’s improbable rise to one of the most powerful jobs in Canada. It’s the story of how the mayor of Toronto found himself ensnared in a scandal so surreal, half of the city couldn’t believe it—a scandal with drugs, lies, an attempted cover-up, and extortion, which captivated the globe for weeks. It’s the story of a complicated family, wealthy and secretive, with boundless ambition and a sincere belief that its members are destined to lead this country. It’s the story of sibling rivalry, an obsession with loyalty, and the never-ending struggle for a demanding father’s approval.

  A public figure’s family life should ideally be private, but in this book it will be impossible to avoid talking about Ford’s family. He is who he is because of them. His political philosophy, his strategy in a crisis, his feelings about money, his compulsion to keep dirty laundry hidden—all can be explored through the lens of a fascinating family dynamic. These seeds were all planted on a quiet leafy street in Etobicoke.

  TWO

  DOUGIE

  LOVED POLITICS

  One by one, the four Ford siblings made the trip to the office of Deco Labels & Tags, where Nelson Scharger, a retired Toronto police sergeant, was waiting with a polygraph machine.

  It was the last weekend in April 1998, and the family patriarch, Doug Ford Sr., was furious. One of his children had stolen from him. He was sure of it. And now he was going to prove it.

  Which of the four, he wasn’t sure, but Doug Sr. suspected it was one of the older two. His daughter, Kathy, then aged thirty-seven, was a heroin user. Randy, thirty-six, had spent years in and out of treatment for substance abuse. For their own good, Doug Sr. periodically cut them off financially. Even in good times, he kept them on a tight allowance. Neither held regular jobs.

  His other two sons were less likely suspects. Doug Jr., then thirty-three, was married with young daughters and running the family business. The baby of the family, Rob, twenty-eight, wanted to be a politician—just like his old man. Rob had taken a run at city council the year before and lost, but he’d try again in the next election. Doug Sr. didn’t think either of these two would steal from the family. From him.

  By this point, Doug Sr. was a sitting member of provincial parliament and a millionaire many times over. And yet despite his loaded bank account, he never felt safe without a small fortune in cash at the ready. He had grown up poor. As a young teenager, he would pick up odd jobs in the evenings, work well into the night, then slip his earnings under his mother’s pillow. As an adult, even a rich one, Doug Sr. kept a thick roll of bills stashed away in a tin can behind a brick in his basement wall. It was enough cash to buy a luxury car. It was something he’d always done. But then, in 1998, the Ford family had renovations done and the money disappeared.

  Was it the contractors? Doug Sr. didn’t think so. He demanded that each of his children—as well as Kathy’s husband, Ennio Stirpe—take a lie detector test. Everyone agreed.

  Scharger, who ran his own polygraph company, set up shop in a meeting room at Deco. The retired officer conducted the short interviews over two days. As each of the Fords and then Stirpe sat down, Scharger explained how the machine worked. He would ask questions, and it would measure each person’s breathing, blood pressure, and any nerve activity on the skin. They could leave at any time, he said. But none did.

  What do you think happened to the money? he asked each of them. None of the five admitted to taking it.

  Did you steal the can of cash?

  Randy, Doug Jr., and Rob said no and passed the test. Kathy and Ennio Stirpe were lying, according to the machine. What they did with the money was unclear.

  Predictably, the unremittingly strict Doug Ford Sr. lost it.

  Kathy and Stirpe split up. She took their baby son and

  moved in with her high school sweetheart, Michael Kiklas, the father of her eleven-year-old daughter.

  In July of that year, Stirpe broke into Kiklas’s home carrying a sawed-off shotgun. Stirpe opened fire on his estranged wife’s boyfriend in front of Kathy and the couple’s young daughter. The blast hit Kiklas in the chest. News reports suggest he was dead by the time emergency crews arrived. After a three-day manhunt that ended in a high-speed chase, Stirpe was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Kathy moved back home after that.

  DOUG FORD SR., while tough, loved all his children fiercely and would have done anything for them. But he was never able to understand how his family ended up poisoned by drug use. The Ford patriarch had provided his four children with wealth, power, easy career choices. Theirs were extremely privileged lives compared to his humble beginnings.

  The year Douglas Bruce Ford was born, nearly one in three Torontonians was unemployed. It was 1933, and the Great Depression had hit Canada hard. After the stock market crash, President Herbert Hoover had signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, driving up the cost of nearly nine hundred import duties. Canada’s prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, retaliated, setting off a tariff war.

  It was a catastrophic blow to the Canadian economy. The United States was, and still is, our largest trade partner. The output of Canada’s manufacturing sector plummeted by more than 50 percent. Between 1929 and 1932, the cost of lumber

  dropped by a third. Pulp and paper companies—a staple in Toronto’s economy—were going bankrupt across the country. By 1933, workers in Toronto were earning 60 percent of what they had been four years earlier. Two years later, a quarter of the population in and around the city w
as drawing on social assistance. Commercial and industrial construction ground almost to a halt.

  Toronto the Good, as this city had once been known, had become Toronto the Hungry. There was fear, resentment, and ultimately racism. By the early 1930s, 631,000 people were living in Toronto and about 80 percent of them were of British heritage. The two largest ethnic groups, Jews and Italians, weren’t welcome on public beaches and at least one city-run swimming pool. By the summer of 1933, the peak of unemployment, Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany. Anti-Semitism was rampant on both sides of the ocean. In Toronto, those racial tensions came to a head on a warm summer night in August on a west-end baseball field. The Christie Pits riot, considered one of the darkest days in Toronto history, broke out after a group of thugs unfurled a black swastika. Hundreds of men, Jews and Italians versus English and Scots, battled for six hours, clubbing each other with whatever they could find—pipes, pokers, bats, and their bare hands.

  It was against this bleak backdrop that Doug Sr. came into the world on February 27, 1933. Like many children of the Great Depression, the times he grew up in forged his character. He knew the value of hard work and self-reliance. And he did his best to ensure that his children would know it too.

  Doug Sr. was raised in a rundown neighbourhood in the east end of Toronto. He lived in a small house with his

  mother and nearly enough brothers and sisters—nine—to field a football team. He never met his father. His mother picked up whatever work she could find, usually doing laundry, to try to keep food on the table. It was never enough.

  Doug Sr. was not yet a teenager by the time he quit school to start working. Eventually, he got a job as a salesman. He was a natural. Doug Sr. was charming and warm. His good looks didn’t hurt either. Standing six feet tall, with his chiselled jaw, thick golden hair, and dashing smile, he looked like a movie star. The girls used to giggle when he walked by. He was a longdistance swimmer. In 1954, he attempted to swim across Lake Ontario alongside sixteen-year-old Marilyn Bell. He didn’t make it, but Bell emerged a national celebrity, after nearly 21 hours, 52 kilometres, and 70,000 strokes.

  Doug Sr. kept training, and on the side worked as a lifeguard. It was at the local pool that he first caught sight of a beautiful, blond Diane Campbell. According to family legend, Doug Sr. wooed her with a promise: “Marry me and you’ll be marrying a millionaire.”

  Diane Campbell lived in the north end of the city. Her family was not rich, but it was better off than most. Diane’s father, Clarence, was a manager with a power plant contracting company. A serious man who used to smoke cigars at his desk, he was not at all impressed by the young man who pulled up on a motorcycle to take his daughter on a date. But Doug Sr., the consummate salesman, eventually won the Campbells over too. Diane and Doug were married on September 1, 1956.

  The young couple moved into a modest apartment on Wilson Avenue in the north end of the city near the highway. Next door was another young couple, Ted and Patricia Herriott.

  Ted had just finished school and was helping set up a Toronto division of the American-based Avery label company.

  Doug Sr. was working as a salesman at a meat packing plant. He would go door to door moving product. And he was good at it, earning Salesman of the Month, month after month. Years later, when Doug Sr. was in the provincial parliament, he talked about those days with a colleague at Queen’s Park, John Parker, the member of parliament for York East.

  Doug Sr. told Parker that he was one of the best at the company. “And he’d say to me, ‘And you know why I was, John? Because I had to be!’

  “Doug took great pride in the fact that he’d pulled himself out of poverty,” Parker said. “He always said he was just a typical guy, with a bit more hustle than the rest of them. A bit more savvy. He got up earlier. Served the customer better. Somewhere along the line, he developed the credo: you’ve got to rely on yourself. The only one you can trust is the guy looking back at you in the mirror.”

  On the home front, the Fords spent a lot of time with their neighbours the Herriotts. Both families had young children. The friendship started with borrowed cups of milk, and soon they were having dinners together. Ted liked Doug Sr.’s spunk. And when a sales job came up at Avery, he recommended his new friend.

  In the early 1960s, Ted began getting restless at work. He was tired of making money for someone else. “My wife and I talked about it. We decided we’d rather be the head of a sardine than the tail of a whale,” Ted recalled. “I asked Doug if he wanted to go it alone—and he agreed.”

  At the time, “pressure sensitive labels” was still a new

  technology. In the old days, you had a company’s logo printed on paper and then someone had to paint the glue on. Avery was one of the first to make the paper itself sticky. And they were making a killing. Avery’s markups were big. Ted was convinced that he and Doug Sr. could offer the same quality for a fraction of the price. And if they were lucky, some of Avery’s clients would follow them out the door.

  The pair spent a year planning their exit. First up: what would they call themselves?

  Mohawk had a nice ring to it. Boomerang also made the shortlist. But then one of them, Ted can’t remember who, suggested Deco. Short for Decorative. But also because spelled out, Deco was D for Doug, E for Edwin—Ted’s first name—and Co. for company. They liked it.

  By this time, Diane Ford’s dad, Clarence Campbell, had started his own construction business. Clarence had an office at 3077 Bathurst Street, which was just a little north of midtown. He offered his son-in-law use of the basement level. They hired Diane’s sister to do some administrative work. Both the wives helped out in the office too. Ted Herriott was the president and Doug Sr. was the secretary-treasurer. Clarence helped out with accounting. At first, Deco Adhesive Products didn’t have its own printing equipment. They were forced to rent. But once the business started to take off, they bought their own plant a few blocks west.

  The families became as close as two families can get, even though they no longer lived next door to each other. Each had moved to Etobicoke and were only a ten-minute drive apart. Ted and Doug Sr. would work together all day, head home, and then sometimes the foursome would turn around and go to a

  dinner party. Occasionally, their kids played together. In the evenings and weekends, Doug Sr. played football with the East York Argos. Ted would go and watch every now and then.

  The Fords and Herriotts joined up with two other couples and began taking ballroom dancing lessons. It started out at the local YMCA, and then, once they got better, the teacher would come to their houses. The host rotated each week. The instructor would show up with the record player and they would push all the furniture to one side of the room and cha-cha.

  “We thought Doug had two left feet,” Pat Herriott laughed. “He couldn’t dance worth a hat.”

  Afterwards, they’d sit and have coffee and sandwiches. Occasionally, they would have a drink, although Ted says none of them were big on booze.

  Doug Sr. got his first taste of politics in 1963. Deco’s lawyer, Alan Eagleson—after taking a run at a federal seat and losing— decided to run provincially as a Progressive Conservative in the southern Etobicoke riding of Lakeshore. Both Ted and Doug Sr. volunteered on Eagleson’s campaign. And he won. Looking back, Eagleson doesn’t remember Doug Sr. expressing any interest in being a politician himself. “He was too busy working to get Deco off the ground.” After serving four years at Queen’s Park, Eagleson went on to become one of the most powerful men in hockey. He spent twenty-five years as head of the National Hockey League Players’ Association, but he never lost touch with his friends at Deco, even after they parted ways. (In a spectacular fall from grace that shook the Canadian hockey establishment, Eagleson was arrested on fraud charges in both Canada and the United States, spent time in jail, and lost his licence to practise law.)

  By 1965, Deco was doing well, but not spectacularly. This time it was Doug Sr. who was growing restless. He wanted
to take the company in a new direction, expanding into tags. Ted wanted to stay the course. There was a bit of a “personality clash,” Ted conceded.

  “We weren’t mad. It was just time to move on,” he explained. “The friendship had run its course.”

  The pair had built a shotgun clause into the original business agreement. Accordingly, each made an offer on the company, and Doug Sr.’s was higher. So they shook hands and Ted Herriott walked away to start his own advertising agency. At Deco, Doug Sr. became president, Clarence Campbell became vice-president, and Diane took over as secretary-treasurer. They moved to an office on Martin Grove Road and by 1971 had again upgraded to a space on Greensboro Drive in Etobicoke, where Deco remains today.

  Business was booming. Said a close family friend, “As soon as Doug made it, he bought his mother a fur coat.” The company needed more staff. Doug Sr. hired his childhood friend Murray Johnson, who took over as vice-president. Doug Sr. was big on loyalty, a trait he passed on to his children, with mixed results. The four Ford siblings, when they were old enough, also got jobs at Deco.

  Kathy ran the administrative side. In 1986, she hired a nineteen-year-old named Gary Moody. He started off in the plant and worked his way up to plant manager and eventually general manager once Doug Jr. officially took over in 2002. Around the time Moody started, Doug Sr. was gradually passing the reins to his namesake—Dougie, to those who knew him well. The father stayed on as president and still went into the office every day, but