Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Page 4

  the goal seemed to be teaching his brood the ropes. Kathy was really smart, Moody remembers. “If it hadn’t have been for the drugs …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  Randy was in and out of the business, depending on his own personal issues. And by the early 1990s, the youngest, Rob— Robbie—was also at Deco, on the sales side.

  “The Fords are just really great people,” said Moody. Deco felt like a family.

  “Before I started, there were a few wild Christmas parties, so they sort of stopped them. But every year, Doug Sr. would put cash in envelopes and call everyone up, one by one,” he said.

  “Back then, when you’re young and broke and living cheque to cheque, when someone hands you three to four hundred dollars cash, it was huge. It made your Christmas.”

  Moody left in 2003 to start his own label company.

  By the time Doug Sr. was elected to provincial parliament in 1995, Deco employed about forty-five people and was clearing millions of dollars in annual sales. With Doug Jr. taking the lead in the company, Deco expanded into Chicago and New Jersey. About 250 people are currently on the payroll.

  Doug Ford Sr.’s story is an inspiring tale of how a child of the Great Depression, with virtually no formal education, built an industry-leading company from nothing, through sheer grit, good instincts, and hard work. But in what would become a recurring theme in their political careers, the Fords could not resist embellishing.

  It has become part of the family folklore that Doug and Diane Ford started Deco out of the family basement. It was a story told in the weekly Etobicoke Life in 1995, after Doug Sr.

  won the Progressive Conservative nomination, and it has been repeated ever since in newspaper and magazine articles about the Fords.

  Nowhere is there mention of Ted Herriott, the co-founder, who was as instrumental as Doug Sr. in the genesis of Deco. Business records and official Toronto directories from the time confirm Herriott’s account.

  Years after their split, Ted Herriott and Doug Ford met at a mutual friend’s party. They embraced, and Doug Sr. seemed genuinely thrilled to see his old colleague.

  There were no hard feelings, Herriott told me. But I asked him if it bothered him to have been airbrushed out of history.

  He considered the question.

  “I’ll say I’ve never understood it.”

  KATHRYN DIANE FORD was the firstborn, arriving on a rainy summer day in July 1960. A little more than a year later, she had competition from baby number two, Randal Douglas. Then, in November 1964, along came another son, Douglas Robert. And the Fords weren’t done yet. Twelve years into their marriage, with a growing business to manage, Doug and Diane Ford had their fourth and final child. Another boy. Robert Bruce, weighing in at nine pounds, one ounce, was born at Humber Memorial Hospital in Etobicoke on May 28, 1969.

  “I gave my sons names that I thought would look good on an office door,” Diane Ford once told a confidant.

  In the early days of Deco, money had been tight. But by the time Rob was a baby, the family had moved into the lavish

  Etobicoke home where Diane still lives today. Doug Sr. worked a lot. Diane was a blossoming socialite. She loved to get dressed up and mingle at the local country club. As their bank account grew, the Fords continued to climb the social ladder. By the early 1980s they were appearing in the society pages alongside the elites of the day, the Eaton family, cabinet ministers, senators.

  Doug Ford Sr. was a founding member of the Rexdale Rotary Club and volunteered with the Salvation Army and Big Brothers. Eventually, he became a board member with the Etobicoke General Hospital and helped raise $1.5 million so that the hospital could buy its first CT scan machine.

  He was strict with his children. There was no sleeping in at their household. Every day, the man who had endured grinding poverty reminded them how fortunate they were. Deco was doing well. The family could afford nice cars. But Doug Sr. warned his children to take nothing for granted.

  The children worshipped their father and all his eccentricities—of which there were many. Doug Sr. liked to wear cowboy hats, sometimes at Queen’s Park. He sported a handlebar moustache and wore fur coats. On his downtime, Doug Sr. loved to travel, picking up treasures along the way, paintings, rugs, vases, statues. He was especially fond of items from Asia. The Ford home became a mini museum, although no one could ever tell if Doug Sr. had paid ten dollars or ten thousand for a piece. He didn’t seem to care. He liked what he liked. On the weekends, his favourite pastime was bargain hunting at the Pickering flea market, east of Toronto. He would never dress up. “He wanted to see how people would treat him not knowing he had money,” said a family friend.

  BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the Ford kids had a happy childhood. No one can really explain what happened next, other than to say it was tragic. As teenagers, both Kathy and Randy started taking drugs. By the time he was eighteen, Randy had a criminal record for assault. He stole a motorcycle then breached his parole. While his younger brothers were just starting high school, Randy was in and out of court, and sometimes jail. Between 1981 and 1987, he was twice found guilty of theft and assault. In 1988 he was found guilty of possession of narcotics. By the time Doug Ford Sr. became a member of provincial parliament, in 1995, Randy had been arrested at least seventeen times, often for multiple offences. Among his dozens of convictions: dangerous driving, mischief to private property, break and enter, driving while impaired, and half a dozen drug offences.

  What sons Doug Jr. and Rob were doing at this time is still the subject of considerable gossip in the Etobicoke community, gossip every journalist in Toronto was tipped off about once Rob Ford announced his candidacy for mayor. The Globe and Mail was the only news outlet in Toronto to follow up on those rumours properly. And on May 25, 2013, a week after the Star published its story about the crack cocaine video, the Globe ran a four-thousand-word investigation into the Ford brothers’ high school years.

  The story, by Greg McArthur and Shannon Kari, alleged that Doug Jr. was one of the go-to hash dealers in Etobicoke during the 1980s. The reporters spoke with ten people—“two former hashish suppliers, three street-level drug dealers and a number of casual users of hash”—who branded the middle Ford brother as a significant player in the Etobicoke hash trade. They alleged that Doug was active from the age of fifteen to about

  twenty-two. Rob Ford was sometimes around his brother when he was conducting business, but the Globe said “he didn’t seem to be involved in a significant way,” according to sources.

  All of the Globe’s sources for the story talked on condition of anonymity, although they each spoke on the record to the reporters and several agreed to meet with editors at the paper. The sources said they were worried about reprisals. At least one feared problems crossing the border if his name was attached to a story about buying drugs.

  According to the Globe’s investigation, Doug Jr. was conducting his drug deals out of his family’s basement and a local park. Sources said Doug and his associates called themselves the RY Drifters—a reference to the Royal York Plaza, which was at the end of the Fords’ street—and at least ten of them “became heroin addicts, some of whom turned to break-ins and robberies to support their habit.” One of Doug’s associates was a man named Dave Price, a long-time friend of his. The pair played on the same hockey and football teams. Days after the crack video story broke, Mayor Rob Ford hired Price as his director of operations and logistics. Asked about the hiring, Doug Jr., now a councillor himself, told the Globe, “You can’t teach loyalty.”

  The Globe story also revealed that, at twenty-four, Randy was charged in connection with the kidnapping of a man named Marco Orlando over a drug debt. A small story about the incident had run in the Toronto Star on December 12, 1986.

  Three Etobicoke men have been charged with trying to force a man to pay a $5,000 debt incurred by his son. Police say the son, Marco Orlando, 28, of Adonis Court, was beaten up by a man in the Royal York Plaza on Royal

  York Rd. on Tuesd
ay night, then turned over to two other men who drove him to Bolton and confined him for 10 hours. Orlando was then forced to call his father and ask for $5,000 for his release. The family called police. Orlando returned home and police later arrested three men.

  The Star story indicates that “[Randal] Douglas Ford, 24” was charged with assault causing bodily harm. The Globe and Mail article in 2013 reported that “court records retrieved from the Archives of Ontario show that he was charged with assault causing bodily harm and the forcible confinement of Mr. Orlando. The records do not disclose how the case was resolved.”

  In an exhaustive search of Randy Ford’s legal history, I did not find any convictions relating to an incident in December 1986. The Fords’ long-time lawyer, Dennis Morris, is quoted as saying he does not recall the incident.

  Finally, the Globe investigation rehashed the fatal shooting of Michael Kiklas, adding, “Not mentioned in the press at the time was the fact that Mr. Kiklas was a white supremacist—a group with which Ms. Ford associated in the 1980s.” Sources told the paper that Kathy never seemed like a true believer in the movement. Rather, she came across as someone trying to rebel.

  After the Globe story became public, Councillor Doug Ford conducted a series of interviews with various media denouncing the investigation. He called the allegation that he once dealt drugs “an outright lie” and “sleazy journalism.” He admitted to smoking marijuana as a teenager, “like everyone else.”

  “Is that the best The Globe and Mail has? … They want to go back when I was in high school,” Doug Ford told Global News.

  “Why don’t we talk about the great things the Ford family has done for Etobicoke and throughout the city? I think that should maybe be once the story. About giving back.”

  He then asked the Global reporter, Jackson Proskow, if he’d ever done drugs. “I’m sure you, Jackson, have smoked marijuana. And God knows what else you’ve done.… Have you ever done cocaine? I haven’t. I’ve heard a lot of people have done cocaine in the media. People chasing Rob have done cocaine, I’ve heard.” This ploy of accusing the questioners of doing drugs was a tactic Doug would use again. (It’s worth noting that in November 2013, after six months of denying the Globe story, Doug Jr. told CNN’s Bill Weir, “If you want to go calling, you know, going to your buddy and saying, ‘Here’s a joint for ten bucks,’ if that’s what you want to call [dealing], so be it.”)

  In researching this book, I reached out to hundreds of the Fords’ former classmates who went to Scarlett Heights Collegiate with the brothers between 1980 and 1988. Because of the age difference, Doug and Rob were only at Scarlett at the same time for one year. Most of the people contacted did not respond. Several former classmates noted that the Ford brothers had a reputation for fighting, especially the eldest, Randy. One person described him as a “terror.” But the majority of those who were willing to comment described Doug and Rob as two friendly jocks who used to throw wild parties around the family’s backyard pool. They were popular and good-looking. Both devoted their high school years to sports.

  Doug Jr. played hockey and threw shot put, but his passion was the gridiron. Football was big at Scarlett in those days. “We probably had the best football team that was out there. There was a [big] conflict between us and Richview Collegiate,” said

  former student Mark Stenoff. One year, Scarlett’s Raiders were the better squad, then it would switch.

  When kids weren’t cheering on their home team, they were partying at someone’s house or in the local park. “You know, it was a rock-and-roll school, basically. That’s the simplest way I could put it,” Stenoff said. “We had a lot of rockers.… You know what I mean? What do you call ’em, long-hairs, I guess. It was a cool school.”

  In his graduating yearbook, Doug wrote, “Scarlett Heights is nice and hearty every day was a party. I can’t believe I’m still alive after five. Make it 3 in a row Raiders.”

  Once Rob Ford came along, he was immediately cast as “Doug’s little brother.” When he was in Grade 10, he made captain of the junior football team. The caption on the team photo that year mistakenly read “Doug Ford.” Football was everything to Rob. Doug Sr. sent his youngest to a prestigious youth football camp in the US over the summer. Rob was not naturally a gifted player, but he worked hard, beefed up, and became a star on the team. “All I remember is him running the track. You’d drive by after school and you’d see him running the track. He had a lot of heart,” said former Scarlett student Bill Gianakopoulos.

  “Rob was a good person. He was a generous person,” said Dave Miteff, who played two years of football with the future mayor. “The second year that we played, we won the city championship.… [Rob] had a party at his house, and the Fords paid for it all. The father had somebody videotape the game, and he gave us all copies.”

  Laura Biernat, who had drama class with Rob at Scarlett Heights, remembers him as being shy. “He wasn’t at all like the

  man you see today,” she said. “He was a quieter kind of fellow as a teenager.”

  Outside the classroom, Rob was social, but he didn’t seem to have many close friends. He used to run with the “rich kids” in Etobicoke, spending weekends at summer cottages or flying down to someone’s vacation house in Florida for a few days. By this point, the Fords weren’t yet ultra-wealthy, but they had enough to keep Rob hanging out with the in-crowd. Status was worth the investment.

  “He wasn’t exactly part of that group, but he hung out with them,” said a friend of the brothers from high school. “Robbie was just sort of around a lot. He was friendly with everyone.”

  Along the way, Rob made friends with a transfer student from nearby Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School named Fabio Basso, said David Profitt, a mutual friend of the two. Basso had long dark hair that covered his eyes. He was laid-back, a “quiet stoner,” according to others who knew him. (Twenty-five years later, it was outside Basso’s yellow-brick home in Etobicoke that the infamous photo of Rob with two alleged gang members and a murdered twenty-one-year-old would be taken.)

  “Robbie liked his weed,” said a high school friend. So he and Basso got along well.

  Rob spent a few years drifting after high school. He dreamed of a career in football, but never made it past the varsity level. At Carleton University in Ottawa, Ford spent one season on the Ravens’ offensive line, but it’s not clear if he ever left the bench. One of Rob’s former teammates, John Lindsay, explained to Toronto Life magazine, “I know it might sound strange now … but Robbie was a little guy.” Rob dropped out after

  a year, went back to work at the family business, and started coaching on the side.

  Toronto’s future mayor still didn’t know what he wanted to do for a career, he just knew he wanted to be successful. “He used to say he’s going to be the first in his family to make a million dollars,” said one friend.

  But in those early days after Carleton, twenty-year-old Rob Ford seemed most committed to “having a good time.” After all, he was young, well-off, and his dad was his boss. He started to party. Primarily, he liked to drink and smoke pot, but he dabbled in cocaine as well. Said the high school friend, “What do you expect? He’s been around drugs his whole life.”

  By that time, Randy’s substance abuse had worsened. Randy and Doug Sr. stopped speaking for a while. Kathy was not doing well either, and she was no longer working full-time at Deco.

  For his part, Rob had never had a strong interest in the family business, but he wanted to be a team player, so he stuck around and joined the Deco sales force. Doug Jr. was running the company, although his father was still officially president for the time being. When the moment was right, Doug Sr. would step back and give the company to his middle son, who had more than proven himself worthy. Doug Sr. was getting ready to retire.

  Then fate intervened.

  IT WAS EARLY 1994, election time in the pre-amalgamation City of Etobicoke. Long-serving local councillor Doug Holyday had decided to run for mayor of Etobicoke
, and he needed help with his campaign signs. A friend recommended Deco Labels.

  Holyday was hoping to reuse his old white-and-blue councillor signs rather than print all new ones. He met with Doug Jr., who suggested covering the word “councillor” with a big red sticker that said “MAYOR” in white letters. Holyday loved it. But he got more than just signs that day. Doug Jr. asked if he needed help on his campaign.

  Holyday recalled one of Doug Jr.’s first days on the team. Doug Jr. was livid that their political rival was winning the sign war.

  “I remember Doug coming down to say, ‘You don’t have any signs in the Six Points, Kipling, and Dundas area. It’s all Bruce Sinclair,’” Holyday said. Doug Jr. vowed to take care of it. “The next day, I drove down Kipling and the area was covered in my signs.”

  Doug Jr. joined Holyday’s steering committee. He attended breakfast strategy meetings and helped with door-knocking. Against the odds, Holyday won, beating out the incumbent Sinclair.

  Doug Jr. was hooked. The next year, he encouraged his father to run provincially. Doug Jr. would be his campaign manager.

  “Dougie loved politics,” said Moody, Deco’s former general manager and long-time friend of Doug Jr. “He never talked about running, though. I think Rob had more time on his hands. Dougie couldn’t. He was running the business and taking care of his family.”

  This dynamic would haunt the brothers’ relationship for years to come. Doug Jr. had been left with the responsibility of running Deco, leaving baby brother Rob the freedom to pursue his dreams. Both worshipped their father, craved his approval, and spent their lives trying to emulate him. Doug Jr. went the business route. Then Doug Sr. changed careers and decided to run for the provincial Conservative party. A few years later, brother Rob launched his own campaign, at least in part off of his family’s business credentials.