Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Page 5

  Those close to Doug Ford Jr. say that not so deep down, he resented Rob. Glimpses of this tension surfaced during Rob Ford’s first year in office, with Doug hijacking news coverage. Friends and former staff go so far as to say that none of the three brothers get along very well. Sometimes they go months without speaking. This is especially true for Doug and Rob, despite the fact that Rob frequently refers to Doug as his best friend, and that Doug is his brother’s fiercest defender.

  Their loyalty is ultimately to the family name, not necessarily to each other.

  ON FEBRUARY 18, 1995, hundreds of people wearing Doug Ford baseball caps and waving Doug Ford placards marched into Scarlett Heights Collegiate to pledge their support for the scrappy tell-it-like-it-is owner of Deco Labels & Tags.

  It was the night of the Progressive Conservative nomination for the Etobicoke-Humber riding. The premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, a New Democrat, was expected to call an election in a matter of months. If the polls were any indication, his beleaguered government was going to take a beating.

  The early 1990s was a period of recession in Canada. Voters felt that Rae and the Ontario New Democratic Party had mismanaged the economy. The province was running a staggering deficit of twelve billion dollars. In an attempt to tame that beast, Rae had passed an austerity measure in the spring of 1993 that forced public-sector workers to take unpaid leave, or “Rae Days,” as they came to be known. In doing so, he became just as unpopular with the left as he was with the right. New Democrat support was barely breathing at 14 percent. All the polls indicated a Liberal sweep. The party, led by Lyn McLeod, had the second highest number of seats in the legislature. They appeared poised to form a majority government.

  Enter Mike Harris, the colourful leader of the third-place Progressive Conservative Party. Harris positioned himself as the exact opposite of Rae. He pitched a “Common Sense Revolution” that would cut income tax rates by 30 percent, slash spending by six billion dollars, and force able-bodied welfare recipients to work for their cheques. Harris vowed to do away with affirmativeaction programs and get tough with criminals.

  Four candidates in Etobicoke-Humber were vying to become soldiers in Harris’s revolution. Doug Ford Sr. was up against a lawyer named Tom Barlow, local business manager Alida Leistra, and a small businessman and lawyer named Joe Peschisolido. The winner would take on Liberal incumbent Dr. Jim Henderson, a physician who had represented the riding since 1985.

  Doug Sr. won on the third ballot.

  It was the first political step by a Ford, and the beginning of a movement that would come to be known as Ford Nation.

  THREE

  THE CANADIAN

  KENNEDYS

  Chris MacIntyre headed straight home from school on the afternoon of March 31, 2005. The fourteen-year-old was new to the neighbourhood and still making friends. Five weeks earlier, he had moved in with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend, Kathy Ford. They lived in an apartment above Kathy’s parents’ garage, which Doug Sr. and Diane had built for her after she ran into some trouble a few years earlier. The Fords were rich. They had their own label business, and Mr. Ford used to be in the provincial parliament. One of the sons was a city councillor.

  Chris figured they were pretty important people.

  Kathy, like his dad, wasn’t perfect. She’d had a lot of hard years, and she wore every one of them on her face. Both Kathy and Chris’s dad had drug problems. Both had criminal records. His dad had spent a lot of time in jail. But things seemed to be better.

  Chris had never seen his troubled father so happy. Kathy Ford was forty-five and Scott MacIntyre was thirty-eight, but the age difference didn’t seem to bother either of them. Scott said Kathy was “soulmate” material. She was good to Chris. She treated him just as well as she treated her own two children, a seventeen-year-old girl and eleven-year-old boy. Now, the five of them all lived together.

  Scott was an excellent cook. In the morning, he would make the kids eggs and hash browns with sausage. Scott would come into Chris’s room whisking a bowl of fresh hollandaise sauce, letting the noise wake him up. Kathy took care of the laundry and the cleaning. Some nights they would skip cooking, and the whole gang would go out for Chinese food or pizza. There was a lot of laughter in their lives. Scott and Kathy liked to banter. They would rib each other all day, trading increasingly ridiculous barbs, each hoping to catch the other off guard.

  Chris was happy.

  This March day, when he got home, he had the apartment to himself. Kathy’s two kids were around somewhere, but he didn’t see them. His dad and Kathy were with some friends in the kitchen of the main house. A woman—the girlfriend of one of Scott’s buddies—was staying with them in the apartment. This was not unusual. People were always crashing for a day or two. Kathy and his dad were generous with their space.

  Chris dropped his backpack and headed straight for the television, as Grade 9 boys will do. He was deep into the video game Mortal Kombat when he heard shouting from downstairs.

  He dropped the controls and walked to the door connecting to the main house. Something was going on. Chris jogged down the hallway and rounded the staircase to the main level. There were a lot of people in the kitchen. Kathy’s daughter was standing by the door. Suddenly, a deafening crack split the air.

  The rest Chris remembers in slow motion.

  Kathy slumped to the floor. People started to run. Scott put down a 12-gauge shotgun, pushed someone out of the way, and ran to Kathy’s side. Kathy’s daughter balled up her fists, tilted her head upwards, and began screaming louder than Chris had ever heard anyone scream in his life.

  “Kathy! Oh, Kathy! Oh, God!” Chris recalled his dad yelling. “Can you talk to me? What’s your name? What’s your birthday?”

  Her head was gushing blood.

  Scott turned to Chris and yelled at him to call 911. Chris ran for the upstairs phone. The screaming didn’t stop. By the time Chris got back to the kitchen, his father was gone. He and another man had taken off in Kathy’s parents’ Jaguar.

  The police arrived. Kathy was whisked to the hospital, and Chris was driven to the police station. He sobbed as they questioned him. He knew his dad was in trouble. He wanted to protect him. At first, he lied and said Scott had been at work all day. “He wasn’t even home at the time of the shooting,” Chris claimed. But the detectives were unrelenting. They told him they already knew everything from Kathy’s children. Chris, scared and tired, eventually confessed what he knew.

  He emerged from the police station to see Kathy’s councillor brother, Rob Ford.

  “Rob, please. Please let me stay with you. I have nowhere to go,” Chris wept.

  Rob looked down at him. “I can’t do anything,” he said, and turned away.

  Chris had to leave Toronto to live with his mom.

  Kathy survived. The bullet had grazed her forehead, leaving a scar but no lasting damage. Police tracked Scott down the next day and charged him with careless storage of a firearm, careless use of a firearm, and possession of cocaine. He pleaded guilty to all three offences and went to jail.

  Investigators determined that the shooting had been an accident. Scott was trying to break up a fight between his friend and the girlfriend who had been staying with them.

  “Somehow or another he was jostled or lost his balance and the gun discharged,” Detective Colin Kay told the National Post. “I am not of the belief that the victim was the intended target.”

  The shotgun wasn’t Scott MacIntyre’s. It belonged to Doug Ford Sr., an avid collector, according to family sources. MacIntyre promised the judge he’d never touch another firearm again. He spent a year in jail.

  Once he was released, he and Kathy got back together. They moved into an apartment, for which Kathy’s parents were paying, across the street from Scarlett Heights Collegiate. Every few months, Chris would visit the couple. They looked as happy as ever, but trouble never seemed far from Kathy.

  DESPITE THE VARIOUS PROBLEMS at home, the Ford family was on
its way to becoming a political dynasty.

  Doug Sr. had spent just a single term in the Ontario Legislature. The premier consolidated the number of ridings, and Doug Sr. lost his seat in 1999 after only four years as an MPP. But he was still a significant player in the party, plus his youngest son was a city councillor.

  In his short time as an MPP, Doug Sr. had made his mark as a staunch conservative warrior, ready and willing to toe the party line even in the face of crumbling public support. His combative speeches at Queen’s Park became something of legend. In one famous incident, he began heckling the people who had come to make deputations about not having jobs. It was in 1997, and the

  legislative assembly was debating Bill 103, the bill that would bring about amalgamation.

  “The greatest economist I ever met in my whole life was my mother,” Doug Sr. said. “My mother had nine children, and she didn’t take any welfare and she had the kind of pride I haven’t seen for many, many years.”

  Someone interjected, “What’s that got to do with Bill 103?”

  Doug Sr. kept going. “We’re talking about living in two rooms with nine kids. The older ones took care of the younger ones. My mother worked every single day of her life. She used to brush my hair, and I used to say to her, ‘When I get older, you’ll never have to work,’ and she used to laugh. Every day, I’d see her go out, and I’d see her come back with a bag of groceries or something. Heating those two rooms—I used to go down to the coal cars, down on Eastern Avenue, take the coal, put it in a bucket, and bring it home on my wagon. Some of you people don’t even know what life’s all about … the people over there who are lobbying from the audience every day. I’ve been listening and I watch them all. I wonder if they’ve got time or they work for a living. I don’t know.”

  Gilles Bisson, a New Democrat, admonished Ford for attacking the public.

  But Doug Sr. pressed on. “Everyone agrees that the status quo is not an option. The mayors, the business community, even the leader of the Opposition all agree there must be change.”

  By this point, the chamber was deteriorating as people began to shout. The Conservative Party whip gave Doug Sr. the signal to sit down.

  Bisson: “The whip is too embarrassed by what you’re saying and he wants you to sit down.”

  Doug Ford: “Why don’t you shut your mouth.”

  Doug Sr. may not have earned himself many friends on the other side of the aisle, but within his own party, his passion, loyalty, and flamboyant charm won people over. They respected his rags-to-riches story. And while Doug Sr. didn’t broadcast it, he donated every penny of his political salary to charity.

  Doug Ford Sr. became an important fixture in Conservative circles. So, in early 2003, when John Tory, the CEO of Rogers Cable—a division of Rogers Communications, one of the biggest and most powerful companies in Canada—decided he was going to run for mayor of Toronto, he scheduled a meeting with the Fords. Tory was a conservative. And to win an election in Toronto as a right-winger, you needed the suburbs. His advisers explained that the Fords were the gatekeepers to Etobicoke.

  “It was ‘Fords,’ plural,” Tory remembered. “I showed up at this restaurant near the airport, and there was Doug Sr., Diane, and Rob and Doug Jr. and Randy.”

  Looking back, Tory described his lunch with the Fords as “being on show,” his moment to explain what he was about and what he planned to do. Diane asked most of the questions, and she was the one who delivered the verdict.

  “We like you. You’ll get elected, because we’re going to help you in Etobicoke,” Tory remembered Diane saying. “You’ll serve for a period of time, and then it will be Robbie’s turn.”

  Tory narrowly lost the mayoral election to the left-wing candidate, David Miller, but he did take Etobicoke.

  According to those who know him well, Rob Ford always knew he would run for mayor once he got elected to council. But he dreamed even bigger. One day, he wanted to become leader of the federal Conservative Party, and ultimately prime minister. Brother Doug Jr. planned to run provincially and eventually be elected premier. As a councillor, Doug Jr. was open about his plans to move to Queen’s Park.

  Said a source closely connected to the family, “The Fords think of themselves as the Kennedys. They talk about it. They’re the Canadian Kennedys.”

  Perhaps it’s true. The Kennedys had skeletons. And so do the Fords.

  ROB FORD WAS TWENTY-NINE years old when he had his first brush with scandal. It was the early morning of February 15, 1999. Ford was on vacation with his then girlfriend, Renata Brejniak, at his parents’ condo in Hallandale, Florida, just north of Miami. Well after midnight, for reasons unknown, Ford was driving around a crime-sick slum in downtown Miami known as Overtown. As he passed 12th Street and NW 3rd Avenue, a police officer noticed Ford was driving his gold Crown Victoria without the headlights on.

  Officer Timothy Marks pulled him over two streets later. According to the arrest paperwork, Ford was nervous, pink-faced, and reeked of booze. Marks suspected he was drunk and asked him to exit the vehicle for a roadside test.

  Ford fumbled his way out of the car, threw his hands in the air, and slurred, “Go ahead. Take me to jail!” He pulled out a handful of cash, chucking the money onto the pavement. The two men, both five feet ten, stood eye to eye, but the driver had one hundred pounds on him. Marks examined the licence. The driver’s name was Robert Bruce Ford, born May 28, 1969, and he was in Florida on vacation from Toronto.

  Marks pulled out a pen from his breast pocket. He positioned it a foot in front of Ford’s face and waved it back and forth. Ford’s glassy eyes floated aimlessly around in their sockets, occasionally fastening on the pen before wandering off again. Fail. Next, Marks asked Ford to walk nine steps in a straight line, turn around, and walk nine steps back. Ford made three attempts before Marks moved on to the one-legged balance test. Standing in his summer deck shoes, Ford gingerly raised his foot off the ground and nearly fell over. He hopped up and down, flailed his arms, then gave up. Fail. Finally, Marks asked him to close his eyes, put his hands at his sides, tilt his head to the stars, and try to estimate thirty seconds. Ford listed from side to side, holding out his arms like a tightrope walker on a cable hundreds of feet in the air.

  “… Thirty!”

  “That was fifteen.”

  At 2:50 A.M., Officer Marks put Ford in handcuffs. He searched Ford’s pockets, emptying the contents onto the hood of his cruiser, and found a marijuana joint stashed in Ford’s right back pocket. Back at South Station, Ford blew .124 on the Breathalyzer, well above the legal limit of .08. On the second reading, he wouldn’t cooperate. Officer Barbara Shaffner wrote “Playing w[ith] blowing” on the official report, which meant Ford was either trying to stick his tongue in the tube or exhale outside the device.

  Ford was charged with driving under the influence and possession of marijuana. He was booked, fingerprinted, and photographed, then driven over to the Dade County jail to sober up.

  Never-before-seen arrest documents reveal that Ford has never been fully truthful about what happened that night. After the story broke in 2010, Ford told reporters he had been out celebrating Valentine’s Day with Renata prior to his arrest. “I admit maybe I had, you know, a little bit … one, two glasses of wine or two,” he said. “We had a couple of bottles of wine. I wasn’t drunk, but maybe I shouldn’t have been driving.” But Ford’s arrest citation paints a completely different picture. Ford told police he had been at a bar called the Players Pub in Hallandale—about twenty-five minutes of highway driving north of Overtown—in the three hours before getting stopped at 2:35 A.M. When asked when he had last eaten something, Ford told investigators he’d had some ribs and potatoes ten hours earlier. He admitted to drinking two large draft beers and two shots of Chivas Regal between 3 P.M. and midnight. (Arresting Officer Timothy Marks said it would take significantly more alcohol than that for Ford to blow what he did.) And it’s not clear if Renata was even with Ford at the time, as he has sugg
ested. There is no mention of her in any of the paperwork, and a source close to the family told me she was waiting back at the condo.

  Ford initially tried to hide the arrest from his family. When Doug Ford Sr. took public office, the Ford children had been warned there would be strict consequences for any “silliness.” This usually meant cutting them off financially for a period of time. It was a punishment that Randy and Kathy knew well. A close family source says that Ford might have successfully avoided the wrath of Doug Ford Sr. if only he had remembered to get rid of his arrest paperwork, which was discovered by another family member at the Florida condo a week later.

  Doug Ford Sr. was “absolutely livid,” said the source. The tough-on-crime, family values premier of Ontario, Mike Harris, was not going to be pleased if the media learned his backbencher from Etobicoke had a son facing drug and DUI charges. And it wasn’t just the Ford family’s reputation on the line. Rob’s own political future was at stake. He wanted to be a city councillor. He had run and lost in 1997 and was preparing to try again in 2000.

  The Fords hired lawyer Reemberto Diaz to work out a deal. On May 14, 1999, Ford pleaded guilty to driving under the influence, and in exchange the state dropped the marijuana charge. Ford agreed to six months’ probation, a 180-day suspension of his licence, and $664.75 in fines and court costs. He was also ordered to perform fifty hours of community service and attend a substance abuse program. And that was the end of it.

  Shortly after coming back from Florida, Ford announced that he and Renata were engaged.

  ON A SUNNY SATURDAY in August 2000, Renata Brejniak married Rob Ford at the All Saints Roman Catholic Church in Etobicoke. She was twenty-nine; he was thirty-one. That evening, there were cocktails, dinner, and dancing at the nearby St. George’s Golf and Country Club. They gave a commemorative bottle of wine to each of their guests and looked very much in love.