Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

  Renata wore a white dress cinched around her tiny waist, with a sweetheart neckline, short sleeves, and a long flowing train. Her curly brown hair tumbled to her shoulders beneath a veil and beaded tiara. Rob was in a dark suit with a powder-blue tie. Doug Jr.’s four daughters were matching flower girls with blue petals in their hair.

  Most people believe the couple had met in high school. A February 2011 Toronto Life feature entitled “The Woman Behind the Mayor: Who Is Renata Ford?” asserts that “what we do know is that Rob and Renata met during high school when they were living a couple of blocks apart.” This is what Ford says too, and it’s certainly possible. They were only a few years apart at Scarlett Heights. And their childhood homes are in the same Etobicoke neighbourhood. But no one I spoke to recalls Rob having anything to do with Renata until his twenties.

  After graduation, Renata went out with a man named Artur Kisicki. He was born in Poland, like Renata’s parents, and worked as a cabinetmaker. They got married in June 1993, when Renata was just twenty-two, but separated a year and a half later. A year after that Kisicki filed for divorce. It was finalized in February 1996. Court records do not indicate what led to the marriage breaking down, although a source close to the family says Renata’s drinking played a role.

  Rob and Renata dated for several years before they got married. Rob had been reluctant to settle down, reportedly, but proposed shortly after his drunk driving arrest in Florida.

  It seemed that alcohol continued to be a problem in the Ford household. In July 2005, after giving birth to her daughter, Stephanie, Renata was arrested for impaired driving. Officer Neville Channer also charged her with refusing to provide a breath sample and assaulting a peace officer. The second two charges were dropped, and she was fined six hundred dollars and given one year of driving probation.

  In 2008 Renata had a second child, a son named Doug, whom Rob affectionately calls Dougie. Renata’s parents help their daughter with the kids most days.

  FOR A WHILE, Kathy Ford’s troubles continued to haunt the family. There had been a brief period of stability in the mid-1990s. She even ran a political campaign in 1997 for the Conservative nominee in Etobicoke North, Sam Basra. But a year later, Michael Kiklas’s killing would devastate her. Kathy moved back in with her parents and eventually into the apartment above the garage. Holding a job was tough. She briefly tried to start a gift basket business out of the family house. But it never really came to anything.

  Then she met Scott MacIntyre. He was always grinning and seemed passionate about everything. He made her happy. But in many ways they weren’t good for each other. Both were drug users. They would spend time clean, then fall back into it.

  Things got bad in late 2003, when the pair went on a rampage stealing from Bell Canada phone booths. On December 10, they were arrested carrying a “pry bar and knife … instruments suitable for the purpose of breaking into a place vault.” Kathy and MacIntyre were each charged with thirty-two counts of theft under five thousand dollars for offences between November 4 and 19. In 2004, most of the charges were withdrawn. Kathy got twelve months’ probation. MacIntyre, because of his record, spent a few months in jail.

  The accidental shooting in 2005 was a brief interruption in their relationship. In 2008, Kathy was arrested for stealing toothbrushes from Zellers. She was also charged with assaulting the person trying to detain her. When she lied about her identity to an investigating police officer, they tacked on an obstruction of justice charge. (The obstruction and assault charges were dropped.) Kathy was given a year of probation for the theft and spent four days in custody.

  Through it all, to the surprise and annoyance of her family, Kathy Ford and Scott MacIntyre stayed together.

  The night Rob Ford was elected mayor, October 25, 2010, Scott was in the room at the Ford family homestead, alongside immediate family, high-ranking campaign staff, and a handful of reporters.

  But fifteen months later, something happened that they couldn’t overcome.

  It began at 7:30 A.M. on January 11, 2012. Scott drove to the mayor’s home and parked around the corner. A neighbour spotted him lurking and spoke to him. She called the police. Another resident asked Scott what he was doing, and Scott answered not to worry, he was family. He then drove into Rob and Renata Ford’s driveway and walked in the front door, which was unlocked because, according to court transcripts, Rob had been waiting for a visitor. When Rob came out of his bedroom to investigate the noise, Scott started to yell.

  “You owe me money and your sister owes me money,” Scott shouted. “If I don’t get it, they will kill me!”

  Rob ordered him to get out, but Scott kept at him. “You and your family are going to get it, you are going to pay for it.”

  Scott left and police arrived. An officer reached him on his cell phone. At one point in the phone conversation, Scott told the constable he intended to shoot Rob—who was now the mayor—and cut off his head with a machete.

  Hours later, Scott MacIntyre was arrested in a hotel room in Mississauga, just west of Toronto. Police found 2.1 grams of heroin and 1.8 grams of cocaine in his room.

  The mayor spoke to reporters later that day: “I can take care of myself. Pretty well told him that.… The whole thing was over pretty quickly.” Doug Jr. told the CBC he didn’t really know MacIntyre very well. He urged his brother to hire a security detail. Kathy didn’t answer her phone that day, but her voice mail greeting still included Scott’s name as well as those of her two children. Neighbours said the on-again-off-again couple had spent Christmas together.

  But now, to the family’s relief, according to sources, it looked like the relationship was finally done for good.

  On January 27, 2012, jail security found a letter written by Scott to Kathy: “You and your family have one chance to leave me the fuck alone and stop this shit! Or I am going to start a shitstorm.… You and your family think I should play nice! Fuck you.”

  While in prison, Scott was “viciously attacked and severely beaten,” court transcripts show. It was a case of “jailhouse justice,” the judge said, likely related to Scott’s relationship with the mayor of Toronto. His teeth were knocked out and he suffered a “catastrophic” injury to his right leg.

  Both Rob and Kathy Ford gave victim impact statements. Both said that they weren’t worried MacIntyre would try to hurt them and that they hoped he would avoid prison time. Justice Paul French found this to be a significant mitigating factor. The Crown attorney and Scott’s defence lawyer agreed on the facts of the case.

  Scott was sentenced to five additional months in jail, three years’ probation, regular drug tests, and a ban on owning weapons. He was also told to stay five hundred metres away from Rob Ford’s home and workplace. Kathy had asked that the court allow her to continue to communicate with Scott to help him with rehab, but Scott’s lawyer noted that Kathy Ford “has her own issues. I think that her issues in combination with Mr. MacIntyre’s issues are simply a prescription for disaster.” The judge agreed. Scott was banned from having any association or communication with Kathy.

  Scott MacIntyre was released that fall. In October 2012, he posted on his Facebook page, “I learned a VERY valuable lesson back in January! No matter if you are 100% innocent and have broken NO LAWS you can still be put in JAIL for daring to challenge people who are CONNECTED with the POLITICAL MACHINE!!!!!!” The status update is no longer visible.

  I made various attempts to speak to Scott MacIntyre before finally connecting with him through Facebook. (His son, Chris, confirms that Scott communicates primarily through the site.) On July 17, 2013, I wrote Scott a message asking if he would discuss the day he walked into the mayor’s home asking for money.

  He wrote back two days later. “The Fords as a whole family treated me like one of their own and for the things that I did to them they were more than fair and it would be remiss for me to say any different.”

  Later he added, “I have nothing to say. And I take full responsibility for my actions.
And what I did by going to my ex-brother-in-law’s and creating a scene was just stupid and irresponsible. Rob did not deserve the disrespect I caused and I paid my debt to society and have put this all behind me and wish you and all other media would do the same. Why don’t you do a story on what a great job Rob has done as Mayor of this City. And the money he has saved the tax payer!!!”

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN some relief to the Ford family that Doug Sr. did not witness these sordid dramas. Doug Ford Sr. died on September 22, 2006, at the age of seventy-three—just weeks after his fiftieth wedding anniversary. He had been diagnosed with colon cancer on Canada Day, July 1, and deteriorated quickly. In his will, Doug Sr. made his wife and three sons equal trustees to the Ford estate. To Kathy, he left a million-dollar trust fund, which she could access with permission from her brothers and mother. The money was to be used to ensure her “comfortable maintenance.”

  Doug Ford Sr.’s funeral was held at Westway United Church in Etobicoke on a Friday afternoon.

  A tearful Rob gave a tribute to his father, his “best buddy.”

  “I affectionately called him Scout, because Scout ran the ship,” Rob said. “Sometimes the ship went to the right and sometimes the ship went to the left, but he always seemed to steer it back on course.”

  Doug Sr.’s niece Sherri Walker called her uncle “the General.”

  “Doug was never a soldier, but forever a warrior; a warrior in the true sense of the word in all he did,” she said. “At the heart of this very complex man was an inner core of absolute, solid rock. The solid foundations he stuck by his entire life: family, integrity, kindness, honour, respect, humility, humour, tenacity and perseverance.”

  The funeral ended with mourners being asked to sing Doug Sr.’s favourite hymn, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;

  His truth is marching on.

  He was buried at Riverside Cemetery. Etched on his tombstone: “Of Those Who Are Called Few Are Chosen.”

  FOUR

  COUNCILLOR FORD

  TO SPEAK

  Rob Ford was twenty-six years old when he decided he wasn’t interested in selling labels for a living. He wanted to be a politician. At the time, his father was a member of provincial parliament under the Progressive Conservative banner. The year was 1997, and PC premier Mike Harris was a year and a half into his Common Sense Revolution. It was a period of painful transition in the province. The Harris government was making aggressive changes to the way Ontario operated. Among other things, it had laid off more than ten thousand civil servants; changed labour laws to discourage workers from unionizing; passed “workfare” legislation, forcing welfare recipients to work for their cheques; and fought for environmental deregulation.

  Harris had been upfront about his intentions during the 1995 election. During that campaign, the provincial deficit was around ten billion dollars. In his platform booklet, Harris had said, “If we are to fix the problems in this province then government has to be prepared to make some tough decisions. I’m not talking about tinkering, about incremental changes, or about short term solutions.… It’s time to ask ourselves how government spending can double in the last ten years, while we seem to be getting less and less value for our tax money.”

  Part of that mission involved shrinking the size of government. Harris looked at Ontario’s capital city and its surrounding suburbs and saw wasted money. There were too many politicians there, too many bureaucrats doing the same thing for a small geographic area. The premier decided to merge the seven local governments: Toronto, Etobicoke, North York, York, East York, Scarborough, and the regional municipality. His proposal was wildly unpopular. A March 1997 referendum showed that residents in each jurisdiction were overwhelmingly against the move, with opposition ranging from 65 to 81 percent. When the Conservatives passed it anyway, five of the six municipalities took the province to court. They lost. Toronto and its surrounding suburbs were set to join together on January 1, 1998. Toronto would become the fifth-largest city in North America.

  The megacity’s first council would be decided in the 1997 municipal election. Among the seven governments, there were 106 politicians. Ward boundaries were going to be redrawn, and the number of spots would be cut nearly in half to fifty-seven, including the mayor. To ease the transition, voters would be permitted to elect two representatives in each ward.

  Ford decided to try his luck against Gloria Lindsay Luby and Mario Giansante—both sitting councillors—as well as the former mayor of Etobicoke, Dennis Flynn. “I remember hearing [Ford] was really ticked off that Dennis Flynn decided to run again,” Lindsay Luby said. “He thought there’d only be the three of us in the campaign, and the odds of getting two out of three were better.”

  Ford was young and thinner back then, with a full head of blond hair. Even in his youth, Ford was always in a suit and tie. Lindsay Luby didn’t know anything about Ford at the time. She doesn’t remember debating him or even seeing him much. Giansante, on the other hand, was well acquainted with the Ford family. Both Giansante and Ford had their brothers running their campaigns.

  “We’re both business people and we met on the street and we got to know each other,” said Giansante, a real estate broker. “I guess we sort of had an admiration for one another that worked out well.”

  Giansante says twenty-something Ford was a lot like forty-something Ford. He didn’t change his mind once it was made up, and he saw the world in black and white. As a campaigner, he was a natural. “The showmanship is what really stuck out with me—and not just him, the whole family. The American way of politics.” Ford’s candidate signs were four feet high by eight feet wide, twice the size of everyone else’s. He wasn’t big on policy, but he was “flamboyant” and personable. And while Lindsay Luby and Giansante typically canvassed alone or with a few volunteers, Ford would door-knock with a full entourage.

  The Fords and Giansantes struck up a bit of a friendship, sometimes sharing information and keeping an eye on each other’s signs. Vandalism was a problem. Lindsay Luby, the lone woman in the race, experienced the most harassment. One morning, she looked outside and realized that one of the two stone Labradors at the end of her driveway had been stolen. A few days later a note arrived in the mail, written in cut-out magazine letters. “We have your dog. The ransom is 1000 dog biscuits.” Pictures started arriving showing the dog, in sunglasses and a hat, posed beside a recent edition of the newspaper. Another showed a masked, burly looking man in military garb holding a gun to its head. The next photo had the stone dog’s head cut off. It had “what looked like fire burning around its head,” Lindsay Luby recalled. The Lindsay Luby family was getting 3 A.M. calls from a Mississauga pay phone. Lindsay Luby went to the police, but no one was ever caught.

  When the election ended, so did the harassment, and Lindsay Luby had won. Giansante was second. Flynn came in third. Ford was fourth.

  Doug Ford Sr.’s old business partner, Ted Herriott, called the Ford family to offer his regrets.

  “So, I guess he’s done,” Herriott remembered saying to Diane Ford.

  “Oh, no, no, Robbie’s a career politician.”

  THEY MET AT A RESTAURANT that doesn’t exist anymore in an Etobicoke plaza. Doug Ford Jr. was already at the table when Gloria Lindsay Luby arrived. The conversation didn’t last long. She can’t remember if they even bothered ordering anything besides coffee.

  This was in the early months of 2000, a municipal election year. Lindsay Luby didn’t know the Fords very well, except that Doug Ford Sr. was in provincial politics and the youngest son, Rob, had run against her in 1997 and finished fourth. Doug Ford Jr. was his younger brother’s campaign manager. She had no idea why he had asked to meet.

  “We wanted to know,” Doug Ford began, “if you’d be interested in running i
n Ward 5. Then Rob can run in Ward 4 and you’ll both win.”

  Lindsay Luby must have looked startled. Doug moved to phase two of his sales pitch. “We’ve done some polling, and you can win south of Dundas as well as north.” And, of course, the Fords would help her with her campaign.

  She had been a councillor in central Etobicoke since 1985. Now Doug Ford wanted her to step aside so his kid brother with no experience, whom she didn’t even know, could get elected? “They thought they could be so persuasive,” Lindsay Luby said, looking back on the conversation.

  “Sorry,” she told him, “I’m not going to run in another ward. I like my ward. And I don’t need your help.”

  WITH THE 2000 ELECTION fast approaching, and Gloria Lindsay Luby refusing to budge, the Ford camp arranged a meeting with Mario Giansante. More changes were coming to the electoral landscape. Council was set to shrink again. Boundaries were rejigged to form forty-four wards—where it remains today— with one representative per ward, making for a much more competitive game. Now there would only be one seat up for grabs in Etobicoke Centre—in 1997 the ward was called Kingsway Humber—which councillors Lindsay Luby and Giansante currently shared.

  “If both of us ran, we knew we didn’t have a good chance against Gloria,” Giansante said. “If we ran as opponents we’d split the vote and Gloria would win automatically.”

  So Ford went north to take on incumbent Elizabeth Brown and Giansante stayed back for a rematch with Lindsay Luby. The Star called Ford’s bid “a bit of a long-shot.” Brown was well liked and was conservative, but her attendance had been spotty around City Hall. She explains that her marriage had been falling apart, then she’d suffered a car accident, and if that wasn’t enough, the July before the election she broke her arm.

  “Rob Ford actually coached my son’s football team at Martingrove. He was the stereotype of a belligerent, bullying coach,” Brown said, looking back on the election that changed her life. “To this day, people ask me, ‘How did Rob Ford beat you?’ They just don’t get it.”