Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (2 page)

PROLOGUE

M
ohamed Farah was an hour late.

Once more, I scanned the dimly lit plaza trying to spot him. Maybe he was hiding somewhere, watching us, making sure we had indeed come alone.

I tried to make out the faces of the young men smoking in front of Istar Restaurant, a popular halal joint where diners could see out but you couldn’t see in. None of them looked familiar.

Maybe he was inside? It was about 10:30
P.M.
Our car was parked at the far end, in front of a bank, as instructed.

“God, he better show up this time,” I said to my colleague Kevin Donovan.

This would be our third attempt at seeing the video.

It had been a month, almost to the day, since Farah called me on my cell phone with a cryptic news tip. It was 9
A.M.
on Easter Monday 2013, and I’d been trying to sleep in. I shuffled out of bed, irritated that someone was calling so early on a holiday.

“Robyn speaking,” I said.

“Robyn Doolittle, from the
Toronto Star
?”

I didn’t recognize the man’s voice. It was deep and had that nonchalant drawl that young cool guys tend to use.

“Yep. Who am I speaking with?”

“I have some information I think you’d like to see,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone … it’s about a prominent Toronto politician.”

A week earlier, I’d co-written a controversial piece with Kevin Donovan about the mayor of Toronto’s struggle with alcohol. I suspected the caller was talking about Rob Ford.

He claimed to be in possession of a very incriminating video, but he refused to say anything more on the phone. He wanted to meet as soon as possible. “I’ll come to you,” he offered.

That was encouraging. If he was willing to make the trip, odds were he wasn’t completely without credibility.

Shortly before noon, I arrived at a crowded Starbucks in a hipster neighbourhood just outside of downtown Toronto.

“Robyn?”

I spun around to see a clean-cut East African–looking guy who seemed about my age, somewhere in his late twenties, maybe early thirties.

“I’m Mohamed,” he said, extending a hand.

He was thickly built, like a football player, and a good head taller than me, wearing a button-up shirt and dark baggy jeans that had a bit of a shimmer to them—hip hop meets business casual. We headed to a nearby park and settled on a bench by the soccer field.

Farah told me he volunteered with Somali youth up in Rexdale—a troubled neighbourhood in Toronto’s northwest end not far from where Ford lived—and that he’d read my story about the mayor and alcohol.

“It’s much worse than that,” Farah said.

I knew this was true. For a year and a half I’d been investigating whether the mayor had a substance abuse issue. To an
outsider, what Farah said next might have sounded unbelievable. But not to me.

“The mayor is smoking drugs. Crack cocaine.” Farah searched my face to see if I believed him, but I kept a blank expression. “And I have a video of it.”

“Did you bring it?”

“I can’t let you see it yet. But I brought this.” He pulled out a silver iPad.

He thumbed around for a few seconds, then turned it towards me. There was a photo of Ford, grinning and flushed, his blond hair matted and messy, with three men who looked to be in their early twenties. Ford, who was wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt, had his arms around two of them. One of the guys was making a “west side” gesture. Another in a dark hood was flashing his middle finger while gripping a beer bottle. It was shot outside at night. The group was standing in front of a yellow-brick garage with a big black door. There was snow on the ground.

Was this photo part of the video?

No, Farah said, but it showed the mayor in front of a crack house with men connected to the drug trade. And “that one,” he continued, pointing to the hooded man with the beer bottle, “is Anthony Smith. He was killed outside Loki nightclub last week.”

Farah had my attention.

He put the iPad away and the conversation returned to the video. Farah claimed the footage was shot by a young crack dealer. He swore that it clearly showed the mayor inhaling from a crack pipe, complaining about minorities, and calling Justin Trudeau, the leader of the federal Liberal Party, “a fag.” Farah alleged that his friends had been selling drugs to the
mayor for a long time, but Smith’s death had everyone scared. The dealer wanted out. He wanted to move to Alberta and start over. Farah told me he had agreed to help.

Here came the catch.

They wanted a hundred thousand dollars for the footage.

THAT WAS
thirty-three days earlier.

Now, I was waiting in a grungy plaza parking lot in a bad part of town with Kevin Donovan, passing the time by theorizing what was going to happen—if anything. Would they show us the video right there in the car? Would it be a group of people? Or just Farah and the dealer? What if they wanted to drive us somewhere?

The later it got, the more I was convinced we were waiting for no one. Then out of nowhere a black sedan pulled up beside us. It was Farah. He wasn’t getting out of the car.

He phoned me from feet away. “Leave your cell phones. No bags. No purses. And get in.”

I sat in the front. Donovan climbed into the back. Farah was breathing quickly. He didn’t say anything as we turned left onto Dixon Road, a busy street in a part of Toronto called Etobicoke. A few minutes later, he pulled into a dark parking lot behind a six-tower condo complex that looked worse than some subsidized housing in the city. We parked behind 320 Dixon.

Farah called his guy. “He’s coming,” he told us.

A skinny Somali-looking man in a wrinkled black T-shirt appeared out of the darkness. He got in the back with Donovan. I guessed he wasn’t much older than twenty-five. He had a peculiar look about him, his face sort of caved in on itself, with
his eyes, nose, and mouth squishing together between a large forehead and pointy jawline. His black hair was cut close to his head, and his arms were pocked with thick scabs. Donovan and I introduced ourselves, but he didn’t want to talk and never gave his name. He pulled out an iPhone and hit play.

I thought I was prepared, but I couldn’t hide my shock.

There was Rob Ford—and there was no doubt in my mind that it was Rob Ford—the mayor of the fourth-largest city in North America, slurring, rambling, wobbling around in his chair, sucking on what looked like a crack pipe.

BEFORE BECOMING MAYOR
on December 1, 2010, Rob Ford had spent ten years as a controversial city councillor. His checkered past included a drunk driving conviction, a domestic assault arrest (which was later dropped), and allegations of racism and homophobia. But Ford’s antics had rarely earned ink outside of the Greater Toronto Area, and even two and a half years into his term as mayor, it was unlikely the average Canadian would have recognized him on the street. That would all change on May 16, 2013. That was the night the American gossip website Gawker posted a story with the headline “For Sale: A Video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smoking Crack Cocaine.” The
Star
published a few hours later. By week’s end, Ford was on his way to becoming internationally infamous, a running gag on American late-night television, and the subject of one of the most astonishing political scandals in the country’s history.

ONE

RESPECT

THE TAXPAYER

W
hen the ballot boxes closed at 8
P.M.
, October 25, the night of Toronto’s 2010 municipal election, reporters braced themselves for a nail-biter. Polls showed the leading two candidates in a statistical tie. It looked as if George Smitherman, the former deputy premier of Ontario, had been able to rally a last-minute push for his candidacy, closing a twenty-five-point gap between himself and Toronto city councillor Rob Ford.

That Ford had gotten that far was a shock to most pundits. He was a populist with a temper, a knack for saying the wrong thing, dogmatic views about low taxes and small government, and social sensibilities that were significantly right of the norm. He was the dark horse in a crowded race, which everyone believed would ultimately be a coronation for Smitherman. But by the end of August, Ford had seemed uncatchable. Now, two months later, it looked like a dead heat.

I was at the Toronto Congress Centre, where Ford was scheduled to make his concession—or victory—speech. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand, of his supporters were jammed into the massive room, wearing campaign buttons and T-shirts, waving Canadian flags and “Ford for Mayor” placards. All eyes
were fixed on the two giant screens that flanked the stage, tuned to the local news. Four minutes after the polls closed, Ford votes were at 31,000. Smitherman, 19,000. The crowd cheered and clapped and blew train whistles—a reference to Ford’s campaign pledge to “stop the gravy train” at City Hall. The councillor was off to a good start. But it was still early—or so I thought.

At 8:08
P.M.
—eight minutes in—CP24 television network was calling it. Rob Ford would be Toronto’s next mayor. It hadn’t been close at all. The Congress Centre exploded. The screens cut to footage of Ford learning the news. He’d been watching at his mother’s home, surrounded by family, some staff, and select media. Sitting on the couch beside his wife, Renata, Ford nervously rubbed his knees while the numbers rolled in. When the projection was made, he looked shocked. Everyone jumped to their feet in celebration. Ford hugged and kissed Renata. The premier phoned to congratulate him. Then outgoing mayor David Miller. Then Smitherman.

A little more than an hour later, Ford arrived at the Congress Centre. He was mobbed like a rock star as he pushed through the crowd. People chanted his name and jostled each other trying to snap his photo. He climbed up on stage to uproarious applause. People chanted “Ford! Ford! Ford!” A supporter draped a Hawaiian lei around his neck.

Standing at the podium, Ford grinned, taking in the scene.

“Tonight,” he began, “the people of Toronto are
not
divided. We are united. We are united all around this call for change. If you voted for me, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You voted for change at City Hall. You trusted me, and I will live up to your expectations—guaranteed. Four years, four years from
tonight, you’ll look back and say, Rob Ford did exactly what he said he was going to do.”

He congratulated George Smitherman on a hard-fought campaign, and when some in the crowd began to boo, he admonished them. He said he looked forward to working with Smitherman and the other candidates in the future.

“To the people that didn’t vote for me, I will work hard to earn your trust. And I will deliver change that you can be proud of,” Ford said to more applause.

What kind of change? He would abolish unnecessary taxes. Cut councillor expense accounts. Make customer service a priority. And get tough with the public-sector unions on the city payroll.

“The party with taxpayers’ money is over, ladies and gentlemen. We will respect the taxpayers again. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, we will stop the gravy train, once and for all.”

WHEN I WAS SHUFFLED
to the City Hall bureau from the police beat in 2010, I wasn’t sure if I was being punished. My city editor sold it as something of a promotion. I was young and energetic. Exactly what the paper needed down there, he told me enthusiastically, larding the pitch with compliments about the work I’d done the last two years covering crime. As I envisioned long days of boring committee meetings and agendas and debates about sidewalk widths and tree removal, I boxed up the contents of my office at Police Headquarters and began the grieving process. I thought my days chasing criminals were over.

It was January 2010, and the long municipal election campaign was just getting under way. In those early days,
everybody thought Ontario’s cranky and openly gay former deputy premier George Smitherman, a.k.a. Furious George, was the easy winner. Up until he quit the provincial Liberal government to run for mayor, Smitherman had been the second most powerful man in Ontario politics. Now he was counting on the fact that Toronto was a liberal city. Not a single Conservative— federal or provincial—had been elected within its borders since 1999. Smitherman had name recognition, a willing electorate, and the keys to a first-class political machine. His only competition was the young hotshot chair of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), Councillor Adam Giambrone.

Giambrone was thirty-two, smart, hard-working, a devoted activist, and the successor-of-choice for retiring mayor David Miller. But hubris got the better of him before he even got started. In a profile interview for the
Toronto Star
, Giambrone insinuated he was married, which really upset another young woman, the one he had been dating and entertaining on his City Hall office couch. She contacted the
Star
, claiming Giambrone had promised her that his other relationship was just for appearances, so he’d look more established. (In fact Giambrone wasn’t married, despite what he’d told the
Star
.) Giambrone’s campaign collapsed, less than two weeks after he announced his candidacy. Once that happened, it looked like the only threat to Smitherman’s victory would be if popular conservative radio host John Tory jumped into the race.

Tory, a former business executive, had run for mayor in 2003 and narrowly lost to David Miller. Afterwards, he switched to provincial politics and became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in the Ontario Legislature at Queen’s Park. Tory is a fiscal conservative with liberal values, a well-spoken
businessman with a strong social conscience. In Toronto, John Tory is beloved—at least until his name hits the ballot. In 2007, Tory led his party to a disastrous showing in the provincial election after he suggested Ontario taxpayers should be subsidizing all faith-based schools—Islamic, Hindu, Jewish, etc.—since the province funded Catholic ones. Voters revolted. Tory never got beyond Opposition leader. In 2009 he moved to talk radio, which only made him more popular. Every day, callers, political strategists, and city councillors were begging him to take another shot at the mayoralty. On January 7, 2010, Tory held a press conference in the Newstalk 1010 radio station lobby. He would not be running for mayor. He cited the polarized political climate, the eagerness for some to go negative. He wanted to continue to make a contribution to the community— but outside of the political arena.