Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (26 page)

The
Star
was fifteen minutes of city driving away. I used the time to get to know Farah a little better. I asked him about his job, his friends and hobbies. He seemed like a decent person. Smart and thoughtful, although he was definitely misrepresenting his altruism.

“It’s not right what’s happening,” Farah told me. “I just really
want the story out there. It has to get out there. People need to know about this.”

“If you really want the story out there, why not just give us the video?” I asked.

He told me he was acting on behalf of a dealer, a young man he’d met through his work in the community. (Occasionally he would refer to two people. Maybe there was another dealer— maybe a girlfriend. It was hard to know.) Farah told me that this dealer was a good kid but had gotten messed up in the drug culture. He wanted out. Anthony Smith’s recent murder had been a wake-up call. Smith had been a good friend. But the kid needed money to build a new life. The video was his ticket. Farah told me he had offered to help because he knew people in the media. One of them, he said, worked in New York—he would not tell me who it was, where they worked, or what they did— and that their organization was considering buying the footage.

“But I’d like for you guys to have it. The
Star
deserves to get the story. You’ve done the work.”

“One hundred thousand dollars is way too much,” I said.

“It’s worth a million. They wanted a million. I told them that was too much.”

“Mohamed, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Canada. We buy videos and photos from freelancers, yes, but that’s like five hundred dollars. Maybe a thousand. I don’t know if you follow this stuff, but it’s not exactly a great time financially for the newspaper industry.”

“The video will make you guys a lot of money. People would have to come to your site to see it. You could charge people to watch it.”

I tried to explain that it didn’t work like that. Someone would just make a copy and post it online.

“It’s not just the cost. There are ethical issues here,” I said. “Anyway, I’m at the bottom of the totem pole. It’s not going to be my call. I’m just warning you—I don’t think a hundred thousand dollars is going to happen.”

We turned onto Yonge Street and followed it down to the lake, stopping outside the
Toronto Star
office tower. I phoned security to raise the gate so that we could park in the front lot, then sent Cooke a two-minute warning. He, along with city editor Irene Gentle, would be in the northwest conference room. Farah collected his iPad, cell phone, and keys. Everything was shut down because of the holiday. I had to swipe my security pass to get inside, then again to activate the elevator. We got off on the fifth floor and turned left at the wall where photos of the
Star
’s publishers, past and present, are displayed. Only a skeleton staff was in the newsroom. I doubt anyone even noticed us. We went straight to the conference room.

I introduced Cooke and Gentle to Farah. Everyone shook hands, and then we got to it.

Farah gave them the same spiel he had given me in the park. Using his iPad, he showed them the photo of Rob Ford with Anthony Smith and two others in front of the yellow-brick bungalow—a crack house, he said. Smith was dead, shot to death just four days earlier. Another of the men had been seriously wounded in the same incident. Next, he described the video. Farah claimed that it clearly showed Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine while uttering racist and homophobic slurs.

Then came the price tag: one hundred thousand dollars. Non-negotiable.

“Well, let’s get one thing straight right now,” Cooke said. “You’re not going to get a hundred thousand dollars. Not even close. Now, there might be some price, but before we even talk about what it’s worth, we need to see the video.”

Farah said he needed time. He did not have a copy. The guy he was helping did not trust him with it, but he would let the dealer know we were interested.

Gentle and Cooke quizzed Farah about the video’s contents.

How was the photo connected to the video?

It wasn’t. Except that the dealer was friends with Anthony Smith.

When was the video shot?

Within the last six months.

Where?

Farah wouldn’t say.

Was Ford alone in the footage?

Yes.

After twenty minutes of grilling, I walked Farah to his car and made plans to touch base later that day to set up our next meeting.

TUESDAY MORNING, APRIL 2, 2013
, I was back in the conference room with Cooke and Gentle as well as the
Star
’s long-time newsroom lawyer, Bert Bruser, and its managing editor, Jane Davenport. Kevin Donovan was on vacation. Everyone had been briefed on Farah’s astonishing claim, but Cooke asked me to recount the story in detail, from the first phone call to our last text message, once more for the group. When I got to the part
about a hundred thousand dollars, everyone seemed to collectively cringe.

“Now he’s supposed to go back to his guy and sort out how we can see the video,” I said. “He texted me last night and we’re going to meet around six o’clock today up in Etobicoke.”

There was silence for a few moments as the editors looked around the room, weighing the gravity of what we were dealing with. Bruser rubbed his bearded chin and shook his head. His face is always impossible to read. I couldn’t tell if he was taking in the magnitude of the allegations or trying to figure out a damage-control strategy for this hoax I had gotten us involved in.

“So,” Davenport said, “are we considering paying a hundred thousand dollars for this video?”

Davenport was just thirty-six when in June 2012 the
Star
named her managing editor, Michael Cooke’s second-incommand. Together, they were the perfect pair. Davenport was the calculated and cautious yin to Cooke’s aggressive and spontaneous yang. When Davenport spoke, she gave the impression that every word had been chosen deliberately.

“We’re not going to pay that,” Cooke replied. “But, if it’s real, and that’s a big if, and if we can confirm that it’s real, we might pay something.”

The
Toronto Star
does not pay for stories. It is explicitly stated in the newspaper’s code of conduct: “The
Star
does not pay for information.” But it does pay for commodities such as photos and video. If Farah had come to the
Star
asking for five hundred dollars, my guess is we would have paid him on the spot. The issue here was the size of the ransom and the people we would be giving it to. What would a self-described drug dealer
do with that kind of money? Did we believe he wanted to turn his life around? On the other hand, if this video did exist, if it proved that the mayor of Toronto was smoking crack cocaine, the implications for the city were enormous. Given the immense public interest of a story like that, maybe it
was
worth paying a hundred thousand dollars to drug dealers.

But there were other problems. How would we be able to tell if Ford was smoking
drugs
? How could we even be sure it was him? Could the video be doctored? Everyone agreed we needed to see the thing before we could assess its value. Besides, there was another, more pressing question to deal with: What if this was a set-up?

The day before Farah had called, Doug Ford devoted the first part of the brothers’ weekly radio show to the
Star
and its supposed vendetta, suggesting the paper would go to any length to “politically kill Rob Ford.” He targeted Cooke specifically, talking about his days as editor-in-chief of the
New York Daily News
, and in particular his role in the reality TV show
Tabloid Wars
. He had found and quoted Cooke’s colourful statement about pressing one’s foot on the competition’s throat “till their eyes bulge and leak blood.”

Was it possible someone was trying to embarrass us with a fake story, baiting the hook with the kind of over-the-top yarn they thought Cooke would do anything to get?

“It’s possible,” I told my editors. “It would be a pretty elaborate hoax, but it’s certainly possible. I’m just assuming everything I say is being recorded.”

I’d try to get a better feel for the situation when I saw Farah that night. Lawyer Bert Bruser said I should have someone with me for physical and journalistic protection. With Donovan still
gone, the group selected Jesse McLean, a young and talented reporter on Donovan’s investigative team. McLean and I had known each other for years, having worked together at our campus newspaper.

Before I left, Cooke looked me in the eye. “I know you know this, but I’m going to say it anyway. No one can know about this. Not anyone outside this room—even your friends in the newsroom.”

“Got it.”

It was the start of a lonely six weeks.

JESSE MCLEAN AND I
pulled onto the highway just in time for rush-hour traffic. We were going to meet Farah at a Country Style doughnut shop in a north Etobicoke plaza on Dixon Road near the airport. The neighbourhood was sometimes called Little Mogadishu, sometimes Rexdale. By the mid-1990s, half the population in the area was Somali. In fact, according to some of the people who lived there, Canada was known simply as “Dixon” in Somali refugee camps across East Africa. It was a lower-income part of town, as communities with large immigrant populations tend to be.

The community centred on six high-rises on the north side of Dixon, which stood like fortresses around two courtyards. These grey towers were actually condos, although they looked a lot more like subsidized housing, especially on the inside. The stairwells reeked of urine. Walls were etched with gang graffiti, carpets were old and stained, and there were signs of disrepair on every floor. One tower had a serious rodent infestation. The average price of a condo in Toronto was more than three hundred
thousand dollars. In Dixon, you could find two-bedrooms for under sixty thousand—half of what they used to be worth. Crime was a problem, especially of late. A gang known as the Dixon City Bloods had a foothold in the complex, especially the 320 building. Shootings and robberies were frequent in Rexdale. Frustrated community leaders were constantly fighting to get media coverage for all the good things happening in the otherwise vibrant neighbourhood.

We pulled into the plaza parking lot across from the towers at about 6
P.M
. There were hardly any free tables at the doughnut shop, which was the case all day most every day. The people who hung around were usually middle-aged to elderly men from the neighbourhood. They sat in clusters, chatting with friends, reading the paper, and watching the CP24 news channel on a big flat-screen TV.

McLean and I slid into a booth. I texted Farah a few minutes before he was supposed to arrive: “Hey you want a coffee?” He wrote back, “Tea please—medium sugar 2 milk.” A few minutes later, he phoned from somewhere in the parking lot. He didn’t want to sit or be seen with us. We could go for a drive, but not in his car. So we took ours.

He got in the front with me, McLean sat in the back, and we went on a little tour for the next hour. We drove along Dixon Road, through the tower parking lots, to the high school and the surrounding neighbourhood. We asked Farah a lot of the same questions I had asked him on that first ride to the
Star
. His answers were all the same, which was a good sign. We went to a community basketball game and met some of Farah’s friends. We covertly fact-checked what he’d been telling us. Everything matched up. Back in the car, we asked Farah more about the
video and the circumstances in which it had been taken. And what about the photo? Where was that house?

“It’s around here. That’s all I’m going to say. You’ve got to be patient,” Farah said. “This is about building trust.”

Trust seemed to mean our willingness to pay. The conversation always curled back to money.

“This is about protection,” Farah said. Could we help the dealer’s family if the government tried to deport them after the story ran? Would we protect Farah’s and the dealer’s identity?

McLean and I explained how confidential sources worked, that we would never reveal their identities even if compelled to do so by a court. If we made a promise of anonymity, we would keep it. This seemed to satisfy him. We said if someone was being unlawfully deported, that would certainly be a story the
Star
would cover, and the press had great influence. We could also try to hook the dealer up with our lawyer to answer any questions. Farah nodded approvingly. (In the end, the
Star
agreed to keep Farah’s name secret, until he revealed himself as “the broker” to two media outlets in November 2013. As for the dealer, the
Star
never granted him anonymity. We learned his name—Mohamed Siad—only after reporter Jayme Poisson spent months uncovering it.)

We dropped Farah off about 7:30
P.M
. We were no closer to the video, but more convinced that there was one. I told him I would get in touch after we’d had a chance to relay some of his concerns to the editors.

THE NEXT DAY AT THE
Toronto Star
offices, the same group plus Jesse McLean was back in the northwest boardroom.

“Farah told me he turned down twenty thousand dollars from another outlet,” I said. “Although he’s likely just bargaining; I guess that was an indication of what he won’t accept.”

We debated whether there was a way to set up some sort of scholarship fund. If they actually just wanted to start over, maybe we could help without handing over cash? But how would that work? Would we pay their rent? Their food? Would they give status reports? It seemed complicated. We got back to the idea of just buying it.

Jane Davenport spoke up.

“I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of paying for it,” she said. “How do we know what they’ll do with the money? What if they buy a gun and kill someone?”

It was a sobering thought.

Then again, if the mayor really was smoking crack cocaine, the city needed to know. Nothing like this had ever happened in Canada, but there were precedents in the US and the UK of news outlets paying big money for exclusive footage. We were unanimous that, no matter what we decided, we would disclose what we did and why.