Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (28 page)

M
ichael Cooke and I arrived at the
Star
building about fifteen minutes after the Gawker story went online. In the taxi ride back to the office, Cooke had called in the troops. Kevin Donovan was coaching a girls’ soccer practice. Cooke texted him a simple “Get in.” It was 8:45
P.M.
, May 16, 2013.

“Just start to write,” Cooke said as we entered the newsroom. I headed to my desk and pulled out my notes from the night in the car.

Sometimes, I spend hours on the first few lines of my articles, tinkering and fiddling until the lead is just right. There was no time for that now. We had less than three hours to get a response from Ford, write the story, edit it, lawyer it, and get it on the page. I tuned out everything and started to type. I had only a vague notion of the conversations happening around me. The senior editors and our lawyer, huddling around the newsroom, sometimes in Cooke’s office, sometimes at the big table near the front, were trying to nail down what we could legally print and how best to do it.

In 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada created a new defence for libel in this country that would prove to be very
important for the
Star
that night. In a nutshell, it allowed journalists to tackle contentious stories of public interest where hard evidence, like a video, might not be available—provided the reporters could prove they acted professionally, did their best to verify the information, and attempted to get both sides of the story. It is known as the responsible journalism defence.

In the decision, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote that if journalists were only able to publish stories where hold-it-inyour-hand evidence existed, “information that is reliable and in the public’s interest to know may never see the light of day.” She said that a “standard of perfection” would lead to the “inevitable silencing of critical comment.”

Because the
Star
did not have a copy of the video, that Supreme Court decision provided a crucial defence for the paper. Our story—that drug dealers were trying to sell a video of the mayor appearing to smoke crack cocaine—was clearly in the public interest. Donovan and I had done our best to verify the accuracy by viewing the video and meeting the sellers. Now we needed to give the mayor a chance to respond.

At 9:04
P.M.
, I sent text messages to Ford’s chief of staff, Mark Towhey, and to his press secretary, George Christopoulos. “Hi George and Mark. The Toronto Star would like to speak with you both regarding the allegations about mayor Rob Ford smoking crack on a video and the Gawker story.” Neither responded. I phoned. No answer. The allegation wouldn’t have come as a surprise to either. CNN had asked the same thing earlier in the day.

Between 9:15 and 10
P.M.
, Kevin Donovan repeatedly tried the mayor at his office and home line. No answer. He left messages. He also tried Christopoulos. City Hall reporter
Paul Moloney and photographer Tara Walton went to the mayor’s house in Etobicoke. Moloney knocked several times at the front door and put a note in the mail slot. They were told to “move along” by a man who seemed to be acting as security. Next, Moloney and Walton went to Doug Ford’s home, which was close by. No answer. They left another note and then returned to the mayor’s home. Still nothing.

At 9:45
P.M.
, I got in touch with Ford’s lawyer, Dennis Morris, and explained what we had seen. He asked me, “How can you know what he’s smoking?” He said the story was “false and defamatory.” Morris and Donovan spoke as well, and Ford’s lawyer repeated the eyebrow-raising quote. My bureau chief, David Rider, got Towhey on the phone before 10
P.M
. After Rider explained the story, Towhey hung up.

We emailed and tweeted and texted and phoned other members of the mayor’s staff throughout the evening.

I wrote for about an hour, then sent what I had to Donovan, who stitched it together with what he’d written. A version went online about 11
P.M
.

Throughout the evening, I had been talking to Farah. We still did not have a copy of the photo of Ford with Anthony Smith. “Please, it’s out there already,” I said. “Just send us the photo. Gawker already has the thing online.”

At truly the eleventh hour, 10:57
P.M.
, Farah sent me the picture. Our drop-dead deadline was closing in. Senior editors crowded around a big computer monitor to examine the photo, running various tests to see if it had been tampered with. We decided to blur the faces of the two men we didn’t know, in case they were juveniles. Finally, the front page was sent to the printing plant. There is a reason the process of
printing a newspaper every day is sometimes called “the daily miracle.”

At 12:30
A.M.
, I unlocked the door to my condo. I had thirty text messages and missed phone calls. There was a half-angry voice mail from my parents. “You got in a car with drug dealers!?” They’d apparently read the online version of the story. I’d call them later. Sleep, I told myself. I had to go to sleep. Instead, I lay in bed and read reaction on Twitter for longer than I care to admit. The backlash was already starting.

A NICE WOMAN
handed me a glass of a water. We’d be on air in a few minutes, she warned. I thanked her, downed the contents, then made sure there wasn’t mascara all over my face before heading to the glass console in the centre of the studio. The CBC afternoon news host Reshmi Nair was standing on the other side with her laptop. A photo of Rob Ford, his lips pursed, looking off into the distance, was on a giant screen behind us. Hours earlier, our story—“Ford in ‘Crack Video’ Scandal”—had been splashed over most of the
Star
’s front page.

“Okay,” Nair began, “so how do you know that it’s actually Rob Ford in that video you saw?”

“You know, I think when it came to us, all we knew was that there was this supposed video that showed the mayor smoking crack cocaine,” I said. “We had no expectations. The video stunned us. It shocked us. It is about ninety seconds long. It is crystal clear.… We were confident that it was Mayor Rob Ford in the video.”

Next, Nair chose her words carefully, so as to avoid being sued. The CBC had not seen the footage and could not verify its
contents, she said, before asking why I couldn’t prove what my paper was alleging. Why didn’t we have the video? I explained that the
Star
was not prepared to pay one hundred thousand dollars for the footage.

“Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday is saying you can’t trust drug dealers,” Nair said.

“I’m not trusting drug dealers. I’m trusting my eyes. So, I saw this video—with my own eyes,” I said. “Who these guys are, [what] their motivations are, they’ve told us some stories: believe them, don’t believe them. I believe my own eyes. Kevin Donovan believes his own eyes.”

THAT FRIDAY MORNING
, my streetcar slid to a stop in front of City Hall just as the old courthouse clock next door chimed 8
A.M
. Reporters and camera crews were everywhere. I could see from Twitter that another pack was outside the mayor’s home.

When Ford left his house that day, he walked past the press smiling. “Absolutely not true,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s another
Toronto Star
…” He trailed off. Reporters continued to shout questions as he climbed into his black Escalade. “All right, I’ll see you guys down at City Hall.”

The story was picked up around the globe.
The Guardian
,
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
, NPR, MSNBC, CNN, and
The Sydney Morning Herald
all reported on the mayor of Toronto’s crack cocaine scandal.

“I have bad news for you, Canada,” Josh Barro wrote on Bloomberg’s economic and politics blog,
The Ticker
. “Americans have learned about Rob Ford, and we’ll have no more of your smug superiority.”

A Washington, DC, alternative weekly asked their city’s former mayor Marion Barry for his thoughts on the scandal. (In 1990, Barry was convicted for drug possession after he was videotaped as part of an FBI sting operation smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room.) “Unless he was entrapped by the government, it’s not similar,” Barry said.

When Ford pulled up to City Hall, camera crews were waiting. Councillors from across the political spectrum called on the mayor to address the crack story in detail, but Ford ignored questions as he walked into his office without a word. Later, he emerged only briefly to say, “Anyways, like I said this morning, these allegations are ridiculous, another story with respect to the
Toronto Star
going after me, and that’s all I have to say.”

The day came and went without any of Ford’s usual fiery denunciations. The mayor’s press secretary and chief of staff were silent. Even the mayor’s staunchest defender, his brother Doug, said nothing. The brothers cancelled their weekly radio show that Sunday. A spokesperson for the Toronto police said the service was “monitoring the situation closely.”

In fact, unbeknownst to us at the time, Chief Bill Blair was taking much more aggressive steps. On May 18, 2013, he contacted one of his most trusted investigators, Detective Sergeant Gary Giroux. Giroux was a seasoned homicide detective who had handled some of the city’s most high-profile cases. Now, he would be asked to take on one of the most controversial investigations in Toronto Police Service history: to find out if the mayor was smoking crack with gangsters. He wouldn’t be alone. A small and very secret taskforce was assembled. There was Detective Joyce Schertzer, who was handling the Anthony Smith murder case, as well as Detective Constable Amy Davey,
Detective Constable David Lavallee, and Detective Sergeant Domenic Sinopoli. The elaborate probe would become known as Project Brazen 2. It would last six months and would enlist the help of a Cessna spy plane, wiretaps, and extensive ground surveillance. And luck was on Giroux’s side. The gang peddling the crack video was already being watched, and listened to, by Toronto police as part of the massive guns and drug investigation called Project Traveller. Wiretaps captured some of those targets discussing the crack video. Police pulled Sandro Lisi’s phone records. The story they would tell was troubling.

At 8:18
P.M
., ten minutes before the crack video story was posted on Gawker, Ford had phoned his friend Lisi, suspected drug dealer and occasional driver. The call lasted forty seconds. Lisi then began sending a flurry of text messages. At 9:25
P.M
.—as the
Star
sent out a breaking-news alert that the video was real and that both Donovan and I had seen it—Lisi was phoning Fabio Basso, Ford’s “stoner” friend since high school. We didn’t know it at the time, but Basso lived at 15 Windsor Road, the yellow-brick bungalow in the infamous Ford photo.

Through the night and into the next day, as Mayor Ford dodged reporters, Lisi talked to Basso six more times.

Then at 1:17
P.M
. on May 17—minutes after talking to Basso—Lisi called Mohamed Siad, the dealer who was trying to sell us the video. The call lasted three seconds. A second call lasted eight seconds. Then Lisi called Basso back. Throughout the day, Lisi phoned and texted a variety of people living in or near the Dixon towers. He also spoke numerous times with Dave Price, the mayor’s old friend and recently hired staff member. At 5:26
P.M.
, Mayor Ford called Lisi. There would be five more calls between the two of them before midnight. At 11:24
P.M.
and
11:44
P.M.
, Lisi phoned Siad again. On the Saturday—two days into the scandal—Lisi and Ford spoke six times. That morning, Lisi and Siad connected once for a few seconds. Around this time, two men came knocking on Fabio Basso’s front door, demanding he get the video back. According to a friend of the Basso family, Fabio told them to “fuck off.” He was more worried about repercussions from the Dixon City Bloods than from the Fords. Basso would pay for his defiance.

Ford showed up at City Hall on Tuesday, May 21, for a special council debate on a proposed casino, a wildly unpopular scheme that his administration had been pushing. He lost the vote and ducked out about 2
P.M
. without answering questions. We would later learn that around 11
P.M
. that night, a man wielding a metal pipe forced his way into Fabio Basso’s home. The assailant tossed Basso’s elderly mother to the ground before striking Basso repeatedly. He then turned on Basso’s girlfriend when she tried to defend him. The attack itself was fast. Fabio “said it happened real quick: bop, bop, bop,” a friend of the Basso family later told me. Even more troubling, the same night that Basso was beaten, a twenty-seven-year-old man was shot in the leg on the seventeenth floor of 320 Dixon, the same building where I’d watched the crack video. The man had been shot outside unit 1701 after partying with friends in unit 1703, a known drug hotspot.

Details about the phone calls and the attack at Windsor Road weren’t known at the time, but the mayor’s silence was telling. Reporters kept the pressure on.

The
National Post
’s Christie Blatchford wrote, “Reporters have asked him directly if the video is a fake, and got his broad back in reply.… I can tell you how I would react if someone ever
claimed to have a video of me doing the same thing—I would be spitting, incoherently mad; I would be screaming my utter innocence from the rooftops, and I could do this and would do it because I know I have never smoked crack or hung around this group. Therefore, there could be no video of me doing it.”

By the middle of week one, #Crackgate hit American late-night TV.
The Daily Show
,
Jimmy Kimmel Live
, and
The Tonight Show
all went after Toronto’s mayor. With the increased attention, the dealer decided to raise the price for the video to two hundred thousand dollars. Gawker launched a crowdsourcing campaign—“Crackstarter”—to buy the footage. “It seems like a form of extortion.… I mean is any of this legal?” Doug Ford asked the
Toronto Sun
. He did not explain why, if there was no video, it would matter.