Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (29 page)

On day six, Doug Ford held a press conference outside the mayor’s office. As he had done so many times before, Doug had prepared a fiery denunciation of the
Star
that ignored the issues at hand. This time, the horde of reporters weren’t taking it.

“I’m not speaking for the mayor,” Doug said. “The mayor is my brother. I love him and he’ll speak for himself—”

A reporter interrupted: “When?”

“… My brother is an honest and hard-working man with integrity, a man who has dedicated his—”

A citizen who happened to be nearby started to heckle him. Doug Ford looked rattled, but he kept going.

“… He is the people’s mayor …”

The rumbling of questions grew louder.

“We have come a long way in the past two years. We are turning the corner. And we are now on the right path.”

Why was he here today?

“All of this of course is overshadowed by the constant stream of accusations coming forward against this mayor.”

Was the mayor done hiding?

“Never, never has a Canadian politician or his family … been targeted, targeted by the media this way. They zealously, and I say zealously, stalk my mother, my children. The media hides in the bushes at our cottage as they did this weekend. That my kids couldn’t even enjoy the weekend, ’cause they were in the bushes, taking videos of them, and harasses our family at home.”

When was the mayor going to talk?

“To the folks at Gawker, what you are doing is disgusting and morally wrong. Giving away prizes to try to raise money for drug dealers and extortionists is disgraceful. When the mayor faces serious accusations by no means will we be pressured by the
Toronto Star
to answer their questions on their time frame.”

It wasn’t just the
Star
! Why wouldn’t the mayor talk?

“I want to thank the thousands of supporters out there who believe in the job Mayor Ford and this administration is doing.”

Shaken, Doug Ford retreated into his office as reporters shouted after him.

ON MAY 23
, in the first of what would become a flood of departures from his office, the mayor fired his chief of staff, Mark Towhey. Sources told every major newspaper in town that Towhey had told Ford he needed to get treatment for his issues.

But still there was no word from the mayor.

Finally, eight days after the
Star
and Gawker broke the video story, and with the media crush outside his office not abating, the mayor made a statement.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to address a number of issues that have circulated in the media over the last few days,” Ford said, with Doug at his side. “There’s been a serious accusation from the
Toronto Star
that I use crack cocaine. I do not use crack cocaine nor am I an addict of crack cocaine. As for a video, I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist.…

“I would like to assure everyone that we are continuing to fight for the taxpayers every day and it’s business as usual at City Hall.”

Ford took no questions—and there were many. Had he
ever
smoked crack cocaine? How did he know Anthony Smith? What was he doing at that house? And so on.

I obviously knew Ford was lying. He knew there was a video. He’d looked directly at the camera and said “That phone better not be on.” But what I didn’t know at the time was that before Mohamed Farah had contacted me, Ford may have already been trying to get the footage back. Wiretap conversations, captured by police as part of Project Traveller, suggested that Ford had offered five thousand dollars and a car to the dealer, Mohamed Siad, in exchange for the recording. On March 27 police were listening as Siad told his friend, Siyadin Abdi, that he planned to meet the mayor and ask for “one hundred and fifty,” which police took to mean a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Abdi suggested that that wouldn’t be safe. Siad didn’t want to listen. It’s impossible to know whether they’re telling the truth. But months later, when all of this came out—the attack at Windsor Road, the numerous calls between Ford and Lisi, the attempts to track down Siad after the video story broke—it was hard to look at the evidence and not feel as if you were living in an episode of
The Wire
.

Police records show that in the two days leading up to Ford’s denial, the mayor and Lisi spoke fifteen times. On May 24—the day Ford finally addressed the allegations, smirking to reporters as he declared that the video “does not exist”—the mayor touched base with Lisi three times. Apparently no one had any idea they were being watched.

Shortly after the press conference, the exodus from the mayor’s office picked up. Ford’s press secretary and another long-time aide left. (Eight would leave by the fall.)

A few dozen reporters set up camp outside the mayor’s glass-walled office. They sat there all day—through lunch, past dinner, and into the night—until the senior staff went home, then were back first thing the next morning. Even councillors, both friends and foes of the mayor, joined in to watch the circus. TV journalists reported live from the hallway all day long.

Things heated up again on May 25, when
The Globe and Mail
published its story alleging that Doug Ford had sold hashish for a number of years in the 1980s. The investigation also touched on Randy Ford’s involvement in the drug trade. It accused Dave Price, who had recently been hired as the mayor’s director of logistics and operations, of being a “former participant in Doug Ford’s hashish enterprise.”

A few days later, the
Star
dropped another bombshell. According to numerous sources, the morning after the video story went online the mayor told his senior staff not to worry, because he knew where the video was. Ford mentioned two apartment units on the seventeenth floor of 320 Dixon: 1701 and 1703. (Four days after the mayor said this to his staff, the shooting took place outside 1701.) The story, written by the
Star
’s Queen’s Park bureau chief, Robert Benzie, as well as
Kevin Donovan, detailed a conversation between Price and Mark Towhey.

“Hypothetically,” Price asked Towhey, if someone had told him where the video was, “what would we do?”

The straitlaced former military man told Price that nobody should do anything other than contact police.

At one point, according to an account of the conversation, Towhey was heard to remark, “We’re not getting the f---ing thing!”

After two more long-time staffers quit, Ford held a press conference to stress that “things are fine” in his office. As soon as he finished his speech, Ford was asked about the
Star
story. The exchange gave birth to a new catchphrase at City Hall.

Q: “Have you done any illegal drugs since you’ve been mayor?”

A: “Anything else?”

Q: “Have you tried to obtain the video, sir?”

A: “Anything else?”

Q: “Are you upset that the deputy mayor says he believes there’s a tape? Does that upset you?”

A: “Anything else?”

Q: “The premier suggests she’s ready to step in if needed.”

A: “I think the premier should take care of the problems that she has at Queen’s Park right now.”

Q: “Did you mention an address to David Price?”

A: “Anything else?”

Q: “How did you know Anthony Smith, sir?”

A: “Anything else?”

Q: “Why are people leaving? What’s going on in your office?”

A: “There’s nothing going on in my office, obviously. I’m bringing in new staff, and if people have a better opportunity, I encourage them to move on.”

Video or no video, as I watched the story develop from inside my little journalism bubble, I thought we were faring well. The evidence was on our side: Ford’s staff was leaving in droves, the mayor was still refusing to answer any questions or talk about the allegations in any detail. He was refusing to discuss the photo with Anthony Smith or answer questions about the mysterious shooting in one of the Dixon towers. The
Globe
’s investigation had laid out a pattern of drug involvement. Other news outlets—organizations that had been sympathetic to Ford through the Garrison Ball controversy—were hammering the mayor every day for not coming clean. People had to believe us, I thought.

My bubble was about to burst.

THIRTEEN

VIDEO,

SCHMIDEO

I
t was hard to accept. On June 1, Ipsos Reid released a poll showing that almost half the city said they believed the mayor’s claim that he did not smoke crack cocaine. People living in Etobicoke were more likely to believe him (61 percent) than those in the downtown (40 percent). And a third of those polled said they would re-elect Ford if a vote were held the next day. That was down just 9 points from his 2010 numbers.

But here was the kicker: of those surveyed, 45 percent— practically half the population of Canada’s largest city—said they thought the video was “a hoax and part of a conspiracy to discredit the mayor.”

THE ROB FORD CRACK COCAINE
scandal didn’t just set off a firestorm of public debate. The fallout prompted a serious discussion, even some soul-searching, in the journalism community. Several high-profile media critics and commentators criticized the
Star
for publishing the story without possessing the video and/or for “trusting” drug dealers.

When the chatter was at its peak, the chair of Ryerson
University’s journalism program, Ivor Shapiro, waded in with an article for J-Source, the Canadian Journalism Project’s website.

When did the accepted standard for reporters’ verification become that raw evidence must be seen by the audience to be believed?

If a reporter sees with her own eyes a document, witnesses with his eyes an event taking place, or hears with her own ears a statement being made, is this not good enough as the basis for reporting?

Must I now record every interview and hyperlink to the tape when I write a damaging story?

If I don’t have a camera rolling when I witness a cop beating a citizen, must I then hold my tongue, at least until I find another (named) witness? Nope. I came. I saw. I report. No verification required.

In September, the
National Post
’s Christie Blatchford said something similar at an Empire Club of Canada panel discussion with Kevin Donovan. She said she absolutely believed the
Star
, but following the story had been difficult. Yes, journalists had always gone out, seen things, and reported back. She talked about being in Afghanistan and witnessing a firefight, then writing about it. She was essentially asking her readers to take her word for it, based on her record. With the crack video story, she was “asking my readers to trust me, because I trust [the
Star
].”

And that’s asking a lot when nearly half the public doesn’t believe the original source.

Tom Rosenstiel, the executive director of the American Press Institute, is an author, journalist, and one of the leading media
critics in North America. Rosenstiel says that public trust in journalists has been eroding for decades. And it’s not just the media that people have a problem with. Faith in all institutions, government, hospitals, the court system, is on the decline. But Rosenstiel believes that in the case of journalism a number of special circumstances are driving that growing skepticism.

“People have more sources of information. The minute the press shifted from being a homogenized group of gatekeepers, who all had similar standards, to a more diverse group of information providers, they began distinguishing themselves by dumping on each other,” he says.

This was the norm before the Second World War, when every city had several different dailies. Newspapers attacked their rivals, often on the front page, Rosenstiel says. With the advent of TV, the number of newspapers shrank. And everyone started to be more polite to each other. That changed again in the 1990s, most notably with the arrival of Fox News.

“They decided to distinguish themselves by saying, ‘We’ll do what talk radio did. [We’ll say,] We don’t have the bias that other media has.’” A few years later, this continued with the blogs, says Rosenstiel. “The ideological wars that we see in politics are playing out in these new media spaces.”

Moaning about how it was better in the old days won’t do much good, he says. Through Twitter and YouTube, readers have become used to seeing news with their own eyes. Whether it’s a mass shooting or a natural disaster, live images and video are circulating online well before the mainstream press has written a word. In this climate, when that proof is not available, journalists need to be more transparent about what they do and how they do it.

“The old era of media, when we were the only source, was the ‘trust me’ media era,” he says. The media could say, “‘I saw it. Take my word for it.’ Now we live in the ‘show me’ era of media. Show me why I should believe you. That does not mean that you have to have courtroom-worthy evidence. But it does mean that you have to show what evidence you’ve got and explain why you believe it.”

In 1964,
The New York Times
’s David Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the Vietnam War. Halberstam’s reporting called into question whether the United States would be able to defeat the Communist guerrilla forces and the North Vietnamese Army. President John F. Kennedy famously called the
Times
and urged the publisher to pull Halberstam out of Vietnam. “If you go back and look at that reporting, it’s all anonymous sources,” says Rosenstiel. “It’s all filtered through him. What he’s seen. You couldn’t write it that way today.”

Today, journalists need to take great pains to lay out the evidence for readers. Quoting an anonymous source isn’t good enough. News outlets need to explain why that person can be trusted, what efforts it took to verify their information, and why they can’t be named. Reporters need to say what they know and what they don’t know.

“This is the world we live in,” says Rosenstiel. “There’s no point in looking back. The question is: Is it better or worse? Yes, there are some things about this that are much better, and some things about this that are much more difficult.”