Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (7 page)

Doug Ford Sr. became an important fixture in Conservative circles. So, in early 2003, when John Tory, the CEO of Rogers Cable—a division of Rogers Communications, one of the biggest and most powerful companies in Canada—decided he was going to run for mayor of Toronto, he scheduled a meeting with the Fords. Tory was a conservative. And to win an election in Toronto as a right-winger, you needed the suburbs. His advisers explained that the Fords were the gatekeepers to Etobicoke.

“It was ‘Fords,’ plural,” Tory remembered. “I showed up at this restaurant near the airport, and there was Doug Sr., Diane, and Rob and Doug Jr. and Randy.”

Looking back, Tory described his lunch with the Fords as “being on show,” his moment to explain what he was about and what he planned to do. Diane asked most of the questions, and she was the one who delivered the verdict.

“We like you. You’ll get elected, because we’re going to help you in Etobicoke,” Tory remembered Diane saying. “You’ll serve for a period of time, and then it will be Robbie’s turn.”

Tory narrowly lost the mayoral election to the left-wing candidate, David Miller, but he did take Etobicoke.

According to those who know him well, Rob Ford always knew he would run for mayor once he got elected to council. But he dreamed even bigger. One day, he wanted to become leader of the federal Conservative Party, and ultimately prime minister.
Brother Doug Jr. planned to run provincially and eventually be elected premier. As a councillor, Doug Jr. was open about his plans to move to Queen’s Park.

Said a source closely connected to the family, “The Fords think of themselves as the Kennedys. They talk about it. They’re the Canadian Kennedys.”

Perhaps it’s true. The Kennedys had skeletons. And so do the Fords.

ROB FORD WAS TWENTY-NINE
years old when he had his first brush with scandal. It was the early morning of February 15, 1999. Ford was on vacation with his then girlfriend, Renata Brejniak, at his parents’ condo in Hallandale, Florida, just north of Miami. Well after midnight, for reasons unknown, Ford was driving around a crime-sick slum in downtown Miami known as Overtown. As he passed 12th Street and NW 3rd Avenue, a police officer noticed Ford was driving his gold Crown Victoria without the headlights on.

Officer Timothy Marks pulled him over two streets later. According to the arrest paperwork, Ford was nervous, pink-faced, and reeked of booze. Marks suspected he was drunk and asked him to exit the vehicle for a roadside test.

Ford fumbled his way out of the car, threw his hands in the air, and slurred, “Go ahead. Take me to jail!” He pulled out a handful of cash, chucking the money onto the pavement. The two men, both five feet ten, stood eye to eye, but the driver had one hundred pounds on him. Marks examined the licence. The driver’s name was Robert Bruce Ford, born May 28, 1969, and he was in Florida on vacation from Toronto.

Marks pulled out a pen from his breast pocket. He positioned it a foot in front of Ford’s face and waved it back and forth. Ford’s glassy eyes floated aimlessly around in their sockets, occasionally fastening on the pen before wandering off again. Fail. Next, Marks asked Ford to walk nine steps in a straight line, turn around, and walk nine steps back. Ford made three attempts before Marks moved on to the one-legged balance test. Standing in his summer deck shoes, Ford gingerly raised his foot off the ground and nearly fell over. He hopped up and down, flailed his arms, then gave up. Fail. Finally, Marks asked him to close his eyes, put his hands at his sides, tilt his head to the stars, and try to estimate thirty seconds. Ford listed from side to side, holding out his arms like a tightrope walker on a cable hundreds of feet in the air.

“… Thirty!”

“That was fifteen.”

At 2:50
A.M.
, Officer Marks put Ford in handcuffs. He searched Ford’s pockets, emptying the contents onto the hood of his cruiser, and found a marijuana joint stashed in Ford’s right back pocket. Back at South Station, Ford blew .124 on the Breathalyzer, well above the legal limit of .08. On the second reading, he wouldn’t cooperate. Officer Barbara Shaffner wrote “Playing w[ith] blowing” on the official report, which meant Ford was either trying to stick his tongue in the tube or exhale outside the device.

Ford was charged with driving under the influence and possession of marijuana. He was booked, fingerprinted, and photographed, then driven over to the Dade County jail to sober up.

Never-before-seen arrest documents reveal that Ford has never been fully truthful about what happened that night. After
the story broke in 2010, Ford told reporters he had been out celebrating Valentine’s Day with Renata prior to his arrest. “I admit maybe I had, you know, a little bit … one, two glasses of wine or two,” he said. “We had a couple of bottles of wine. I wasn’t drunk, but maybe I shouldn’t have been driving.” But Ford’s arrest citation paints a completely different picture. Ford told police he had been at a bar called the Players Pub in Hallandale—about twenty-five minutes of highway driving north of Overtown—in the three hours before getting stopped at 2:35
A.M
. When asked when he had last eaten something, Ford told investigators he’d had some ribs and potatoes ten hours earlier. He admitted to drinking two large draft beers and two shots of Chivas Regal between 3
P.M.
and midnight. (Arresting Officer Timothy Marks said it would take significantly more alcohol than that for Ford to blow what he did.) And it’s not clear if Renata was even with Ford at the time, as he has suggested. There is no mention of her in any of the paperwork, and a source close to the family told me she was waiting back at the condo.

Ford initially tried to hide the arrest from his family. When Doug Ford Sr. took public office, the Ford children had been warned there would be strict consequences for any “silliness.” This usually meant cutting them off financially for a period of time. It was a punishment that Randy and Kathy knew well. A close family source says that Ford might have successfully avoided the wrath of Doug Ford Sr. if only he had remembered to get rid of his arrest paperwork, which was discovered by another family member at the Florida condo a week later.

Doug Ford Sr. was “absolutely livid,” said the source. The tough-on-crime, family values premier of Ontario, Mike Harris,
was not going to be pleased if the media learned his backbencher from Etobicoke had a son facing drug and DUI charges. And it wasn’t just the Ford family’s reputation on the line. Rob’s own political future was at stake. He wanted to be a city councillor. He had run and lost in 1997 and was preparing to try again in 2000.

The Fords hired lawyer Reemberto Diaz to work out a deal. On May 14, 1999, Ford pleaded guilty to driving under the influence, and in exchange the state dropped the marijuana charge. Ford agreed to six months’ probation, a 180-day suspension of his licence, and $664.75 in fines and court costs. He was also ordered to perform fifty hours of community service and attend a substance abuse program. And that was the end of it.

Shortly after coming back from Florida, Ford announced that he and Renata were engaged.

ON A SUNNY SATURDAY
in August 2000, Renata Brejniak married Rob Ford at the All Saints Roman Catholic Church in Etobicoke. She was twenty-nine; he was thirty-one. That evening, there were cocktails, dinner, and dancing at the nearby St. George’s Golf and Country Club. They gave a commemorative bottle of wine to each of their guests and looked very much in love.

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.