By: Rosie DiManno Columnist, Published on Thu Dec 05 2013
EXPLORE THIS STORY
1 PHOTO
Save to Mystar
Share on Facebook
inShare
4
Reddit this!
Republish
He was up to his thick neck, just below his even thicker skull, in thugs and drugs and lurking shakedowns.
Everything you thought you knew about Rob Ford, everything you may have believed — or disbelieved — has been eclipsed by stunning new revelations, as alleged in the fresh batch of police documents released Wednesday. None of the allegations have been proven in court.
Hard to imagine that it could get worse, this endless contorting helix of scandal. But it has. We’ve not yet touched bottom.
Your mayor, Toronto: Crack-smoker, habitué of drug dens, consorter of gang-bangers, and sitting duck for potential blackmail.
More Video
Rick Salutin Jan.7Video: Rick Salutin Jan.7
High winds could slow Toronto's ice storm recoveryVideo: High winds could slow Toronto's ice storm recovery
Doubt he’s “lovin’ it” now, the notoriety that transformed him into celebrity fable, all yuk-yuk on TV and radio, dining out on the gluttony of his misdeeds. Because if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em and revel in the infamy. Make a mockery out of calumny.
Yet Ford was still laughing Wednesday, even as the latest allegations further compromise the mayor, draw him alarmingly closer and closer to the Dixon Bloods, one of the most ruthless gang outfits in the city.
Just as many had warned and worried, Ford’s compulsions were never merely one man’s dilemma. They seduced him into a sordid underworld of criminality that left Ford perilously vulnerable to the whims of those who knew the truth and possessed the evidence.
A virulent video. And five thousand bucks, plus a car, purportedly dangled to get them back.
It would have been cheap at the price. But Ford — with felonious friend Sandro Lisi as broker — was entirely way too much of a cheapskate in the view of alleged extortionists thinking $150,000. Because they apparently had plenty more on the wayward mayor than what was originally reported by the Star and Gawker in May. Not just one incident of crack experimentation in a “drunken stupor,” to which Ford has belatedly confessed. But, as police wiretap transcripts made public Wednesday indicate, confidence among gang members that they could siphon money off the mayor over allegedly multiple drug-consuming occasions.
If and when they got around to it, no rush, except who actually had the phone that went missing after Ford got high and stupid, “smoking his rocks” at an Etobicoke crack house, and where was the video that captured him sucking on the glass pipe?
Those wiretaps, which were not applied against Ford but targeted a cavalcade of gangsters orbiting around him, caught extensive chatter about the mayor in “a lot of f---ed up situations.” They bragged about it.
Outwardly, Ford went about his business, attending a graffiti cleanup event on the very day that Lisi was meeting with a man at a doughnut shop, attempting to retrieve the mayor’s phone, promising some “spliffs” (marijuana) in return. That individual, identified as Liban Siyad, is heard on a wiretap telling someone that he’d received “1.5 of kush” — meaning, police say, a pound and a half of grass.
The slew of information to support a police search warrant, sought by media lawyers and released by Justice Ian Nordheimer — sections that had been censored when the materials were first relinquished a month ago — provide not just a compelling look-see into what lowlife characters were discussing amongst themselves as they salivated over squeezing Ford. They also extend the criminal scheming afoot to talk of a planned “kidnapping”. And Mohamed Siad — the same guy who tried selling the video to the Star — was, according to the wiretaps, seized by two gang members shortly thereafter for a chat about the video.
“Siad was crying, saying he destroyed the video and his family is in trouble,” is heard on an intercept. One of the men tapped says he’d warned Siad that if he “saw him in Dixon he would kill him.”
Violence triggered by various ganged-up individuals apparently trying to get their hands on the video seems to have extended to one man going out a window in Fort McMurray, Alta. And while police don’t believe that video was behind the March murder of Anthony Smith — a gang member photographed with Ford outside the Windsor Rd. crack house, along with two other young men arrested in June’s massive Project Traveller guns and drugs raids — some of the mayor’s staff pondered that possibility later.
Ripples emanating from Ford, the video, the phone, the Dixon Bloods, have yet again pulled Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair into the riptide. Blair has not satisfactorily explained why his investigators tailing Lisi — since charged with trafficking and extortion in his bid to retrieve the video — never stepped in and arrested the mayor, even when they witnessed Ford exchanging packages, contents unknown, with his go-to buddy.
Maybe cops didn’t have enough to charge Ford, not even to bring him in for questioning. Perhaps they would have been left empty-handed, their surveillance shot prematurely, had they caught Ford with nothing more than a bottle of vodka or a bundle of lottery tickets. But it’s damn sure they wouldn’t have been so circumspect with any other run-of-the-mill suspect, say, some black kid from Regent Park.
Did they let him slip through their fingers or did they allow him to slither away?
The thing is, Ford won’t go away, nowhere near far enough.
Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
