UNBELIEVABLY, IT GOES FROM BAD TO WORSE
Ford admits to buying illegal drugs in past two years,
In the morning, asked by a colleague on the floor of city council if he had yet admitted to all of his problems, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford shrugged his big shoulders and opened wide his arms, stammered a bit, said he really didn’t know and then added winningly, “There might be a coat hanger left in my closet.”
By mid-afternoon, it was apparent the man is a whopper of a clothes horse.
With the release of previously redacted pages from the massive search warrant in the Toronto police investigation of him, tumbling out of that crowded mayoral wardrobe came a brace of skeletons.
On these two fronts — at city hall, where councillors publicly denounced him while asking him to step aside, and from the courts, where a judge ordered more documents unsealed — the embattled mayor emerged looking for all the world like a Kardashian wrapped in an episode of Intervention inside a bottle of vodka.
The new revelations detail beliefs from those in his inner circle at city hall, both past and current staffers, that Ford is an alcoholic who when disinhibited and without brakes, also dabbles in harder drugs — you can add allegedly OxyContin and cocaine to the crack cocaine the mayor has acknowledged using at least once — makes weepy late-night calls from his father’s grave, flies into rages that border on the physical and may have once invited a prostitute into his office.
As well, Ford is alleged by his former staff to have behaved inappropriately with a young woman who was once a policy adviser in his office and now works at Toronto Hydro.
Calling the behaviour with the young woman inappropriate is putting it mildly: “He claimed to have slept with her. Mayor Ford said, ‘I’m going to e-- you out’ and ‘I banged your p---y,’ ” according to his former communications assistant Isaac Ransom.
Notes of Ransom’s police interview, like others with the mayor’s former staffers, was included in the unsealed documents.
Ransom also told detectives that after Ford lost a key subway vote and took a latenight subway ride that he “tried to hit on a woman that was at the station” and asked her out to dinner.
Others told police how the mayor had smoked marijuana in front of a staffer’s then-girlfriend at his Etobicoke home, once drank openly while behind the wheel such that a young aide demanded to be let out and hopped a bus home, and that as recently as this past spring, another employee found a joint in Ford’s desk while looking for a file.
None of these staffers, it is worth noting, appeared to in any way have an axe to grind against the mayor.
After stories about the notorious crack video appeared on the Gawker website and in the Toronto Star and the investigation into those allegations began, the staffers were approached by detectives and merely co-operated — exactly as the mayor himself is now refusing to do.
Most of them also managed to speak of Ford with concern and affection despite his sometimes ghastly behaviour.
For instance, several mentioned how distraught the mayor was when, this past May, he received a letter from his beloved Don Bosco football team, saying he wasn’t wanted anymore. “The mayor called (former chief of staff Mark) Towhey later on that day in tears,” staffers told police. He was “sobbing and completely distraught.”
But Towhey stood his ground when the mayor then wanted to have a party for the players at his house and tried to enlist some of the young staff to help him. He called Ford and “told him that he cannot do that.”
In fact, Towhey, who was fired this May after the crack video story broke and he told Ford he must either take a leave or resign, was clearly the role model for the strange workplace that was the mayor’s office: Within the law and the propriety expected by taxpayers, Towhey nonetheless tried valiantly to protect Ford from himself.
His conduct, and the efforts it seems to have inspired in other staffers, stands as the lone bright light in this seamy story.
If Ford took an unprecedented licking both at city council and in the released documents, he kept on ticking.
But if Ford took an unprecedented licking both at city council and in the released documents, he kept on ticking.
At first restrained and polite at the council meeting Wednesday, he soon became bellicose, as did his brother, Coun. Doug Ford.
Bumped to the top of the agenda, at the mayor’s own insistence, was a motion from Coun. Denzil MinnanWong which called for Ford to apologize for misleading Torontonians about the crack video, to co-operate with police, answer councillors’ questions and to take a temporary leave to “address his personal issues.”
Though the motion ended up passing with a huge majority, it was only a symbolic gesture; council has no authority to force the mayor to step aside.
But any chance the discussion would be high-minded evaporated quickly.
At one point, MinnanWong accused the mayor of physically blocking him as he tried to approach the speaker’s chair and demanded an apology.
To cries of “Shame! Shame!” from most of the public gallery but with a few hoots of “Opportunist!” and “Want a tissue?” directed at Minnan-Wong from a cadre of Ford supporters, the mayor adamantly denied having done anything wrong.
What followed then was a series of mini-explosions.
Someone in the public gallery apparently made a rude gesture to Coun. Pam McConnell, who whirled in her seat and cried, “Stop that! Don’t you dare do that to me!”
As Minnan-Wong was asking the mayor questions — getting him to admit he’d bought illegal drugs since being elected — and then wrapped up his speech, Doug Ford began heckling him in loud faux whispers: “What? Are you campaigning now?” and then, “Yep, I’m running for mayor.”
The mayor’s brother then got to his feet to demand if Minnan-Wong had smoked marijuana, or “drank and ever driven?” And Doug Ford then announced that if councillors were honest, “the whole council would stand up” and admit they’d done it.
That got the mayor to his feet, shouting, “Answer the question! I answered it truthfully!”
As the speaker called for a short break, a man from the public gallery left, deliberately giving Doug Ford the finger.
Outside city hall, an antimayor demonstration was getting started. Two people, standing close, held two signs. One read, Step Aside.
The other read, … Or Fall Over.