Gangsters seemed to know Ford well
Better than general public did
It was one of the enduring images from the June 13 Toronto police raids that were the culmination of the force’s lengthy gunsand-gangs investigation now widely known as Project Traveller.
While heavily armed police made arrests early that morning at a number of addresses across the city, one was the six-tower complex on Dixon Road in north Etobicoke.
A building there, 320 Dixon Rd., was by then well known as ground zero for the notorious video documenting the Toronto mayor’s alleged crack cocaine adventure.
The cameras captured at least one woman, being led away in handcuffs, who was bellowing that all of this was Rob Ford’s fault.
And that — nothing else — speaks to the real damage done by Toronto’s crude, crack-smoking, binge-drinking problem-child mayor.
In a segment of that particular neighbourhood at least, the perception was that, like some renegade mayor of a corrupt city in a Third World country, the Toronto mayor ran the police force and had thundered his rage upon the denizens of Dixon for causing him so much grief.
The rest of the country is just now catching up with gossip that has been rampant among drug dealers and hoodlums — perhaps, in the modern lingo, they ought to be called “the outside-the-law community” — for months now.
So it is that 204 days after the website Gawker.com and the Toronto Star first went public with allegations that Ford had smoked crack — he has since admitted it, and much else, albeit in his unique blithe fashion — does it become clear why on Dixon that day, the angry woman and others may have believed the fix was in.
The key revelation comes from the massive ITO (information to obtain a search warrant) in the Project Brazen 2 probe, which was a direct offshoot of Traveller and aimed squarely at the mayor because his name had been so frequently invoked in Traveller’s intercepted wiretap conversations.
Over the course of recent weeks, Ontario Superior Court Judge Ian Nordheimer has been releasing chunks of the monster 500-page document, each chunk less heavily censored than the last, all at the behest of media lawyers.
This week’s release, made Wednesday, includes summaries of some of those intercepted phone calls.
Many of these chatterboxes are now facing charges from Traveller, which saw police recover weapons, cash and drugs. Many are alleged to be members of a criminal gang called the Dixon City Bloods.
In April, one of these lovelies told another “that he had Rob Ford smoking on the ‘dugga’ (probably slang for crack cocaine).” He said he had “so much pictures of Rob Ford doing the hezza (allegedly slang for heroin).” His pal “told him to take a picture of that because of what it could be worth.”
Another summary of a different conversation has one fellow saying, a bit mournfully, that “they love and respect Rob Ford but they have (him) in a lot of f---ed up situations.”
The summaries, and others of other conversations, mostly relate to a day in April when it appears Ford turned up at another notorious location — 15 Windsor Rd., a crack house, according to police, and the location where an infamous picture of the mayor, posing with three alleged members of the outside-the-law community, including Anthony Smith, who was murdered March 28, was taken.
The lady of that Windsor Road house phoned to arrange for a drug delivery because “Rob Ford is at the residence” and wanted drugs.
There appeared to be some urgency to the matter, and summaries of the transcripts suggest that the drugs were duly delivered, or, in the inimitable words of one of the alleged gangsters, “the mayor of the city Rob Ford was smoking his rocks today. (The gangster) advised he was at (the) house and that he will put a picture up on Instagram.”
Ford’s good friend and sometime chauffeur Sandro Lisi, the intercepts suggest, was also at the party, because the next morning, Lisi (known as Dro on the wires) was on the phone demanding to know where the mayor’s personal cellphone was and identifying himself as “one of the guys at the house last night.”
Lisi, the summary says, “explained that Rob is freaking out because he needs his phone. … Lisi threatened that if he did not get the phone back that the mayor would put the heat on Dixon.”
And there you have it — in a troubled, drug-and-guns-plagued Toronto neighbourhood, the gangsters appeared to know Ford better than most of the rest of the city, and the mayor’s purported representative, Lisi, was threatening to bring down the wrath of the mayor on the community.
There is no evidence in the document that Lisi was acting on behalf of Ford, or following his direction, when he issued the threat.
If there is some unfortunate fallout to the judge’s decision to release the intercept summaries — chiefly, the potential harm or limiting of Lisi’s fair-trial rights on his pending extortion charge — it is surely right that Torontonians know at least as much about the mayor as the alleged criminals with whom he consorted.
As Judge Nordheimer wrote at one point in his Nov. 27 decision to expose the rest of the documents to the light, “It cannot be denied that the actions of the mayor are a matter of very significant public interest and concern at this time as are the actions of the police in relation to them.”