It was 9 a.m. Easter morning. I was lying in bed, trying to sleep in, when my cellphone started to ring. I grimaced. No one but my dad would be calling so early on a holiday.

Irritated, I chucked off the covers and shuffled into the kitchen, where my phone was shaking across the table. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Robyn speaking,” I muttered.

“I need to meet with you,” said a deep voice I’d never heard before.

“Okay. What about?”

There was a pause.

“I have some information I think you’d like to see,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

I’d been getting a few of these calls over the last week.

On March 26, 2013 — six days earlier — Kevin Donovan and I had written an explosive story about Mayor Rob Ford’s alcohol problem. Five sources, including current and former members of Ford’s staff, had told the Star that they’d been trying to get the mayor into a treatment facility for a substance abuse issue for the last year. We’d also reported that the mayor had been asked to leave the Garrison military ball after showing up impaired.

“You need to give me some sense of what we’re talking about before I meet with you,” I said.

He told me he had incriminating video of “a prominent Toronto politician,” but wouldn’t say who was in it or what they were doing.

Odds are this was a bad tip. Then again, there was something about his voice. He sounded nervous.

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the deal. It’s Easter Monday and I’m off, so I don’t have access to a work car. If you want to meet today we can meet at a coffee shop in the west end. Or we can wait until tomorrow and I can drive out to you.”

“It’s no problem,” he said immediately. “I’ll come to you.”

The fact that he was willing to make the trip was encouraging.

Three hours later, I was standing outside a Starbucks on Queen Street West.

“Robyn?”

I turned around and came face to face with clean-cut guy, who looked about my age — somewhere in his late twenties. He was big, like a college football player, and well dressed. Sort of business casual meets street style, if that’s at all possible. He was carrying an iPad.

“Nice to meet you,” I said as we shook hands.

We decided to walk to a nearby park for some privacy.

“So?” I said. “What did you want to tell me?”

As we walked up a leafy street towards the park, he asked if I could protect him. He worked with youth in his community in Rexdale. He was coming to me on someone else’s behalf, a young drug dealer. I promised to protect his identity.

He wanted to know if I was required to hand over evidence of a crime to police. I told him that morally, if someone was in danger, I would feel compelled to try to prevent someone from being harmed. He told me it was nothing like that. It was about drug use. I told him I would not turn over evidence of drug use to police.

He seemed satisfied.

“What I’m about to tell you,” he began, “will sound unbelievable.” He told me he’d read the story about the Garrison ball and Ford’s drinking.

“It’s much worse than that,” he said. He went on to tell me that there was a video of the mayor smoking crack cocaine and he had it.

“I can’t let you see it yet,” he said. “But I brought this.”

He pulled out his iPad and swiped open the screen. At this point we’d reached the park. We took a seat on a bench at the south end of a small soccer field. He thumbed around for a minute and then passed me the screen.

An after-hours photo of Ford

There was a photo of the mayor, grinning in a dark grey sweatshirt and baggy pants, linked arm in arm with three young men in front of a yellow brick bungalow. One of the guys was giving the camera the finger and holding a beer bottle. Another was flashing a “west-side” gesture. There was snow on the ground and all three men were in coats. Ford was just wearing his sweater.

The mayor takes lots of photos with people, but he’s never in casual clothing. It was clearly taken after work hours at night.

“That one” — he pointed to the hooded man with the beer bottle — “is Anthony Smith. He was killed outside Loki night club last week.”

He told me the young man on the far right side of the photo had been shot in the same incident. But he wouldn’t give me anyone else’s name and he wouldn’t say where the photo was taken.

“What about the video?” The photo had nothing to do with the video, except that it was shot in the house. And that the house is a crack house.

He told me the footage was about a minute and a half long, that it was well lit, with perfect resolution and that it clearly showed the mayor inhaling from a crack pipe. He told me Ford could also be heard calling Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau “a fag,” and that at one point, during a conversation about his Don Bosco football team, the mayor mumbles something like “f---ing minorities.”

The man told me he didn’t shoot the video. A dealer in Rexdale, one of the youths he’d been mentoring, had taken it. The footage was shot in the last six months. He alleged the dealer was still selling to the mayor.

“Can I see the video?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, but only if the Star would pay for it. “It’s worth $100,000.”

I nearly laughed.

“Are you serious?”

He was dead serious.

I asked him to sit tight for a moment. I called Star editor-in-chief Michael Cooke.

I told Cooke exactly what the man had told me.

“Can you bring him to the newsroom?” Cooke asked.

The man agreed to go to 1 Yonge St. He offered to drive me. I wanted to see his car and his licence plate so we could run a check, but I also didn’t want to put myself in an unsafe situation. Decisions, decisions.

“Sure, that’d be great if you could drive,” I said.

He was parked in an alley. When he pointed to the four-door sedan, I fired Cooke a text message with a description of the car and his plate.

We made small talk on the way to the Star newsroom. He seemed like a nice enough guy. He told me he had gotten to know a lot of the “kids” — these guys were really in their late teens to mid-twenties — up in the Dixon Road and Kipling Avenue area. They were good guys, he said, but they’d made mistakes. Now they wanted out. Anthony Smith’s death had them scared. Ford was exploiting them, he told me.

“I just really want the story out there. It has to get out there. People need to know about this.”

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“If you really want the story out there, why not just give us the video?” I asked.

We parked in the front lot at the Star, then took the elevator to the fifth floor newsroom in silence. City editor Irene Gentle and Cooke were in the north-west boardroom. We didn’t waste any time.

He told them the same story he’d told me. He showed them the photo. And he made the pitch for his ransom one more time.

“Well, let’s get one thing straight right now,” Cooke said. “You’re not going to get $100,000. Not even close. Now, there might be some price, but before we even talk about what it’s worth, we need to see the video.”

The man, who from then on became known as the broker, promised to talk to his guys and get back to us.

I walked him to his car.

We filled in Donovan, who was away on vacation.

Later that night, reporter Jesse McLean and I met with the broker. It would be one of half a dozen meetings over the next month. We started looking into the group of guys trying to sell the video and the area we believed the footage was filmed. Meanwhile, Star editors began holding nearly daily meetings in the northwest boardroom about what to do if it was real.

If this video was real — and that was a big if — it was a matter of immense public interest. If the mayor of Toronto, the man in charge of the fourth largest city in North America, one of the largest governments in Canada, and a $10-billion budget, was in fact using crack cocaine, the implications were endless. He opened himself up to blackmail. It called into question his judgment, his state of mind, his health. How can a man mixed up in crack cocaine and the underworld of Toronto have partial control over the police budget?

Ford himself has spoken out harshly about drug dealers, gang culture and crack use as both a councillor and a mayor.

In 2005, when the city was considering handing out clean “crack kits” to addicts in order to help prevent the spread of disease, Ford declared that “tough love” was the only way to deal with drug users. Then, in July 2012, Ford said it was time “to declare war” on “thugs.” He vowed to run them out of the city.

If Rob Ford was using crack, Toronto needed to know. Maybe it was worth paying something for the good of the city.

On the other hand, the people trying to sell us the video seemed to be thugs. How could we ethically hand over $100,000 in cash to men who admitted to being crack cocaine dealers? As managing editor Jane Davenport said in one meeting, “What if they buy a gun and kill someone with it?”

Everyone at the Star agreed: it was impossible to know what we should do until we saw the footage and confirmed it was real. So that became the goal. The problem was that the broker didn’t want to show us the video until we promised to buy it. In that sense, it was a Catch 22.

As the weeks went by, and as McLean and I spent more and more time in Rexdale, I started to believe there was a video. We’d been subtly grilling the broker for weeks on both his personal life, the brick house, the men trying to sell the footage and Ford’s involvement in all of it. The answers never changed. It seemed like he was going to a lot of trouble meeting with us if it was made up. We met some of his friends. We asked them about the video, the house, the players involved. The answers all lined up.

But we never seemed to be getting any closer to seeing the footage. The conversation always came back around to money. Twice, the broker arranged for us to watch the video, but the dealer always cancelled at the last minute. While McLean and I did this, investigative editor Kevin Donovan began digging from the other side, building a profile of the many suspicious characters in the mayor’s life.

Back at the Star, we discussed our options. Maybe there was some sort of scholarship fund we could create for them? Everything seemed too complicated.

By the end of April, the broker was frustrated. The Star was still refusing to even discuss money until we saw the footage. I felt they were about to disappear.

I talked to Cooke about it: “They’re never going to let us see it if we don’t at least say we might buy it.”

We’d tried to avoid uttering those words. But the situation was getting desperate.

It became clear we couldn’t see the video without discussing what it was worth.

“Do it,” said Cooke.

I phoned the broker.

In that case, he said, we could watch the footage that week.

On May 3, nearly a month to the day after the broker first called, Donovan and I were sitting in a car in front of the Royal Bank in a grungy plaza on Dixon Road around 10:30 p.m.

The broker was late and we were beginning to think this was another false alarm.

“God, he better show up this time,” I said to Donovan.

Just as I was becoming convinced we were being stood up — again — a black sedan pulled up by our car. My phone rang. It was him.

“Leave your cellphones. No bags. No purses. And get in.”

He drove us to a parking lot behind the six Dixon towers. We parked behind 320 Dixon, which a little more than a month later would be ground zero in Project Traveller’s massive guns and gangs raid.

The broker left and a few minutes later returned. The dealer was coming. The man who got in the car, who the Star has since identified as Mohamed Siad, looked nervous. He looked over his shoulder. He didn’t want to talk.

He pulled out a black iPhone. At first, he didn’t want to play the sound — it was “extra,” he said — but we convinced him we needed to hear the sound in order to assess the value of the footage.

Siad relented.

He hit play. There was no question. There was Mayor Rob Ford, rambling, slurring, stuttering, jerking around on his chair, smoking from a crack pipe.