This is the Part 3 of Michele Mandel's seven-part series on the Rob Ford saga

For some, like the media and the alleged gangsters hoping to cash in, it was the pot of gold and Eldorado all rolled into one.

For Mayor Rob Ford, the elusive crack video was a ticking time bomb.

An hour after Gawker’s explosive story appeared online May 16, Ford’s good friend Alexander Lisi was on the phone making frantic calls to assorted shady characters in Ford’s underworld life. Through the night and into the morning, according to police surveillance records, he made repeated calls to Fabio Basso, owner of the Windsor Rd. home where it was believed to have been shot, and to video seller Mohamed Siad. He and David Price, Ford’s logistics director, were talking as well.

Ford and Lisi were also in constant communication -- according to police intercepts, exchanging 13 texts and phone calls that night alone.

Lisi was on a mission, police claim. His extortion charge would later allege that between May 16 and 18 he “did induce Mohamed Siad or Liban Siyad by threats or violence or menace to deliver said digital video recording.”

Siad was feeling the heat. At 12:47 a.m., a Project Traveller wiretap recorded his call to a woman believed to be his sister. He told her to take the phone out of the red pencil case and keep it safe.

Was this the cellphone that held the lucrative recording everyone was seeking?

After their flurry of phone calls, it appears Ford’s deputies had a handle on where that video might be.

Former press secretary George Christopoulos told police that Ford’s statement to the press was only supposed to say he couldn’t comment on a tape he “hadn’t seen” but the mayor had added the words or “does not exist.”

His strange wording made many suspicious, including his staff. “This made Christopoulos think that maybe the mayor had somehow gone out and obtained the video,” the police document says.

Later that day, according to Price’s story to police, he received a second call from an anonymous supporter who said Somali drug dealers “Gotti” and “D” were trying to sell the video and could be found in unit 1703 at 320 Dixon Rd.

Price told investigators he didn’t relay the information to the mayor. It wouldn’t be appropriate, he said.

Instead, he called Ford’s chief of staff, Mark Towhey, and asked “hypothetically speaking”: What would they do if they knew where the crack video could be found?

If that wasn’t alarming enough, Towhey told police that Price dropped another shocking piece of information -- the phone used to record the crack tape belonged to Anthony Smith and “it was the motive for his murder.”

Ford’s good friend had just tied the mayor to a gangland slaying.

It was a theory police would later completely discount. But, Towhey knew the startling information had to be forwarded to the authorities. In the meantime, he asked Price not to share the tipster’s info with the mayor.

But, the mayor already knew.

That would be the same Ford who was busy insisting for months onward that the video didn’t exist. And yet, according to Christopoulos’ interview with police, the mayor came to his press secretary that very day it hit the news and told him the “video that everyone was talking about, if it existed, might be at the address 320 Dixon Rd. apartment 1701 or 1703.”

Funny, how would he know that? Christopoulos texted the address to Towhey.

Meanwhile, Price told detectives he called his “best friend” Doug Ford in Chicago to give him the heads up that police were now involved. “Ahh f..., Dave,” was his response.

***

Chief Bill Blair had a serious problem on his hands: Wiretaps during Project Traveller had unwittingly caught suspected gangsters talking about supplying the mayor of Toronto with drugs. Two media reports had just alleged there was a video that showed Ford smoking crack.

The chief and the mayor had always had an uneasy relationship. Some would later say this was to be Blair’s revenge.

On May 18, top homicide Det.-Sgt. Gary Giroux was tasked to investigate the mayor and the possibility of a drug video. The investigation was temporarily suspended the following day out of fear that his questions may interfere with the ongoing Project Traveller operation -- but it would pick up again with a vengeance one month later.

***

The mayor was increasingly M.I.A.

On May 18, Ford was supposed to be at a parade with Prince Philip but didn’t show. When staff finally reached him, he blamed them for giving him wrong information. Isaac Ransom, Ford’s former communications assistant, told police this wasn’t uncommon behaviour -- that he often tried to get out of doing ethnic media events and meetings with international politicians and ambassadors.

Meanwhile, Gawker had begun a campaign to raise money to buy the crack tape and Dixon was rife with people anxious to get their hands on it - Ford’s emissaries allegedly among them.

In later television interviews, Mohamed Farah, the video’s broker, said people in “organized crime” arrived in the neighbourhood driving fancy cars and flashing a “suitcase of money” for the crack tape.

Offers soon became more frightening.

“There were phone calls coming in from people claiming to be ex-military, claiming to be a police officer, saying, ‘Look, if you guys don’t pass the video or find the video, we’ll arrest you guys or we’ll have you guys executed or some crazy stuff like that,’” Farah told CBC’s the fifth estate.

These threats, he said, were made “on behalf of the mayor.”

May 21 would prove to be a dangerous day for those caught in Ford’s toxic orbit.

Recall Harun? He was one of the video vendors who, according to court documents, claimed on police wiretaps that he supplied Ford with drugs and had photos of him doing heroin. He was shot in the leg that day on the 17th floor of 320 Dixon Rd., the very building and very floor where Ford had told Christopoulos that the video may be found.

Harun had little to say to police at the time -- he insisted he was drinking alone and had no idea why he was shot. A neighbour told a far more believable story: Six males were arguing in front of his door before he heard several gunshots. By the time he came out from hiding in his kitchen, the men had fled.

Curiously, just before Towhey heard about the “troubling” shooting, he told police Price had assured him “the situation would be taken care of as they spoke.”

There would still be more victims that day. Later that night, Fabio Basso and his girlfriend were attacked at 15 Windsor Rd., the home police call a “crack house” and where the cellphone clip of their friend the mayor may have been recorded. Toronto Police responded to an armed home invasion call where the couple was reportedly beaten by a man wielding a metal pipe.

Others would also be hurt: according to police intercepts, Siad, another alleged gang member trying to sell the footage, was briefly kidnapped a week later and questioned about the video by his compatriots and threatened with death if he didn’t leave Dixon.

He tried to pretend he’d left town. Instead, Siad got rounded up in Project Traveller raids June 13 on a slew of charges, including participating in a criminal organization and trafficking guns and cocaine. Two days later, he was stabbed in the back, chest and cheek during a fight at the Don Jail.

He, too, had nothing to say to police. But as the Toronto Sun’s Sam Pazzano and Don Peat would later report, Siad allegedly tried to use the crack video as his get-out-of-jail-free card.

***

Ford insisted it was “business as usual.” Once again, nothing could have been further from the truth.

On May 22, he suffered his most crushing blow -- not the revelation of the crack tape, but his firing as volunteer football coach by the Toronto District Catholic School Board after comments he’d made on Sun News about the players. His staff told police the distraught Ford, in tears, wanted them to organize a farewell pizza party that night at his home for the team.

When Towhey found out, he immediately e-mailed them: “Do not answer calls from the mayor tonight. Take the night off. Will explain in the A.M.”

Towhey told police he called the mayor and reminded him city employees can’t be doing his football work. During their ensuing argument, Ford was evidently so irrational that Towhey said he demanded to know if Ford was high.

Ford had had enough. He didn’t want to hear about his need for rehab, he didn’t want to be told what he couldn’t do. He told his chief of staff not to bother reporting for work the next day. “You’re done,” he told Towhey.

Thinking Ford would forget this latest outburst, his chief of staff arrived at City Hall the next morning only to have security march him out.

Towhey was Ford’s voice of reason. Or as Christopoulos told police, “As far as city business went, Mark Towhey was the mayor. He was well respected by everyone in the office.”

And now Ford had no one to rein him in.