In mid-2012, Mark Towhey, chief of staff for Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, got a call from his boss at 2:39 in the morning.

Ford, the 330-pound leader of Canada’s largest city, was speaking “superfast,” often incoherently. He told his chief that he’d been arguing with his wife, Renata — whose speech Towhey could hear in the background sounding “slurred” — and wanted a witness.

Towhey listened to them scream at each other about money and other things, and occasionally Ford would interject.

“I can’t live like this,” Ford told Towhey. “She’ll f— guys right in front of me . . . I swear to God I’m gonna kill this woman, brother.”

Towhey dialed 911 on his cellphone but didn’t press “Enter.”

His biggest concern — with his volatile boss and his wife both at least drunk and possibly on drugs as well — was their two kids, Stephanie and Doug, 8 and 4 at the time. Throughout the nerve-wracking call, which would last an hour and 40 minutes, Towhey heard Stephanie in the background, trying to keep the peace, “more mature than either of her parents.”

After accusing Renata of having drugs and needles in the house, Ford rambled to Towhey, “She’s a whore, dude. She’s got $520 hidden away. They pay her to blow them or for a f—. I catch them. Stephanie tells me these guys are coming over.”

Later, he says, “I just found a big piece of blow. A rock.” Then, “I’ll light this thing up . . . I’ll put a light to it and it melts.”

Then, “She just took my gun upstairs.”

This elevated Towhey’s concern to a new level.

“Where are your kids, Rob?” he asks.

More mumbling and ranting, then, “I’m putting three bullets in your head. I’ll pump you full . . .”

“Do you have a gun, Rob?”

“She stole it.”

No one was shot that night, no gun fired, no one harmed — physically, anyway. But this was the sort of behavior city staff, and then the city at large, came to expect from its mayor.

Ford nation

To outside observers, Toronto’s laughingstock mayor has been less a matter of scorn than of mystery. Why on Earth did the people of Toronto keep electing this buffoon?

Towhey’s explosive new memoir, “Rob Ford: Uncontrollable,” offers an explanation.

Rob Ford’s father, Douglas Ford Sr., created a successful label business called Deco Labels & Tags with hands-on service, traveling anywhere to personally solve customer problems.

Ford took the lesson to heart. From his initial election as a councillor for Toronto’s Ward 2 in 2000, the conservative Ford had refrigerator magnets made with his home phone number on them and would hand them out everywhere he went, telling constituents that if they ever had a problem, they should call.

For 10 years, they did. And for 10 years, Ford returned every single call personally and saw to it that every constituent’s problem was addressed.

Along the way, he saved every phone number he received a call from, though not with any purpose in mind — he just kept shoving call sheets into file boxes.

When he ran for mayor in 2010, Ford had a decade of personal service to constituents behind him. Every phone number he ever received a constituent call from was called back, and a database of loyal Rob Ford supporters was assembled that came to be known as Ford Nation. Where establishment types might have found the overweight, sweaty, disheveled councillor something of a non-entity, voters saw the rare politician who was there for his constituents whenever they needed him.

The St. Pat’s party

Securing voter loyalty was never Rob Ford’s problem. Rob Ford’s problem was Rob Ford.

Signs of possible substance abuse surfaced during Ford’s first year as mayor.

“By the end of 2011, Rob was getting harder to manage,” writes Towhey. “He was late for meetings . . . he was coming to City Hall less and less.”

By 2012, Ford’s productivity was almost nonexistent. Staffers used to joke that he put in “a solid two-hour day.”

Twitter buzzed with sightings of Ford in liquor stores, filling his flask from the shelf. His then-chief of staff (Towhey took over later) arranged for others to buy his booze for him. It was also quietly arranged for him to meet regularly with an addiction counselor.



Ford charged [a staffer] with his left hand out, grabbed him by the collar and slammed him into the wall, right arm pulled back ready to punch him.

The more Ford drank, the less he engaged. To Towhey’s agitation, Ford took to answering his requests for important decisions to be made by telling him, “Do whatever you want. You’re the boss.”

Just before 9 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day 2012, Ford arrived at his City Hall office with two friends, a man and a woman. The three got drunk, and Ford’s staffers got very nervous, joining the festivities in order to keep an eye on him.

One of Ford’s friends wanted to light a joint right there in City Hall, and Ford told him to go ahead. A staffer stepped in and said no.

“He sternly reminded Rob that he was the chief magistrate of the city,” Towhey writes, “and there was no goddamned way people were going to smoke drugs in the office of the mayor. Rob pouted.”

Against staff objections, Ford and his friends went to a bar, the nervous staffers in tow. Along the way, Ford hurled racial remarks at a cab driver, calling him “Paki,” then drank and danced in the crowded bar, becoming so inebriated that he fell down in public view.

He and his friends then returned to City Hall, where, Towhey writes, an out-of-control Ford launched physical attacks on two staffers and sexually harassed a third.

“Without warning, Ford became violent. He pushed [a staffer] off a couch and onto the floor, then loomed over him with his arm cocked and fist clenched, threatening to strike him. When the others protested, Rob turned his wrath on [the other staffer]. He charged him with his left hand out, grabbed him by the collar and slammed him into the wall, right arm pulled back ready to punch him. The staffers got him to back off and calm down, but the atmosphere was electrically charged.”

Soon after, Olivia Gondek, Ford’s former executive assistant and then-senior policy and council liaison, stopped by to collect something. Seeing trouble brewing, she stayed to help.

“Rob, by now completely blotto, began speaking to her in a sexually harassing and inappropriate manner,” Towhey writes. “He was describing in explicit detail what he’d like to do sexually with her.”

Fortunately for Ford, Gondek knew him well, and wasn’t intimidated. “She sharply rebuked him and stopped him cold, then told him he was drunk and should go home to his wife. Rob sat down like an embarrassed little boy.”

The addict

The next day, the staff realized the mayor had hit a turning point.

“Before March 17, Ford had been a mayor who seemed to be in an increasing struggle with alcohol and troubles at home,” Towhey writes. “After March 17, he was ‘the addict.’ It changed how the entire office functioned. We spent more and more time managing Rob, and less and less time leading the council or the city.”

Ford’s behavior continued along this path. Shortly before his almost deadly argument with his wife, he was driving with a junior staffer when, as they were stopped in the car at a local high school, Ford pulled “a 12-ounce mickey of vodka out of a paper bag and down[ed] it in about two minutes, alternating each chug with a mouthful of Gatorade.”

After that incident, Towhey forbade his staffers from riding in a car with Ford if the mayor was driving.

From time to time, Ford would butt-dial Towhey by mistake. One of these times, Towhey heard him “talking about his wife, about offering her up to the guys he’s with.” Towhey hung up.

Towhey began kicking-off staff meetings by asking about Ford’s kids — if anyone had seen them recently, and if they were OK.

Bad became worse in May 2013, when Gawker published a story claiming they had seen a video of Ford smoking crack. Later, a man seen with Ford in one of the article’s photos was murdered.

Towhey thought the only way to save Ford’s political career was for him to enter rehab. He could admit the problem, go away for a bit and come back clean just in time to run for re-election. Ford wouldn’t consider it.

Soon after, a City Hall staffer told Towhey he had heard where the videotape was — and that the man who had been murdered was killed because of the tape.

Ford made a public statement claiming he didn’t use crack and saying that he couldn’t comment on the video because there was no video.

In November, though, he did an about-face, publicly admitting to having smoked crack, “probably in one of my drunken stupors.” (The murder turned out to have been unrelated.)

Then another video surfaced in which Ford, “seemingly intoxicated,” was “talking theatrically about killing someone.”

The video showed “an almost incoherent and violently aggressive Rob Ford role-playing an imaginary encounter” [between] the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party (and new Canadian Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau, whom Ford despised, and either Mike Tyson or Hulk Hogan.

During this rant, Ford said, presumably about Trudeau, “ ’Cause I’m gonna kill that f—ing guy. I’ll fight him. Brother, you’ve never seen me go . . . When he’s down I’ll rip his f—-ing throat out. I’ll poke his eyes out . . . I’ll . . . f— when he’s dead, oh, I’ll make sure that motherf—er’s dead. I need 10 f—ing minutes to make sure he’s dead.”

Running again

Toronto, incredibly, had no legal mechanism for impeaching a mayor. Instead, the City Council stripped him of the majority of his powers, bestowing them on his deputy and leaving Ford mayor in name only.

He registered as a candidate for re-election, and was widely favored to win, as his loyal Ford Nation stood by him throughout.

Additional embarrassing videos only worked to strengthen Ford, as followers blamed the media for piling on. But when one more video showed him smoking crack, this time in his sister’s house, it was too much even for him, and he checked into rehab the next day.

He emerged several months later, supposedly clean and ready to campaign, when a large tumor was discovered in his abdomen.

He removed his name from mayoral consideration and ran instead for his old council seat, which he won. Several months of chemotherapy and surgery shrank the tumor, though Ford has told the press he’s not completely out of the woods. He’s discussed running for mayor again in 2018, but his health leaves this a question mark.

Since leaving Ford’s employ — he was fired during a dispute over Ford’s personal use of City Hall staff — Towhey has struggled with unemployment, depression and financial hardship. One positive, though, is that he became a radio host for Toronto station Newstalk 1010 — by coincidence, taking over a time slot formerly held by Ford.

“In homage to Rob Ford,” he writes, “I always start the second hour of the show with the same theme song: ‘Video Killed the Radio Star,’ by the Buggles. Call it karma.”