Mark Towhey served as chief adviser and, later, chief of staff to Rob Ford from 2010 to 2013. He is the author, along with Johanna Schneller, of Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable, from which this article is adapted. Johanna Schneller is a freelance journalist who lives in Toronto, Canada. She was a senior writer for GQ and has had cover stories in magazine such as InStyle, Premiere, Vanity Fair, Ladies’ Home Journal and More.

At the senior staff meeting on Monday, March 19, 2012—two days after St. Patrick’s Day—Amir Remtulla, Mayor Rob Ford’s chief of staff, asked me for an update on our preparations for the second special council meeting about a city subway project. I was then serving as director of policy and strategic planning, but I didn’t answer the question.

Instead, I exploded.


“Who the f—cares?” I asked. “There is only one thing that matters right now: The mayor of Toronto is a f—ing addict! And he’s out of control.”

Stunned silence. Many in the room suddenly took a keen interest in their notepads. Earl Provost, another of the mayor’s top advisers, paled. Amir tried to calm me down, but I was having none of it.

“Have you heard what happened here Saturday night?” I went on. “Rob physically assaulted two of our staff. He sexually harassed another. He was drunk in public. He wanted to smoke a joint in his office. He’s out of control.

“It doesn’t matter what we do at the council meeting. It doesn’t matter if we win or lose. The subway doesn’t matter. The budget doesn’t matter. Nothing matters until he goes to f—ing rehab.”

Earl cleared his throat. I wheeled on him. “You were f—ing attacked by a 330-pound addict!” I cried. “So was Brooks. We can’t ignore this shit. Everything else we’re doing can just stop until this is dealt with.”

***

Lunchtime at Swiss Chalet, Sunday, March 18, 2012. I was eating a chicken sandwich. Rob and his brother Doug were down the street, in the middle of their two-hour weekly radio show. Earl, who was eating with me, was looking ill. After I learned why, I lost my appetite, too. Ford had been out the night before—St. Patrick’s Day.

As I heard, first from Earl, and later from the staffers who’d been present, he’d been way, way out.

Though there’d been nothing on Ford’s calendar for Saturday night, Brooks Barnett, a special assistant to the mayor, was in the office, on standby in case Ford needed a body man. Just before 9:00 p.m., without warning, Rob, two years into his term as mayor, rolled in with two guests. He was looking to party—to have, as he puts it, “a few pops” with his friends: Peter Kordas, who drove a bus Rob sometimes rented for his high school football team; and a beautiful, twenty-something blonde named Alana, who appeared to be a friend of Peter’s. Brooks recognized Peter, but had never seen the woman before. The three went into Rob’s office and began drinking.

At some point, Rob stuck his head out and invited Brooks to join the party. He stayed, reluctantly. He also sent a discreet PIN message to Amir, outlining the situation. Amir asked Isaac Ransom, the deputy press secretary, to go assist Brooks. When Isaac arrived, he found Rob and his guests in the mayor’s office, already very drunk. Rob kept urging Brooks and Isaac to join in; they pretended to, so they could keep an eye on him.

Soon, Rob and his pals decided they wanted to go out on the town. Brooks and Isaac tried to dissuade him. Isaac called Earl, who arrived tout de suite, and also urged Rob to stay put and have fun in private. Rob wasn’t listening—he was keen to attend a party he’d heard about on The Esplanade, a short, bar-lined street a 10-minute walk from City Hall. Then one of the guests asked to light up a joint of marijuana. Rob said yes. Earl said no. Rob pouted.

Eventually, Rob, his two guests, and his two anxious staffers left City Hall and hailed a cab. During the ride to the bar, Rob directed a number of insulting racial remarks at the cab driver, calling him a “Paki” even though he clearly was not. Then he flung a handful of business cards at the driver from the back seat, telling him, “I’m Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto. If there’s anything I can do for you, call me anytime.” Not quite the low profile the staff had hoped for.

At the Bier Markt bar, Earl quickly secured a private room and whisked Rob and his party inside, away from the public eye. There, the mayor and his friends partied for some time, drinking more alcohol and eating chicken wings. At some point, a young female friend of Alana’s arrived; then the bar DJ and his girlfriend joined in, too. Though the press would later report that Rob snorted cocaine off the arm of one of the young women, none of his staffers corroborate that, and they insist they had eyes on him all night. I believe the staffers. Given what else occurred that night, I think they would have told me if they’d seen Rob do coke. As the night wore on, they certainly saw him do worse.

Eventually, Rob decided he wanted to go back to City Hall. On his way out of the bar, he tried to dance on the dance floor, stumbled around a bit, and fell to the ground. He was assisted up and out to a cab by his staff and bar security personnel. (Again, so much for discretion.)

Back in his office, Rob seemed to be coming down from a high. He grew morose and reminisced about his father. He broke into tears. Then he became angry, and started ragging on the “Liberal hacks” in his office. (Earl, Isaac, and Brooks are all members of Canada’s Liberal party; Ford is a staunch Conservative.) Without warning, Ford became violent. He pushed Earl 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 Brooks. 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.

At some point (exact times are hard to pin down, but everyone agrees on what happened), Olivia Gondek, the senior policy and council liaison, who managed much of the mayor’s agenda on council, arrived in Rob’s office to pick something up. Sensing imminent trouble, she stayed to help the staffers. Rob, by now completely blotto, began speaking to her in a sexually harassing and inappropriate manner. He was describing in explicit detail what he’d like to do sexually with her. Olivia had been Rob’s executive assistant while he was a councilor; she knew him better than most of us. She also knew how to shut him up, and was one of the few members on staff who wouldn’t tolerate any crap from him. She sharply rebuked him and stopped him cold, then told him he was drunk and should go home to his wife, Renata. Rob sat down like an embarrassed little boy.

Gondek left. For a while, Rob wandered the second floor mezzanine of City Hall with an open bottle of alcohol in his hand, until his staff corralled him back into his office. Finally, at about 4 a.m., the party wound down; the staffers guided Rob out of the building toward a taxi.

But Rob wasn’t done. First, he caused a ruckus at the security desk near the building’s main entrance, because he thought his car had been stolen—until Earl reminded him he hadn’t driven to work that day. Second, he made more lewd remarks, this time to the female City Hall security guard who was helping to shepherd him to a taxi. The staffers pulled him away and stuffed him into the cab. Earl got into the front seat with the driver to see Rob home.

In the cab, Rob punched a number into his cellphone and tried to arrange to meet someone. Earl insisted the cab continue directly to the mayor’s home. Angry, Rob ordered the cab to pull over; he wanted Earl to get out in the middle of nowhere. Earl refused and instructed the driver to carry on. At Rob’s house, Rob and Earl both got out of the cab. While Earl was paying the driver, Rob jumped into his black Cadillac Escalade and accelerated so rapidly out of his driveway that the taxi had to squeal out of the way, and Earl had to dive for safety lest he be flattened by the mayor of Toronto.

Needless to say, I was feeling grim when I went to work on Monday, which is when I exploded at the staff meeting.

After the meeting ended. Earl, Amir, and I discussed what to do. Eventually Amir agreed to confront Rob, and I agreed to keep working on the subway file. Earl and I offered to go with Amir when he spoke to Rob; we felt there would be strength in numbers. Amir declined. “This is something for me to discuss with him alone,” he said.

He was right. The chief of staff has a special relationship with the mayor, and a unique burden. He knew it would be better if Rob didn’t feel we were ganging up on him. I went back to work.

Every day for the next few months, I asked what we were doing about “the addict.” Yes, alcohol was a given. But there seemed to be more. Much of his behavior didn’t reconcile with what I understood to be the common effects of alcohol. He often appeared hyperactive, extremely agitated, and paranoid. He would rub his forearms repeatedly as if they were itchy and talk so fast you couldn’t understand what he was saying. Other times he seemed so exhausted he could barely stand up.

Amir said he’d spoken to Rob, and Rob had agreed to take some action. He wasn’t going to rehab, but he would see a counselor. I suggested we speak with Doug, and with Diane, Rob’s mom. Amir already had.

And for a few months, Rob got better. His behavior was less erratic. He showed up for meetings, he took a more active role in city affairs. I kept waiting for media stories about St. Patrick’s Day, but it took months for them to surface. When the story that Rob had done coke in the back room finally appeared, we shrugged it off; we thought it was false. No one in the media seemed to realize that the most horrifying moments of that night had not occurred at the bar, but at City Hall, and outside the mayor’s home.

The full story eventually emerged a year later. But for us on Ford’s staff, St. Patrick’s Day 2012 was a watershed moment. Before March 17, Ford had been a mayor who seemed to be in an increasing struggle with alcohol and troubles at home. After March 17, he was “the addict.”

It changed how the entire office functioned. The staff closed ranks in a bond of secrecy and struggle. We spent more and more time managing Rob, and less and less time leading the Council or the city. We started shedding policy objectives as we reassessed what was possible and what was not. We researched the major rehab centers, where they were, and how someone got in. I drew up a list of ground rules for the staff, and Amir and Earl agreed: No one would lie for Rob. No one would do anything illegal or against the rules.

The chief of staff’s job became less about politics and more about protecting the staff from their mayor. It became about making sure Rob’s family was safe, and trying to get the mayor to agree to treatment—or at least trying to insulate him from the consequences of his actions and addictions. It became about keeping Rob from dying.

For me, it was brutal. It must have been for Amir, too—he resigned four months later.

That’s when I got the job of chief of staff.





***

I was concerned about how Rob was handling his money. Since he was first elected councilor, he had claimed almost no expenses from the city. He boasted about this so much that other councilors complained—in fact, they passed a motion requiring him to spend some of the money allocated to his office.

When Rob became mayor, things got worse: He refused to let any of his staff claim their expenses. This was unfair. We weren’t paying people a lot, and their costs were legitimate. Earl and I fought Rob on this so often that he begrudgingly agreed to reimburse staff expenses—out of his own pocket. Literally: someone would hand Rob a receipt, and he’d pull out a stack of $20s and peel a few off. (He usually had around $1,000 in his pocket.) The staff found this so embarrassing they ate all but the biggest work expenses. I certainly did; I never claimed anything.

But in mid-2012, just after I became chief of staff, Rob suddenly began paying for everything by check. His pocket cash seemed to have evaporated. He began arguing about a lot of expenses, and taking longer and longer to pay back the few he deemed worthy. Just before Christmas, I overheard Rob ask aide Kia Nejatian to book Rob’s family vacation to Florida on Kia’s credit card. (Kia told me soon after that it wasn’t the first time he’d put charges of Rob’s on his card, and he was still waiting for repayment.) I went into Rob’s office and closed the door. I told him it wasn’t appropriate for him to ask staffers to cover his expenses on their credit cards, especially during the holidays. If he didn’t want to use his own card, he could write a check or pay in cash at the travel agency. He conceded—or so I thought.

I wasn’t sure if this cash crunch was due to the hundreds of thousands of dollars he’d spent on legal bills defending himself against a number of lawsuits brought against him by political activists, or if he was burning it on his other, recreational uses.

Then this happened: A junior staffer named Chris Fickel had a minor accident in a city car. No one was hurt, appropriate reports were filed, and the matter was closed. Until weeks later, that is, when Chris asked to speak with me privately. Nervously, he admitted to me that Rob had pulled him aside, and told him that the woman whose car he’d hit had phoned him and was threatening to sue. Rob said he’d calmed her down by offering to have Chris pay her $2,000 to “make the problem go away.” Rob said he’d deliver the money himself, because the woman might not want to see Chris. If he didn’t pay, Rob warned, Chris could be charged and do jail time. To me, it sounded perilously close to a shakedown.

Chris, always a loyal, honest guy, agonized over sharing his story with me. I confronted Rob. He denied it at first, then went on the attack. His story was that Chris, who he called “as useless as tits on a bull,” had come to him, saying he needed money to pay off the woman. I let that one go, and told him a) there was no way a staffer was paying anybody anything; and b) Rob should back off the whole thing.

When I told Chris he was off the hook, he broke down and related a slew of things that had happened between him and the mayor. One evening a few months prior, on Chris’s day off, Rob had ordered him to stop by Rob’s house to look at wife Renata’s computer which wasn’t working. When Chris got there, Rob insisted Chris join him and Renata in the basement. When Chris protested that he had a date waiting in the car, Rob told him to bring her in, too. Downstairs, Chris and his date witnessed a surreal scene: The mayor disappeared briefly, then returned with a joint of marijuana he offered around the room. No one joined him, so he smoked it alone. As soon as they could, Chris and his date hightailed it out of there.

On another occasion, Chris was riding in the backseat of Rob’s Escalade; Rob was driving, with one of his assistant high school football coaches riding shotgun. They stopped briefly at a local high school and Chris watched Rob pull a 12 oz. mickey of vodka out of a paper bag and down it in about two minutes, alternating each chug with a mouthful of Gatorade. Chris was shocked. He asked the mayor to let him out at the next corner; he said he wanted to catch the bus. Chris had never told anyone, he said, because he didn’t want to get fired or get the mayor in trouble. Immediately, I moved him off Rob’s staff and onto mine. I also told him that he was never again to ride in a vehicle driven by the mayor.

The next morning at the senior staff meeting, I made it policy: No staffers were permitted to be in a vehicle operated by the mayor. They could ride in Rob’s car if someone else drove. If Rob was driving, they were to follow him in a city car.

When Rob came in later that morning, I told him privately that I’d heard from three people who said they’d seen him driving after drinking, and in one case driving while drinking. I said “three” to protect Chris, and because it was true: Two senior members of the Toronto Police Service had told me officers had pulled over the mayor’s car late at night on multiple occasions and driven him home rather than charging him for driving under the influence.

All Rob wanted to know was who had accused him. I refused to say. “Chris!” he said. I said it didn’t matter who’d told me—what mattered was that staff was no longer to ride in his car if he was driving.

He exploded. “You’re saying I’m driving drunk?!”

“Are you?” I asked.

“No fucking way, buddy,” he sputtered. “You’re saying I’m a criminal. Why don’t you call the police?”

“I’m not saying that you drive drunk,” I countered, in my most level and measured voice. “I’m saying that I don’t know if you’re always sober when you drive, so I’m taking steps to make sure our staff—your employees—are safe.”

“I can’t believe you’re accusing me! Prove it!”

“I don’t have to prove it, Rob. It’s bad enough that I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t you see that? It’s bad enough that I can’t be sure you’re not driving drunk.”

He argued some more, then he dismissed me with his standard perfunctory “You do what you want, brother. I don’t care.”

I did not report Chris’s story to the police. It was hearsay, and it was too late. I’d arrested two drunk drivers in my life, and I knew it was essential to witness the act of driving and to have continuity of evidence through to a blood alcohol test establishing the driver over the legal limit. That didn’t exist weeks after the fact. There was nothing the police could do with the information. Besides, as I mentioned, they already knew the mayor was driving drunk, and weren’t doing anything about it.

Little did I know then that, as bad as this situation seemed to me at the time, it was only going to get worse. Much worse.