His drug and alcohol-fuelled antics made world headlines and engulfed a city in unprecedented controversy. Toronto mayor Rob Ford’ s personal and political troubles have occupied centre stage in North America’s fourth-largest city since news broke that drug dealers were selling a videotape of Ford appearing to smoke crack cocaine.

Toronto Star reporter Robyn Doolittle was one of three journalists to view the video and report on its contents in May 2013. Her dogged pursuit of the story has uncovered disturbing details about the mayor’s past, and embroiled the Toronto police, city councillors, and ordinary citizens in a raucous debate about the future of the city.

Even before those explosive events, Ford was a divisive figure. A populist and successful city councillor, he was an underdog to become mayor in 2010. His politics and mercurial nature have split the amalgamated city in two.

But there is far more to the story. The Ford family has a long, unhappy history of substance abuse and criminal behaviour. Despite their troubles, they are also one of the most ambitious families in Canada. Those close to the Fords say they often compare themselves to the Kennedys and believe they were born to lead. Doolittle says that regardless of whether the mayor survives the current crack-cocaine scandal, the Ford name will be on the ballot in the mayoralty election in 2014.

Fast paced and insightful, Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story is a page-turning portrait of a troubled man, a formidable family and a city caught in an astonishing scandal. In this exclusive excerpt from the new book, Doolittle recounts how she came to watch the now-famous crack video and provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the Star newsroom handled the explosive situation.

Last call had come and gone when 21-year-old Anthony Smith and a 19-year-old friend left Loki Lounge in downtown Toronto on March 28, 2013. The popular nightclub in the King St. W. bar district was the kind of place where men wore sunglasses inside, women teetered on heels they couldn’t walk in and most of the furniture was upholstered in velvet.

Smith and his friend had known each other since they were about 10 years old. They used to play on the same basketball team. Now, according to police, they were both members of the Dixon City Bloods street gang.

At 2:30 a.m. they crossed to the north side of the street. The gunshots came out of nowhere.

A bullet went through the back of Smith’s head. His friend was hit in the arm and back. When the sun came up, two crimson pools of blood were still on the sidewalk. Smith was pronounced dead before the morning was over. The friend barely survived.

Four days later, my cellphone rang just after 9 a.m. It was a man named Mohamed Farah. He wanted to meet.

“I have some information I think you’d like to see,” he said.

“It’s about a prominent Toronto politician.”

It was around noon on Easter Monday. I was standing on a soccer field in a west-end Toronto park talking on the phone to the Star’s editor-in-chief, Michael Cooke. Farah was waiting out of earshot on a nearby bench, holding his iPad.

“He says they want $100,000,” I told Cooke. “I tried to explain that’s a completely crazy number, but he seems set on it.”

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

Farah offered to drive. He was parked in an alley behind a Starbucks. I had three seconds to weigh the pros and cons of going with him or taking a cab. Pro: I could see his licence plate, run a check and get his name and address. Con: I was alone, and any idiot knew not to get in a car with a stranger. Pro: It would build trust, provided he wasn’t a rapist. Con: He might be a rapist.

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

The moment I spotted Farah’s black sedan, I sent Cooke an email with a description of the vehicle and the plate number — just in case. I climbed into the passenger side. The car was clean and obviously quite new. I didn’t see a scrap of trash.

The Star was 15 minutes of city driving away. I used the time to get to know Farah a little better. I asked him about his job, his friends and hobbies. He seemed like a decent person. Smart and thoughtful, although he was definitely misrepresenting his altruism.

“It’s not right what’s happening,” Farah told me. “I just really want the story out there. It has to get out there. People need to know about this.”

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

He told me he was acting on behalf of a dealer, a young man he’d met through his work in the community. (Occasionally he would refer to two people. Maybe there was another dealer — maybe a girlfriend. It was hard to know.) Farah told me that this dealer was a good kid but had gotten messed up in the drug culture. He wanted out. Anthony Smith’s recent murder had been a wake-up call. Smith had been a good friend. But the kid needed money to build a new life. The video was his ticket. Farah told me he had offered to help because he knew people in the media. One of them, he said, worked in New York — he would not tell me who it was, where they worked, or what they did — and that their organization was considering buying the footage.

“But I’d like for you guys to have it. The Star deserves to get the story. You’ve done the work.”

“$100,000 is way too much,” I said.

“It’s worth a million. They wanted a million. I told them that was too much.”

“Mohamed, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Canada. We buy videos and photos from freelancers, yes, but that’s like $500. Maybe $1,000. I don’t know if you follow this stuff, but it’s not exactly a great time financially for the newspaper industry.”

He finally wrote back: “I’m trying my best, I will reach out when I have something or when I’m done. All the best.” Shortly after, I approached senior editors at the paper. “They’re never going to let us see it if we don’t at least say we might buy it,” I said.

“The video will make you guys a lot of money. People would have to come to your site to see it. You could charge people to watch it.”

I tried to explain that it didn’t work like that. Someone would just make a copy and post it online.

“It’s not just the cost. There are ethical issues here,” I said. “Anyway, I’m at the bottom of the totem pole. It’s not going to be my call. I’m just warning you — I don’t think $100,000 is going to happen.”

We turned on to Yonge St. and followed it down to the lake, stopping outside the Toronto Star office tower. I phoned security to raise the gate so that we could park in the front lot, then sent Cooke a two-minute warning. He, along with city editor Irene Gentle, would be in the northwest conference room.

Farah collected his iPad, cellphone and keys. Everything was shut down because of the holiday. I had to swipe my security pass to get inside, then again to activate the elevator. We got off on the fifth floor and turned left at the wall where photos of the Star’s publishers, past and present, are displayed. Only a skeleton staff was in the newsroom. I doubt anyone even noticed us. We went straight to the conference room.

I introduced Cooke and Gentle to Farah. Everyone shook hands, and then we got to it.

Toronto mayor Rob Ford is pictured in a now famous photo at 15 Windsor Dr.

Farah gave them the same spiel he had given me in the park. Using his iPad, he showed them the photo of Rob Ford with Anthony Smith and two others in front of the yellow brick bungalow — a crack house, he said. Smith was dead, shot to death just four days earlier. Another of the men had been seriously wounded in the same incident. Next, he described the video. Farah claimed that it clearly showed Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine while uttering racist and homophobic slurs.

Then came the price tag: $100,000.

Non-negotiable.

“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.”

Farah said he needed time. He did not have a copy. The guy he was helping did not trust him with it, but he would let the dealer know we were interested.

Gentle and Cooke quizzed Farah about the video’s contents.

How was the photo connected to the video? It wasn’t. Except that the dealer was friends with Anthony Smith.

When was the video shot?

Within the last six months.

Where?

Farah wouldn’t say.

Was Ford alone in the footage?

Yes.

After 20 minutes of grilling, I walked Farah to his car and made plans to touch base later that day to set up our next meeting.

Tuesday morning, April 2, 2013, I was back in the conference room with Cooke and Gentle as well as the Star’s long-time newsroom lawyer, Bert Bruser, and its managing editor, Jane Davenport.

Kevin Donovan , the reporter-editor who heads the Star’s investigative team, was on vacation. Everyone had been briefed on Farah’s astonishing claim, but Cooke asked me to recount the story in detail, from the first phone call to our last text message, once more for the group. When I got to the part about $100,000, everyone seemed to collectively cringe.

Bert Bruser in the Star's newsroom lawyer. DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR

“Now he’s supposed to go back to his guy and sort out how we can see the video,” I said. “He texted me last night and we’re going to meet around 6 today up in Etobicoke.”

There was silence for a few moments as the editors looked around the room, weighing the gravity of what we were dealing with. Bruser rubbed his bearded chin and shook his head. His face is always impossible to read. I couldn’t tell if he was taking in the magnitude of the allegations or trying to figure out a damage-control strategy for this hoax I had gotten us involved in.

“So,” Davenport said, “are we considering paying $100,000 for this video?”

Davenport was just 36 when in June 2012 the Star named her managing editor, Michael Cooke’s second-in-command. Together, they were the perfect pair. Davenport was the calculated and cautious yin to Cooke’s aggressive and spontaneous yang. When Davenport spoke, she gave the impression that every word had been chosen deliberately.

The Star's Managing Editor, Jane Davenport. DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR

“We’re not going to pay that,” Cooke replied. “But, if it’s real, and that’s a big if, and if we can confirm that it’s real, we might pay something.”

The Toronto Star does not pay for stories. It is explicitly stated in the newspaper’s code of conduct: “The Star does not pay for information.” But it does pay for commodities such as photos and video.

If Farah had come to the Star asking for $500, my guess is we would have paid him on the spot. The issue here was the size of the ransom and the people we would be giving it to.

What would a self-described drug dealer do with that kind of money? Did we believe he wanted to turn his life around? On the other hand, if this video did exist, if it proved that the mayor of Toronto was smoking crack cocaine, the implications for the city were enormous. Given the immense public interest of a story like that, maybe it was worth paying a hundred thousand dollars to drug dealers.

But there were other problems. How would we be able to tell if Ford was smoking drugs ? How could we even be sure it was him? Could the video be doctored? Everyone agreed we needed to see the thing before we could assess its value. Besides, there was another, more pressing question to deal with: What if this was a set-up?

The day before Farah had called, Doug Ford devoted the first part of the brothers’ weekly radio show to the Star and its supposed vendetta, suggesting the paper would go to any length to “politically kill Rob Ford.” He targeted Cooke specifically, talking about his days as editor-in-chief of the New York Daily News , and in particular his role in the reality TV showTabloid Wars. He had found and quoted Cooke’s colourful statement about pressing one’s foot on the competition’s throat “till their eyes bulge and leak blood.”

The Star's Editor-in-Chief Michael Cooke. DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR

Was it possible someone was trying to embarrass us with a fake story, baiting the hook with the kind of over-the-top yarn they thought Cooke would do anything to get?

“It’s possible,” I told my editors. “It would be a pretty elaborate hoax, but it’s certainly possible. I’m just assuming everything I say is being recorded.”

I’d try to get a better feel for the situation when I saw Farah that night. Lawyer Bert Bruser said I should have someone with me for physical and journalistic protection. With Donovan still gone, the group selected Jesse McLean, a young and talented reporter on Donovan’s investigative team. McLean and I had known each other for years, having worked together at our campus newspaper.

Before I left, Cooke looked me in the eye. “I know you know this, but I’m going to say it anyway. No one can know about this. Not anyone outside this room — even your friends in the newsroom.”

“Got it.”

It was the start of a lonely six weeks.

Jesse McLean and I pulled onto the highway just in time for rush-hour traffic. We were going to meet Farah at a Country Style doughnut shop in a north Etobicoke plaza on Dixon Road near the airport. The neighbourhood was sometimes called Little Mogadishu, sometimes Rexdale. By the mid-1990s, half the population in the area was Somali. In fact, according to some of the people who lived there, Canada was known simply as “Dixon” in Somali refugee camps across East Africa. It was a lower-income part of town, as communities with large immigrant populations tend to be.

The community centred on six high-rises on the north side of Dixon, which stood like fortresses around two courtyards. These grey towers were actually condos, although they looked a lot more like subsidized housing, especially on the inside. The stairwells reeked of urine. Walls were etched with gang graffiti, carpets were old and stained, and there were signs of disrepair on every floor. One tower had a serious rodent infestation. The average price of a condo in Toronto was more than three hundred thousand dollars.

In Dixon, you could find two-bedrooms for under $60,000 — half of what they used to be worth. Crime was a problem, especially of late. A gang known as the Dixon City Bloods had a foothold in the complex, especially the 320 building. Shootings and robberies were frequent in Rexdale. Frustrated community leaders were constantly fighting to get media coverage for all the good things happening in the otherwise vibrant neighbourhood.

A man peers over a balcony at 320 Dixon Rd. in Rexdale, a building that became the focus of police raids in June 2013. STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR

We pulled into the plaza parking lot across from the towers at about 6 p.m. There were hardly any free tables at the doughnut shop, which was the case all day most every day. The people who hung around were usually middle-aged to elderly men from the neighbourhood. They sat in clusters, chatting with friends, reading the paper, and watching the CP24 news channel on a big flat-screen TV.

McLean and I slid into a booth. I texted Farah a few minutes before he was supposed to arrive: “Hey you want a coffee?” He wrote back, “Tea please — medium sugar 2 milk.” A few minutes later, he phoned from somewhere in the parking lot. He didn’t want to sit or be seen with us. We could go for a drive, but not in his car. So we took ours.

He got in the front with me, McLean sat in the back, and we went on a little tour for the next hour. We drove along Dixon Road, through the tower parking lots, to the high school and the surrounding neighbourhood. We asked Farah a lot of the same questions I had asked him on that first ride to the Star . His answers were all the same, which was a good sign. We went to a community basketball game and met some of Farah’s friends.

We covertly fact-checked what he’d been telling us. Everything matched up. Back in the car, we asked Farah more about the video and the circumstances in which it had been taken. And what about the photo? Where was that house?

“It’s around here. That’s all I’m going to say. You’ve got to be patient,” Farah said. “This is about building trust.”

Trust seemed to mean our willingness to pay. The conversation always curled back to money.

“This is about protection,” Farah said. Could we help the dealer’s family if the government tried to deport them after the story ran? Would we protect Farah’s and the dealer’s identity? McLean and I explained how confidential sources worked, that we would never reveal their identities even if compelled to do so by a court. If we made a promise of anonymity, we would keep it. This seemed to satisfy him.

We said if someone was being unlawfully deported, that would certainly be a story the Star would cover, and the press had great influence. We could also try to hook the dealer up with our lawyer to answer any questions. Farah nodded approvingly.

(In the end, the Star agreed to keep Farah’s name secret, until he revealed himself as “the broker” to two media outlets in November 2013. As for the dealer, the Star never granted him anonymity. We learned his name — Mohamed Siad —only after Star reporter Jayme Poisson spent months uncovering it.)

We dropped Farah off about 7.30 p.m. We were no closer to the video, but more convinced that there was one. I told him I would get in touch after we’d had a chance to relay some of his concerns to the editors.

The next day at the Toronto Star offices, the same group plus Jesse McLean was back in the northwest boardroom.

“Farah told me he turned down $20,000 from another outlet,” I said. “Although he’s likely just bargaining; I guess that was an indication of what he won’t accept.”

We debated whether there was a way to set up some sort of scholarship fund. If they actually just wanted to start over, maybe we could help without handing over cash? But how would that work? Would we pay their rent? Their food? Would they give status reports? It seemed complicated. We got back to the idea of just buying it.

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Jane Davenport spoke up.

“I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of paying for it,” she said. “How do we know what they’ll do with the money? What if they buy a gun and kill someone?”

It was a sobering thought.

Then again, if the mayor really was smoking crack cocaine, the city needed to know. Nothing like this had ever happened in Canada, but there were precedents in the US and the UK of news outlets paying big money for exclusive footage. We were unanimous that, no matter what we decided, we would disclose what we did and why.

From where I was sitting, it felt like the editors’ problem with the dollar amount was not so much about the Star’s bottom line as the ethical concerns. (Contrary to what some critics have suggested, the Star actually lost several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of subscriptions from people who believed the Fords. It would have been far cheaper to have bought the video.) Yes, there was an awareness that breaking this story would be huge for the Toronto Star, a big win in a crowded newspaper town. But no one was willing to compromise the integrity of the paper — even for the scoop of the century.

McLean and I headed back to Etobicoke that afternoon to look for the house in the photo before meeting again with Farah. It had been a few days since I’d seen the picture, and Farah was more and more reluctant to let us see it again. He didn’t want us finding the place. All we had to go on was my memory and his claim that it was a place where people smoked crack. The brick was light, and the house was somewhere near Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School, which was about five minutes from the Dixon towers. We drove up and down each street, looking for unkempt lawns, broken windows and chipped paint, jotting down a few licence plate numbers to check later. Then we met Farah for another long conversation that ended up the same place it began.

Such was the dance for the next 20 days. We’d talk to Farah, then meet in the northwest conference room. The Star’s then-executive editor, Murdoch Davis, the man who watched the newsroom’s money, was added to the roster. Donovan got back from vacation and was extremely apprehensive.

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I can’t believe that the mayor would let himself be videotaped doing this. I just have a hard time believing these guys.”

Farah wasn’t helping the skepticism. One weekend, he promised to let us see the video but then never responded to any messages when the time came close. Another time, we showed up thinking we could see the footage, only to have the same conversation over again. Farah was also becoming frustrated. We were not budging on the cash issue. He stopped talking to me for 10 days in mid-April.

McLean and I kept up the search for the house in the photo.

We talked to a few locals who had also heard about the video and the crack house, but they wouldn’t share anything more than that. Meanwhile, Donovan worked his sources for information about Ford’s activities in the area.

On April 22, I sent Farah a text message: “Hey dude. Whether there’s video or not I still want to do this story. I thought you did too.”

It was a sentence we had been avoiding, but it seemed like the only way. I got the go-ahead to tell Farah we would be open to negotiating a price — if we could see it. I called him that night. We could see the video by the end of the week.

It’s about 11 p.m. on May 3, 2013. Donovan and I are sitting in a parked car near the Dixon towers, not speaking, just writing; writing down everything we can remember.

“Mo took us 320 Dixon lot. Left car to get dealer. Man returned. Lanky. Somali? Scabs on arms. Bulging eyes. Looked nervous. Black T-shirt. Short hair. Big forehead. Didn’t want to talk. Pulled out iPhone — black. Hit play. Definitely Ford. White button-up T-shirt. Buttons open at neck. Holding glass pipe — dark at the end.”

And so on.

At first the dealer had wanted to play the video with no volume. “Sound’s extra,” he told us. But we convinced him we needed to hear what was being said in order to assess the value.

He eventually relented.

The video was about a minute and a half long. Rob Ford was sitting on a chair beside a small table. To me, there was no question it was him. He was sitting against a white wall in sunshine, no more than seven feet from the camera. It looked like it had been shot on an iPhone in high definition. Ford had his eyes closed the way he does when he’s answering questions in a press conference. He was bobbing around on his chair, slurring, swaying and rambling. At points, he lifted up his arms, bent at the elbow like a chicken, and then he sort of squirmed all over. He was talking, but it was hard to remember any of the words, because they didn’t connect. At one point, someone off-camera says something like, “You love football. That’s what you should be doing.”

In my notes, I wrote that Ford responds, “Yeah, I take these kids . . . (something) minorities,” maybe “f---ing minorities.” After that, Ford starts to talk politics. He says something like, “Everyone expects me to be right-wing, I’m supposed to be this great . . .” but then he loses his train of thought. Off-camera, the person says something like, “I wanna shove my foot up Justin Trudeau’s ass so far it comes out the other end.” Both the voice and Ford are yelling, although the person off-screen doesn’t seem impaired. Ford seems to chuckle at the comment. “Justin Trudeau’s a fag,” he says. Shortly after, a cell phone rings. Ford looks directly at the camera filming him and says, “That phone better not be on.” Then the screen goes dark. We watched the footage three times, committing the details to memory. Remember, we’d been instructed to leave all our stuff back in our car, including my purse with my notebook.

During one pass, I kept the phone four inches from my face to look at the clear stem of the glass pipe. It was definitely black at the end, as crack pipes tend to be. I checked to see if smoke came out of Ford’s mouth. It did. I wanted to see if he held the lighter below the tube rather than curl the flame above, the way you would with a tobacco or marijuana pipe. It was definitely being lit underneath.

“It’s crack,” the dealer said. He was becoming more and more agitated the longer he sat in the car. Of course, there was no way to know for sure what Ford was smoking. All we could tell was that it looked like a crack pipe. And he looked impaired.

Kevin Donovan, an investigative reporter/editor at the Star, has won three Canadian Association of Journalists Awards, one Michener Award and three National Newspaper Awards. DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR



“Are you worried, if this comes out, about your safety? Will the mayor know it’s you?” I asked the dealer.

“Money is safety.”

Farah drove us back to our car. I told him I’d call the next day, after we had a chance to speak with our editors.

Donovan and I didn’t say anything as we pulled out of the plaza. We parked in a lot one block west and pulled out our notebooks. Once we had written down everything we could remember, we compared notes. They were more or less the same, although Donovan had more detail in some parts and I had more in others.

Kevin Donovan and Robyn Doolittle work in the Star's newsroom. SCOTT SIMMIE/TORONTO STAR

About the person off-camera, we were split. My impression was that it was a woman with a really gruff, masculine voice. Donovan thought it was a man. Donovan had also heard “f---ing minorities,” while I remembered more about the comment “I wanna shove my foot up Justin Trudeau’s ass.” We both picked up on the “fag” reference. We had both seen a clear tube with black at the end and smoke. And we were both positive it was Ford.

Donovan phoned Cooke, Davenport and Bruser and put them on speakerphone. The trio was at the National Newspaper Awards in Ottawa, where Jesse McLean had just won the top prize for investigations with another Star reporter. “It’s real,” Donovan said.

Monday morning we were back in the conference room for a conversation that was no longer hypothetical. Were we going to pay for this? Some people in the room wanted to buy it. Others did not.

As the head of the Star ’s investigative unit, Donovan took the lead on the story.

We met with Farah in the same west-end park I had taken him to a month earlier.

“We’re not going to pay a hundred thousand,” Donovan said.

“This is worth a million. It’s gotta be a hundred thousand,” Farah said.

“You need to come back with something more reasonable,” Donovan said.

Farah said the dealer wasn’t going to accept anything lower than the asking price.

Now that Donovan and I had seen the footage, there was going to be a story at some point, whether we got the video or not. Maybe it made sense to pay their price just for the legal protection alone, in case Ford sued the Star. My opinion changed numerous times. On the one hand, I desperately wanted Toronto to see what Donovan and I had seen. On the other, I shared the concerns about where the money was going.

More selfishly, I didn’t want my whole career to be defined by a story for which the Star had paid one hundred thousand dollars to make happen.

The only thing I knew for sure was that if we wanted that tape, we should be prepared to pay the six figures. I had the sense that these guys were doing something that their friends either did not know about or did not approve of. It didn’t seem inconceivable that if the video came out it could put them — and maybe their families — at serious risk.

I didn’t know how many ways the money was being split. I suspected Farah was going to get a cut, although he denied it. At the very least, he’d made reference to two other people. So, assuming the total payment was going to at least be split in half, I sort of understood the large price tag. If they did intend to completely uproot their lives and move, that wasn’t something that could easily be done for a share of $20,000.

In a final big meeting at the Star, we decided the paper would not pay for the video.

Bert Bruser, Michael Cooke and Jane Davenport at the Star's newsroom hub. SCOTT SIMMIE/TORONTO STAR “

I have confidence that Kevin and Robyn can get this story through old-fashioned reporting,” Davenport said. Cooke agreed.

Part of me was relieved. Part of me felt nauseated at the prospect of another year on this investigation. But it was the right call.

Donovan and I met that afternoon. He drew up a battle plan and gave me a list of people he had been pursuing with ties to Ford and drugs. The rest of the investigative team would be getting involved. This was going to be a long slog. But it would be worth it. And in the meantime we would leave Farah to think things over.

Keeping a secret is tough. Keeping a secret that I’d seen the mayor of Toronto smoking from what looked like a crack pipe was exhausting. My Star friends knew not to ask what I was working on. My mom called to see if everything was okay — she’d noticed I hadn’t been writing much. “Oh, you know, just taking some time off after the big Garrison story,” I said, lying to my own mother.

Donovan was never a fan of concentrating on just one thing. “You should spend some days at City Hall. Let people see you there,” he told me. So I went back to the beat.

The day before my life changed forever, I covered a story about some activist foodies who had decided to protest Toronto’s perplexing street-food bylaws. A group called Food Forward had set up a “guerrilla food cart” in front of City Hall, handing out apples to passersby, I wrote. The next morning, one of the organizers called to complain that I had used the word guerilla. I had apparently insinuated that they were gun-wielding rebel fighters. “I was just trying to use an interesting word to describe your fruit protest,” I sighed. “I don’t think anyone would read that and actually think you were holding AK-47s.” She wanted a correction. I referred her to the Star’s public editor, then put my head down on my desk. I’d seen video of the mayor maybe smoking crack cocaine, and I was spending my morning dealing with aggravated food cart protestors.

At 12:02 P.M., my cell phone rang again. I didn’t recognize the number. Not more Food Forward people, I thought. “Hey, Robyn!” It was a TV news producer I knew. “I have to ask you something, but please keep it confidential . . . We just got a call from CNN. Have you heard anything about a video of the mayor smoking crack?”

I almost hit the floor. I managed to chuckle nonchalantly, “Nope, but if you hear anything more about that, I’d certainly like to know.”

“Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. I just figured, if somebody knew it would be you.”

“Okay, talk soon,” I said, while typing out an email to the editors, subject line: “ALERT!—CNN may have our video.”

I left City Hall and headed to the Star, texting Farah on the way. He told me he had shown the video to an editor at the American gossip website Gawker, and that Gawker was trying to broker a deal with CNN to buy the video. By 4.30 p.m., we learned that CNN had called the mayor’s office to see if they knew about it. I called Farah again to warn him. He was panicking.

Back in the conference room, we discussed our options. If CNN and Gawker were going to buy the video, that was not such a bad thing. At least the story would get out.

“Do we think Gawker isn’t just going to write a story?” I asked.

“They might,” Cooke said.

That night, Cooke and I were at a third-floor dim sum restaurant in Chinatown for a Star food writer’s book launch. I noticed Cooke sneak out about 8:25 p.m. Seconds later, my friend Jonathan Goldsbie ran over to me with his cellphone. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be looking at their phones.

“Robyn, did you see this?” he said. Gawker had posted the photo of Ford with Anthony Smith and two other men in front of the yellow-brick house. The headline: “For Sale: A Video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smoking Crack Cocaine.”

I’m pretty sure I yelled “F—k!”

I dove under a table where I had been hiding my purse. I tried Cooke’s cell. No answer. In my four-inch heels, I sprinted to the stairwell, hoping I hadn’t missed him. I rounded the steps to the second floor. I could see him hailing a cab. I started banging like a crazy person on the full-length Plexiglas window. He spotted me. “Stay there!” I gestured. Six seconds later, I was on the street.

“Gawker just published the story,” I heaved.

A taxi pulled up.

We got in the cab.

“One Yonge Street, please,” Cooke said.

From Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story by Robyn Doolittle. Copyright © Robyn Doolittle, 2014. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Canada Books Inc.

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