Police Chief Bill Blair has called the homicide cop his top investigator.

So why is Det.-Sgt. Gary Giroux slumming around in a bust that swooped up the mayor’s occasional driver and buddy on an assortment of what would appear to be relatively dinky drug charges?

Sandro Lisi is one of two men who appeared in court Wednesday, released on $5,000 bail on charges that include possession and trafficking of marijuana “under”— which usually means less than $5,000 worth of drugs.

The 35-year-old had been on the police radar for his attempts to retrieve the notorious video that seems to show Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine, a startling recording that has disappeared since two Star reporters first watched it on a cellphone in May when the tape’s owners were shopping their prize around for $100,000.

A recent Star investigation revealed that Lisi had told three associates he’d supplied drugs to Ford, an unverified claim that the mayor has refused to address, despite repeated requests from the newspaper for comment.

So trifling a quantity of grass — even if intended for trafficking — would seem a minor matter to preoccupy a senior homicide cop like Giroux, who earlier this week made the dramatic announcement that one individual had been charged with first-degree murder in the killing of two Eritrean women.

It was Giroux, as well, who Blair tapped to head the G20 Criminal Investigative Project that did all the legwork in pursuing charges against vandals who unleashed colossal violence in Toronto during the June 2010 summit of political leaders. That task force ultimately arrested upwards of 50 individuals, charged with more than 250 offences.

Giroux does not waste his valuable time on nickel ‘n’ dime cases.

Yet here he is, in charge of an operation that would routinely fall to division-level drug squads, which resulted in the arrest Tuesday night of Lisi and Jamshid Bahrami, 47, identified by witnesses as owner of the Richview Plaza dry cleaners where police executed their search warrant.

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Police are saying little about the latest arrests, except that they were part of an ongoing criminal investigation. Both Lisi and Bahrami were also charged with conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, though no information was included on what that indictable offence might be.

Giroux, however, has been following up leads that arose out of Project Traveller, which culminated in a massive drugs and guns raid in June. During the year-long investigation that preceded the raid, police came across the mayor’s name in wire taps.

Everyone, certainly police included — and, as the Star earlier reported, members of Ford’s own staff — have been looking for the incendiary cellphone video, a scandal that blew up like a grenade in the mayor’s life in late spring. Ford has said he’s never seen the video and he doesn’t smoke crack. As of a month ago, police had not come into possession of the video.

But it all keeps coming back to that missing item and the attention its existence — and attempts to recover the article — drew to people in Ford’s inner circle.

They comprise an intriguing rogues’ gallery of characters, from Lisi — convicted in the past for threatening and assaulting women — to Ford’s “logistics director,” the former football coach who made phone calls seeking the video’s whereabouts (and made supportive calls to Ford’s radio shows pretending to be “Dave from Scarborough”), to the occupants of a known crack house, friends of the mayor, where Ford was photographed in the company of three men, one who was later shot in the head and two who were arrested in Project Traveller.

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Circles within circles, provocative connections, ill-judged friendships, and Ford the common denominator, at the centre of the web.

Yet again the mayor was forced to address the woes and misbehaviour — alleged, in this instance — of a close associate, as he held a press conference, bizarrely, at a gas station near his Etobicoke home.

Saying the minimum has become Ford’s M.O. on the rare occasions that he reacts to the scandals engulfing him. He’s sticking to that tack, even as a police investigation headed by one of the most prominent homicide detectives on the force has now penetrated his inner cadre of acolytes.

“I’m surprised, I’m very surprised,” Ford mumbled about Lisi’s arrest. “It’s before the courts. Obviously I can’t say much.”

In August, though, Ford denied to the Toronto Sun that Lisi had acted as either his driver or security guard — despite Lisi popping up on the scene near the mayor’s house on the morning that the crack scandal broke and shadowing reporters as they beseeched Ford for comments. Lisi also drove the mayor to and from the Garrison Ball last winter, an event Ford was asked to leave because he appeared impaired. On Wednesday, a Lisi neighbour told the Star Ford had frequently been seen arriving at the man’s residence, as often as four times a week.

“He’s a friend,” Ford continued. “He’s a good guy. I don’t throw my friends under the bus. Like I said, he’s straight and narrow. I’ve never once seen the guy drink. I’ve never seen him once do drugs. So I’m surprised . . . shocked.”

In between those remarks, Ford scolded reporters for showing up at his home Wednesday morning. “You know what bothers me? You guys come to my house, my front door. That’s pretty bad.

“I don’t go to your front door, don’t go to my front door.”

Of course, the media has been compelled to chase the mayor when these scorching matters erupt because he ducks his inquisitors at city hall.

Ford was on his way to Austin, Texas, a business trip designed to copycat that city’s branding as a music capital and promote Toronto as similarly vigorous in the recording industry.

Perhaps he’ll be humming that country ‘n’ western standard: “Stand by Your Man.”