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[np_storybar title=”Rob Ford crack tape thrust into public view after extortion charge dropped against Sandro Lisi” link=”http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/extortion-charge-dropped-against-sandro-lisi-leaving-police-with-little-to-show-for-gigantic-probe-into-rob-ford”]

A key player in the crack scandal that engulfed former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford walked free Thursday after the court agreed to drop the lone remaining charge against him.

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Alexander “Sandro” Lisi, Ford’s sometime driver, agreed to sign a peace bond in return for the dismissal of a single charge of extortion filed following the massive police investigation of Ford and his associates launched after a tape emerged showing Ford smoking crack.

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Comment

With the conclusion of legal proceedings against Sandro Lisi, Rob Ford’s scofflaw factotum, the crack video that sent Ford’s mayoralty and this city’s politics careering down an icy slope with a cliff at the end of it is finally in the public domain. It is an important municipal artefact from a period of madness Torontonians must always remember, so as never to repeat. But its contents may come as a surprise.

Accounts by those who had seen it suggested something manic, something utterly damning. “Rob Ford … is a wild lunatic given to making bizarre racist pronouncements. … One reason for this is that he smokes crack cocaine,” Gawker’s John Cook reported on May 16, 2013. “I know this because I watched him do it, on a videotape. He was f–kinghiiiiigh.”

Shortly thereafter the Toronto Star reported that Ford was “heard (on the video) calling (Justin) Trudeau a ‘fag’ ” and referring to members of his football team as “just f–king minorities.”