The curse of the Rob Ford crack video: Canada Did What? podcast
It’s a Season 2 bonus episode! There are layers within layers to the outlandish stories of Rob Ford, but one of the most bizarre is that of the “crack video” showing the late Toronto mayor smoking cocaine in a seedy suburban basement. The gangbanger who filmed it tried selling it in hopes of getting out of Toronto’s thug life, but set off a circus that engulfed a city. It put police, gangsters and the mayor’s minions in hot pursuit of a tape everyone wanted, but everyone connected to would eventually suffer for.
This is episode 6 of season 2 of
Canada Did What?
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Canada Did What? Season 2, Episode 6 (bonus episode), unedited transcript
Archival clip of Ford Nation TV show.
Host, Tristin Hopper: That’s a clip from the short-lived Canadian TV program Ford Nation. And when I say short-lived there was precisely one episode ever aired on TV, and then five web-only episodes.
Most of the show is like this: It’s just two guys in front of a crinkled photograph of the Toronto skyline going on about … not much really.
They read fan mail. They talk about how there’s a lot of Canadians in Los Angeles. Here’s their thoughts on actor Kevin Spacey…
Archival clip of Ford Nation TV show.
Hopper: So with hindsight, it may be hard to believe that one of the hosts of Ford Nation is currently one of the most powerful figures in the entire country.
Doug Ford – he’s the guy with the strong opinions on Kevin Spacey – is currently serving his third majority term as premier of Ontario, Canada’s richest and most populous province. At the time this podcast goes to air, Doug Ford has won majorities in three consecutive provincial elections – something nobody else has done in Ontario since the 1950s.
And Rob Ford – the guy who likes veal – was at the time arguably the most well-known Canadian in the world.
Michael Buble? Celine Dion? Justin Bieber? Yeah, people might have known their names, but they weren’t generating fevered conversation on every single world continent all at once.
In 2013, he was the most-searched Canadian term on Google.
The Australian media called him the Falstaffian mayor of Toronto; Falstaff being a Shakespearian character known for his immense bulk and corrupt morals. The New Yorker called him the “rotund, wayward mayor of Toronto.”
He’s one of the extremely few Canadian politicians to ever be parodied on Saturday Night Live.
Clip of SNL impression of Ford.
A side note, actor Bobby Moynihan apparently couldn’t do a Rob Ford impression, so he just went with a Minnesota accent.
He was the subject of a feature film: Run This Town, which came out in 2019. For some reason, Rob Ford is played by the rail-thin English actor Damian Lewis, so he had to wear an awful lot of makeup.
Archival clip of Run This Town.
Hopper: Anyways, back to the short-lived show Ford Nation, whose tagline makes reference to Rob Ford’s international fame. It reads “Get to know the Mayor that the whole world is talking about.”
Why was the whole world talking about him? They never say this in the show, but while serving as mayor of Canada’s largest city, Rob Ford admitted to smoking crack in a garage somewhere … and then said that this sort of thing happened all the time.
I’m Tristin Hopper and this is Canada Did What?! And today, we’re looking into the saga of one of the most well-known Canadian politicians of all time; the one Canadian elected official who’s entered the global zeitgeist more than any other: Rob Ford, the so-called “crack mayor” of Toronto.
But the Rob Ford story is so outrageous that there’s all these others intersecting layers of outrageousness that never really got the attention they deserved because they were all overwhelmed by the basic, background level of outrageousness that surrounded Rob Ford at all times.
You probably already knew that Rob Ford admitted to smoking crack in November 2013, setting off one of the most dramatic political flameouts in Canadian history.
Archival clip of Ford admitting he smoked crack.
But what you probably didn’t know was the absolutely bananas behind-the-scenes story of how all of this was the work of a single Somalian gang member who had just been trying to scare up enough money to start a new life in Alberta.
Instead, he summoned an unholy rain of fire and trouble that burned him way more than it ever burned Rob Ford.
Because if you’re making a movie about the Rob Ford crack scandal, I’d argue your protagonist isn’t Rob Ford. It’s the 27-year-old criminal who captured the video, thought he had hit the jackpot, only for events to quickly spiral out of his control.
But first, let’s meet His Worship, Mayor Robert Bruce Ford.
Archival clip of several of Rob Ford’s outrageous comments.
Hopper: One of the most surreal things about Toronto under mayor Ford was that, pretty regularly, he would show up in some completely random place blitzed on some unknown substance.
For instance, say it’s a Monday night in the summer of 2014, and you’re having a beer at Sullie Gorman’s, a cheap strip mall tavern in the westernmost fringes of Toronto. Suddenly, an extremely inebriated Rob Ford charges in and delivers an extended soliloquy about all his enemies, darkest thoughts and workplace crushes.
Clip of Ford ranting.
Hopper: A tape was leaked to the Toronto Sun. He refers to one guy as a dumb effing wop and an effing dagger, two ethnic slurs for Italians and asks, sorry, is that racist? Then he says he’s going to knock his effing teeth out. He also says of city council or Karen Stintz that he wants to quote jam her unquote, but she don’t want it, adding, I’m so sorry, I forgot there was a woman in the house.
Or maybe it’s the spring of 2012. Ford, who is quite overweight, has launched a public pledge to lose weight. It’s called the Mayor Ford Cut the Waist Challenge. He even has a weekly weigh-in in front of reporters.
Anyway, you’re sitting at a Toronto KFC when Ford, clad in his mayor clothes, comes in and buys a giant bag of fried chicken, all while fellow patrons yell at him “aren’t you supposed to be on a diet?”
Or, my personal favourite; Rob Ford shows up drunk at a Greek diner known as Steak Queen and proceeds to go on an extended rant delivered in Jamaican patois.
Clip of Ford ranting.
Hopper: Raasclot and bumbaclot are both Jamaican expletives. The other Jamaican term in there is “cha.” It’s sort of like a Jamaican equivalent of “feh.”
And here’s the part we’ve never really been able to explain: Ford’s patois is pretty good. I was the night reporter at the National Post at the time, and I got in touch with a Jamaican patois expert in Jamaica who was amazed how closely the Toronto mayor had nailed the dialect. And we never ever heard him speaking patois ever again; it’s just this one time at the Steak Queen.
You can see why Rob Ford made international headlines so readily in the mid-2010s: He was outrageous. You never knew what he was going to do, where he was going to show up and what he was going to say.
Here’s Ford in 2013 responding to allegations that he offered to perform oral sex on a female staffer.
Clip of Ford denying he wants to perform oral sex on Olivia Gondek.
Hopper: I’m not going to pretend that random, intemperate behaviour hasn’t been a feature of Canadian politics since the beginning. Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald was known to go on days-long benders where nobody actually knew where he was. When he was in London negotiating the final terms of Canada’s creation, alcohol was likely a factor in an incident where he lit himself on fire.
But Rob Ford was the first to do stuff like this in the camera phone era. Thus, every time he showed up in some random place and started spouting off about which city councillor he thought was hottest, there was video evidence of it. Video evidence that was soon showing up in social media feeds all around the world.
Ford obviously wasn’t like most politicians, even though his dad was a former member of the Ontario legislature.
Rob Ford was actually one of the first examples of something that’s now quite common in western democracies populist anti-establishment protest candidate. The kind of guy you vote for because you hate the system and you want someone to go in and rough it up a bit.
Archival clip of Donald Trump talking about draining the swamp.
And Rob Ford was very much a rough-things-up kind of guy, but unlike other populace in that mould, Rob Ford was also remarkably genuine. He gave all Torontonians his personal phone number, and so was constantly taking random phone calls from constituents, as in you’d see the mayor of Toronto answering his cell phone, and it was an old lady asking for a pothole to be filled or whatever, and he promised he’d get someone right on it, and then he did.
Now, there’s a whole bunch of reasons why this is a terrible idea for the chief executive of the city of more than 2 million people, but you can’t deny that it wasn’t charming. Between that, the various random drunken appearances, the weird public access style cable show that we opened the podcast with.
Rob Ford ran one of the largest cities in North America, like he was the mayor of a small town in Newfoundland or something. Everyone in Toronto, Canada, and eventually the world New Ford as an unpretentious man of the people there. Who also shows up wasted in random places, often in front of cameras, and sometimes committing crimes.
And that’s where the real main character of this story comes in. A guy named Mohamed Siad, a gang member affiliated with the Dixon City Bloods, AKA, the Dixon Goonies that were infamous in the Etobicoke area of Toronto for running drugs and guns. Siad went by the alias Gully, and he’s the guy who takes a video on his phone of Rob Ford high in a basement, smoking crack cocaine in February, 2013 with this event, then unleashing a months-long firestorm on everyone involved in the city of Toronto as a whole.
That’s because Siad decided to do it so he could sell the video so he could get some money to move out of Toronto and settle in Alberta. When it came out that he was offering this explosive video evidence, he had every media organization in Canada running around chasing the story, Toronto City Hall, turning itself inside out over the allegations, and it began the clock ticking on a scandal that would end Rob Ford’s political career.
Siad called up the Toronto Star and the gossip website, Gawker, which no longer exists. He met with reporters from each of them under very cinematic circumstances. He would call them, tell them he had something they would be interested in. He would meet reporters at a prearranged location, usher them into the back of a car, show them the cell phone video and then say the incriminating evidence could be theirs for six figures.
The actual amount would change, but the price quoted to Gawker was $200,000. We know this because Gawker started a Kickstarter page to raise the money. They called it “Crack starter.” It actually succeeded in raising more than that.
Eventually, by that time, it was too late. Here’s this episode’s guest, Joe Warmington, a reporter and columnist for the Toronto Sun. He had a special relationship with Ford, shall we say, at particularly dark periods. Warmington was sometimes the only reporter Ford would be willing to talk to. And also, as you’ll hear, when people tried to get in touch with Ford during all this, they often started by going through Warmington.
Guest, Joe Warmington: I got a call from the guy and I used to know his name, but he was from Gawker. And he’s one of the guys that saw the video and he called me within five minutes of this coming out. And he said that he was, he had the video he wanted to, or he had, he’d seen the video and he wanted the Toronto Sun to get, get involved with him and they’d get the video and then they would share it with Gawker.
But the decision was made right there that first night. We weren’t going to pay for video and we stayed with that all the way through. but you know, again, we also decided to not report what he had seen. I think that if we’d reported what he’d seen. But we didn’t know him. We didn’t know if it was true. You know, he called us. It was a tricky situation where we didn’t get a chance to meet him. again, we weren’t 100 % sure if any of this was legal.
Hopper: The video was from three months before. It was taken on the eve of Family Day, one of the more uncreatively named Canadian statutory holidays.
And the setting is a small home in the same neighbourhood of Etobicoke where Ford had grown up, and where he still lived at the time he was mayor. Ford had long been friends with the home’s, owners, the Basso family, and went to high school with Fabio Basso.
Members of the Basso family had some connections to the criminal underworld. There were three adult siblings in the home, one of whom worked at Ford’s family label making business, and two of them had criminal records. Neighbours called this bungalow the drug house. Now we don’t exactly know why Ford had gone there.
It’s the second day of a three day long weekend, and either Ford went there in search of drugs or he’s there anyway, visiting friends when the opportunity for some drugs comes up. Either way, it’s 7:00 PM on the Sunday before family Day and the Mayor of Toronto is smoking a bowl of crack in the basement of the Basso family’s home, surrounded by various criminal and criminal aligned operators, some of whom had apparently just delivered the crack.
Warmington: He reminds me of some of the celebrity people that I’ve known over the years when they disappear on you, you know, you know them, you talk to them on the phone and then they disappear. And you read in the news that they’re either dead, charged or in rehab or the loss of marriages, all those things are some of them. And I’d lost track of him. You I always had his phone number. He didn’t always call me. I mean, I would call him sometimes to get the stories. Sometimes he would call me or call me back. But I saw him spiral downhill.
Hopper: As this is all going down. Siad whips out his smartphone and pretends to be texting while surreptitiously recording a video.
Siad had just recorded a scene almost as good as catching a UFO or a Sasquatch on film. He had footage of a major political figure, smoking crack with gang members inside a drug house, and he immediately grasped the gravity of the image he had captured. We know because he recorded a selfie video soon after where you can see him bursting with excitement over the video.
Clip of Siad bragging about the video.
Hopper: There’s a John Steinbeck story called The Pearl that you probably had to read if you went to a Canadian high school.
It’s about a Mexican pearl diver who finds a giant pearl of untold value only to have his life ruined by the unwanted attention it brings upon him. What followed for Siad was effectively that, except instead of a pearl of life-changing beauty, it’s a grainy cell phone video of a Canadian mirror doing illicit drugs.
And what followed was nothing but pain and tragedy. Not just for Rob Ford. Basically everyone in that garage that night very quickly had bad things happen to them. Usually as a direct result of Ed’s video. The crack video became like a curse. If you were there when it was taken, you seemed destined to suffer some grave destiny to chin up interest.
In the video, Siad released a photograph to the press showing Ford posing with three men outside the Basso family’s garage, one of whom is giving the middle finger to the camera. Within a month of that photo being taken, two of those men, Anthony Smith and Muhammad Kadak would be shot outside a nightclub as apparent retaliation for an unrelated robbery.
The year before Smith was killed, the guy linked to the shooting Hanad Muhammad was also in the video. He was eventually arrested in Alberta for the crime, although the charges against him were later stayed at the end of the day.
Warmington: Rob Ford was the mayor of Toronto and he put himself in a position to be manipulated by organized criminals that were involved in all kinds of things here, whether it’s crack cocaine or murder.
Hopper: The Basso family themselves would have to contend with a pipe-wielding maniac who stormed into their home looking for the crack video, or information about who had it. We don’t know why he wanted the video, but his pipe antics put Fabio Basso in the hospital.
Ford’s driver, Sandro Lisi, would later be brought up on extortion charges – eventually dropped – that he had gone on a personal and not tremendously above-board mission to recover the tape before it could see the light of day.
All of this happens to coincide with a Toronto Police dragnet known as Project Traveller, which is targeting Siad’s gang, the Dixon City Bloods.
And other members of the Dixon City Bloods start to conclude that all of this unwanted police attention might be because one of their own had started shopping around an embarrassing video of the mayor.
But the Bloods might have had another reason for not liking what Siad was up to. It seems that where the gang members came from, everyone just plain kind of liked Rob Ford and didn’t want to see him exploited this way.
At the height of the controversy, national post reporter, Megan O’Toole went to a dingy, bullet scarred Toronto apartment where the crack video had reportedly been stored, at least for a time. It was in a low income apartment complex where Rob Ford had occasionally been spotted hanging out, and the people in the neighborhood said they really liked the mayor.
We don’t like Rob Ford getting screwed. One man in the unit told her. We wanted to help him. 85% of young Somalis are very upset about these guys. With the video, he even detailed a plan to recruit a local Rob Ford lookalike named Slurpee and record an obviously fake crack video and release it to the press in an attempt to discredit the real one.
Officers working Project Traveler would end up raiding this unit and would end up arresting many of the key players in the Rob Ford Crack video saga. Amazingly, the National Post was able to get a hold of this Rob Ford lookalike named Slurpee, who said rather sagely that he thought it was best not to get involved in an elaborate video fraud perpetrated by gangsters.
So to sum up Siad’s situation as he’s trying to sell this explosive video. At a certain point, he has a pipe wielding maniac after him trying to get his hands on it, he has Rob Ford’s very devoted driver, Sandro Lici, also hunting him down to grab the video away from him. He has many of his fellow gang members after him trying to put a stop to a scheme, and now he’s got the Toronto Police on the case trying to get it to build an extortion case and as part of their investigation into the Dixon City Bloods.
We’ve never actually heard Mohamed Siad’s side of this chaotic story, but we do know it didn’t end well for him. When Gawker tried getting him the money it had raised from its crack starter, it couldn’t find him anymore. He’d gone to ground Gawker’s editor said he was probably frightened in skittish.
That’s a pretty good guess. So who finally found Mohamed Siad? The police, of course, he was swept up and arrayed linked to their project traveler gang investigation, and charged with multiple counts of trafficking, cocaine, and firearms. They also arrested a lot of his fellow gang members, which they probably blamed him for, so then things got even worse for him.
While he’s in custody waiting for trial, he’s reportedly stabbed by his fellow gangsters who are in jail with him and the police were the ones who finally got their hands on science’s video. He never got to sell it, and the cops didn’t even release it, at least not for a long time. Wouldn’t be seen until years later after all the dust had settled.
In October, 2013, Siad goes to jail for eight years on the drug dealing and gun charges. So in exchange for a get rich quick scheme that upended Toronto politics and made a Canadian mayor, one of the world’s most well-known municipal officials, Mohamed Siad got nothing turned much of the Toronto criminal world against him, and ultimately got thrown in prison and stabbed.
Meanwhile, from Rob Ford’s perspective, you could argue that this whole saga actually turned out a lot better than could have. Because while Rob Ford may have been a figure of fun, it was not fun to be Rob Ford. It’s not that Ford liked to party or have a few jars after work. He obviously had a really bad addiction problem on seemingly everything, drinking drugs, junk food.
Here’s a really telling example. In 2014, Ford was a guest on the web series Coffee Run with a Canadian music producer, dead mouse. The videos have dead mouse. Take guests out for coffee and then they chat on route. Ford’s coffee order was five espresso shots at once. If you gave that much caffeine to say a Mormon teenager, it would put them in the hospital.
But Ford pounds it back like it’s nothing. This was during a period when he was supposedly clean, and pounding back industrial quantities of either sugar or caffeine is classic recovering addict behaviour.
And where Rob Ford’s antics get much less funny is when you remember who’s being hurt by them, and who could have been hurt by them.
He appears to have driven drunk rather routinely in his 6,000 pound black Cadillac Escalade.
The book Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable, written by Ford’s former chief of staff, details multiple incidents in which the Toronto Police stopped Rob Ford’s car while he was driving home impaired … and then rather than charging him with impaired driving they simply drove him the rest of the way.
That same book included an incident where a mayoral staffer, Chris Fickel, was being driven around by Ford when the mayor stopped and chugged a 12-ounce bottle of vodka before continuing on his way.
Which, to be clear, is the equivalent of drinking two six-packs of beer all at once.
Ford had two young children, and they were definitely privy to their dad’s drunken behaviour and wild, unpredictable mood swings.
In one particularly notorious incident, also detailed in the book Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable, a badly intoxicated Ford dragged his children to the Garrison Ball, an annual black-tie dinner to celebrate members of the Canadian military.
Ford arrived two hours late and so inebriated he was incoherent. When staffers tried to block him from entering he flew into a violent rage – at one point threatening to “drop” his chief of staff with a punch. His children were present for all of it, running circles around him.
And obviously there were the drugs.
As the Ford saga came unwound. There were stories about his alleged use of cocaine, marijuana, hash, and crack. Now if you talk to people who have recovered from severe alcoholism or drug addiction, they’ll often describe a bottom a point where the harms from one’s addiction becomes so egregious that it drives them to seek treatment.
Your wife leaves you, you lose your job, you lose custody of your children. Sometimes that bottom is fatal, so you never get a chance to turn it around. So when you can get a bottom without any major criminal or physiological consequences, it’s a win. And for Ford, that bottom turned out to be. The humiliation of publicly admitting a drug problem to basically the entire English speaking world, and then being systematically stripped of almost everything that had ever given his life, meaning and purpose.
Ford never resigned over this. He just saw most of his staff resign in protest, and then Toronto City Council stripped him of most of his mayoral powers. He got to remain there, but he couldn’t do anything, but he didn’t overdose or go out in a flaming drunk driving car wreck.
This was all, just a few years before fentanyl began heavily contaminating the drug supply and killing unsuspecting users. So he dodged that bullet, and remarkably his wife and family stuck with him through it all, including his always loyal brother Doug. So the public political humiliation was it, and it was the impetus to him getting clean, which was good because as it turns out, Ford didn’t have much time left to live after all
In September, 2014, apparently clean and sober and just as he was getting ready to prepare a re-election bid for Mayor Ford was diagnosed with cancer. The way four dealt with his cancer was very much on brand with why voters had been attracted to him in the first place.
When Canadian politicians get cancer or any other serious illness, the usual inclination is to be very guarded on the details.
That’s what NDP Leader Jack Layton did around this time. A fellow Torontonian, Layton was diagnosed with cancer in 2010, but that’s basically all we know. Layton made one public appearance where he was visibly emaciated, and then no updates until one day his family just announced he had died. We don’t even know the type of cancer that killed him.
But Ford’s cancer was an ugly, full-colour affair in which no detail was spared.
You shouldn’t be embarrassed by cancer, but this was a particularly embarrassing cancer to get. It was fat cancer, as in: The tumour develops in your body’s cellulite. And in Ford, the tumour was in his abdomen and his butt. He got an extremely rare cancer that develops in buttock cellulite.
Ford could have just said he had a “long illness,” but didn’t hold back on anything. He authorized the leader of his medical team, Zane Cohen, to deliver a press conference before the world’s media detailing exactly where the cancer was and how likely it was to kill him.
To this day, he remains the one name most associated with “pleomorphic liposarcoma,” aggressive cancer of the fat cells.
In October 2015, when Ford had just five months left to live, he stood in front of a press scrum on the sidewalk outside Toronto’s Mt. Sinai hospital, said cancer had spread to his bladder and just openly detailed how awful he felt and how he figured this was it.
Clip of Ford talking about diagnosis.
Ford even got into detail about how he’d discovered the new tumour: He couldn’t pee. Here’s a quote: “I’d basically have to find a washroom, get one of my staff … and a five minute pee would turn into a literal half-hour pee because I’d have to sit there and wait and wait and wait.”
There’s not really any inspiring message. He’s just a human detailing how much cancer sucks, how he wishes he didn’t have it, and how sad it is that he has to die now.
Warmington: I remember when we all walked over to the hospital on University Avenue in Toronto, I was walking over there and I saw satellite trucks. I’d never seen in Toronto more satellite trucks — there’s like 100 of them — from everywhere, Mexico, all kinds of the U.S. I saw Buffalo and Cleveland and Detroit. You know, I couldn’t believe it. So I walked in and it was just packed in this hospital and they were announcing that he had cancer. And I got to tell you that, you know, that really showed like how big he’d become.
Hopper: Nobody, with the exception of a few journalists and police officers, ever saw the Rob Ford crack video while the scandal was playing out.
In an age when we assume that we can basically see anything, this was one of the last examples of knowing that something existed, but not being allowed to see it.
You name it – a plane crash, leaked nude photos, footage of some horrifying crime. All of these things can be all over your social media feed within seconds of hitting the internet.
But for multiple months in the spring and summer of 2013, seemingly the entire world looked to Canada over the intrigue of an alleged piece of tape that nobody could see, and whose existence was not even a certainty.
When it finally came out in 2016, what’s remarkable is that it didn’t really get all that much traction. It was 70 seconds of video over which literal blood had been shed, which had attracted world attention unlike anything else out of Canada and for which hundreds of strangers had put up a collective $200,000 for the privilege of seeing it.
Millions gloried in videos of Rob Ford making an ass of himself, and this was supposed to be the apex. But when it finally came out, there were very few who could watch it and feel anything other than pity or embarrassment.
Ford was dead, the “shock value” of a mayor smoking crack had long worn off and, well, people smoking crack is not a pretty sight.
Warmington: Crack is not something you can try once and you can’t just try it twice either. It’s like, okay, I tried it once. maybe I’ll try it one more time. Cause it was so, you know, potent.
But you can’t stop there. And that’s what we saw with them. That’s why it was an important story too, is that we got to see what that drug does. It’s destroyed so many people in Toronto, across the U.S. as well, and other parts of the world.
Hopper: It’s Ford in a dingy garage, so drunk and high he can barely talk, it’s a Sunday night and instead of being a few blocks away with his wife and kids, he’s here, listening to Elena Basso sitting off-camera and praising him for being a family man.
Excerpt of Elena Basso with Rob Ford on the crack tape.
Hopper: Here’s one Reddit comment from the time that kind of sums it all up: “I thought this would be funny, I’ve never been more wrong in my life. This is hard to watch. I really wish this came out when he was still Mayor so he could have been forced to resign and taken to get the help that he needed.”
As for Mohamed Siad, the guy who unleashed so much havoc with his video? He hasn’t been heard from since.
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