This is out of the blue. Here at TPM or at least at my desk we’d basically forgotten about crackhead Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto. Basically a bad memory when we thought Canada really had it in him/her? to really roll in the international scandal world. But after all that, maybe it’s actually going to happen. The police now have the goods, include THE TAPE.
So here’s the deal.
It turns out that while all of this stuff was going on the Toronto police were doing a major investigation not just into the notorious crack tape but also into the Ford’s alleged drug dealing. And it seems like the investigation went pretty well.
And the big news, just announced moments ago in a police press conference, is that Toronto police now have the infamous video.
Perhaps even more shocking than the evidence of rampant crack use, there’s this photo from the police investigation, showing Mayor Ford getting out of his official car to pee on a tree …
From the ITO: July 28, Toronto Police watch Mayor Rob Ford urinate on a tree during meeting with Sandro Lisi #TOpoli pic.twitter.com/Dr5pMjnGM8
— Don Peat (@reporterdonpeat) October 31, 2013
From the Toronto Star …
Police photographed Mayor Rob Ford in multiple secret meetings with an alleged drug dealer, documents released Thursday morning say.
Mayor Rob Ford was the target of a police investigation that witnessed him taking part in more than 100 meetings with known drug dealer Alexander Sandro Lisi, according to a police document filed in court.
Ford was the target of the investigation, according to the police documents that formed part of the search warrant application in the case.
…
Police surveillance captured Ford and Lisi conduct clandestine meetings with a mysterious package.
Police watched in the early evening of July 11 as the two arrived separately to an Esso station just 350 metres from Ford’s home.
The gas station’s security footage shows Ford arriving in his black Escalade around 5:40 p.m. and heading straight to the station’s bathroom. As the mayor’s in the washroom, security cameras caught Lisi drive up. He appears to be texting someone on his phone while holding a manilla envelope.
Also, the Star article contains this fairly epic sentence: “For Ford, the tough campaigner who leads Ford Nation, it remains to be seen whether the fact that police surveillance teams spent the summer watching him consort with drug and weapons dealers will have an impact on the former Scarlett Heights football player’s popularity.”
In any case, I’m still trying to get a handle on how far this is going to go. Torontonians appear to have a high tolerance for their Mayor being a cartoonish crackhead. But perhaps this will be the line that broke the camel’s septum.
