As I flagged over the weekend, the Mayor Ford/crack cocaine saga has now graduated up to potential connection to an unsolved murder in Toronto. Over the weekend, the Globe and Mail reported that a member of Ford’s senior staff had reached out to the Toronto police after getting a tip from another member of the staff about the location of the video and the suggestion that a young Toronto man had been murdered over the tape. Now we have a few more details.
This morning’s Globe and Mail reports that the mystery staffer is Mark Towhey, Ford’s former chief of staff who we’d been told had resigned or been was fired after he asked Mayor Ford to go to rehab and try to get his act together.
After this weekend’s report it seemed that Towhey might be the person in question. Now that’s confirmed.
According to the new article, Dave Price (a longtime Ford family confidant – about whom we’ll say more in a moment) went to Towhey to say he’d gotten a reliable tip about the whereabouts of the crack tape. That tip included an address. Towhey (wisely) told Price not to try to find the tape. Then this …
That’s when Mr. Price added the information that his source was telling him that the original owner of the video was now dead because someone had killed him for the video.
It was a worst-case scenario that staffers had brainstormed during a strategy session that very morning.
Mr. Price insisted to Mr. Towhey that the intelligence was dependable.
The revelation put Mr. Towhey in a bind. A former military man, he realized that regardless of the veracity of Mr. Price’s tip, they were sitting on potential evidence in a homicide investigation.
Now, before going any further, I mentioned in my post over the weekend that one of the notable things about the Globe and Mail’s lengthy story on the Ford family’s involvement with the drug trade was that even though that happened a couple decades ago, Mayor Ford had brought former members of brother Doug Ford’s drug dealing business (Doug’s also a member of the City Council) into his current inner circle. I know this is complicated but bear with me.
That brings us to David Price, the guy mentioned above. He’s now serving as some sort of fixer/loyalist for the Mayor. But he apparently was one of Doug’s guys when he was the big hashish dealer in Etobicoke, the Toronto suburb where the Ford’s are from. From that big article on the Ford family …
It remains unclear how much Mayor Ford was exposed to his siblings’ escapades and their issues with illegal drugs. He is considerably younger – Doug, the closest, is five years older. But at least one of Doug’s closest and oldest friends has become an official adviser to the mayor’s office. Several sources have identified David Price as a former participant in Doug Ford’s hashish enterprise.
The morning after the Toronto Star and the U.S. gossip website Gawker alleged that journalists with both organizations had viewed a homemade video of the mayor smoking crack, a throng of reporters waited outside his home. Mr. Ford walked past them, uttered only four words – “these allegations are ridiculous” – and hopped into his SUV.
After driving only a few feet, he pulled to the side of the road and rolled down his window to chat with a man in a sunglasses and a blue shirt, Mr. Price. Moments later, Mr. Price appeared again, this time standing between videographers and Mr. Ford as they tried to film the mayor at the gas station at the end of his street.
Since he arrived at City Hall, the mayor’s office has said almost nothing about what Mr. Price, called director of logistics and operations, is there to do. Concerning the hiring of Mr. Price, Doug Ford told Globe and Mail city hall reporter Elizabeth Church that “you can’t teach loyalty.”
Mr. Price first appeared in the office mere days after The Toronto Star revealed that the mayor had been asked to leave a military benefit gala by Councillor Paul Ainslie allegedly because he appeared intoxicated.
So to summarize, there is apparently a tape of Mayor Ford smoking crack. We now know that when they were young men Ford’s older brothers were the big hash dealers in town. Doug’s now a city councilor. Randy was arrested for a drug related kidnaping after one of Doug’s sub-dealers got behind on his bills. When news first surfaced about the alleged crack tape, pictures also surfaced of Ford with a 21 year old man named Anthony Smith. Smith was gunned down in March.
The tip received by Ford family confidant David Price was that Smith was the original owner of the crack tape but that he’d been killed over possession of it. Ford’s chief of staff, Mark Towhey, went to the police with that information and subsequently resigned was fired. Any questions?
