Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story by Robyn Doolittle

the Air Canada Centre, and the Toronto Maple Leafs were playing the Ottawa Senators. Ford was sitting behind Dan and Rebecca Hope, who were in town visiting from Enniskillen, a hamlet just outside the city. According to the couple, with less than ten minutes left in the third period, the “rather large gentleman” behind them was “becoming extremely loud and obnoxious.” He was standing up, waving his arms, and shouting. They particularly remember him yelling, “My sister was a heroin addict and was shot in the head.” The Hopes wrote a detailed account of the night to Toronto’s city clerk.
The gentleman continued on in an extremely loud way with his belligerence and obscenities to the point where I turned and calmly asked him to “tone it down a little.” He responded, again in an extremely loud way with a verbal assault on me personally. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Are you some kind of right wing commy [ sic ] bastard?” Fearing that the situation would escalate further, I did my best to avoid any conversation and/or eye contact with the gentleman. At one point he shouted the following question at my wife and I, “Do you want your little wife to go over to Iran and get raped and shot” and continued on with other extremely asinine comments.
    Security guards eventually removed Ford. The Hopes turned to two men sitting behind them to see if they knew the screaming guy’s name. It turned out that Ford had been doling out his city business card. The Hopes went to the City of Toronto website to find Rob Ford’s picture. It was him.
    When first confronted with the allegations, Ford accused the couple of lying. “This is unbelievable, I wasn’t even at the game. So someone’s trying to do a real hatchet job on me.” The next day, he came clean. Ford told reporters he had lied because he was “completely embarrassed and humiliated about the whole situation.”
    “I’m going through a few personal problems, but it doesn’t justify, you know, getting drunk in public and pretty well acting like an idiot if you ask me,” he said. “I was inebriated. I’m not a heavy drinker at all. I guess it hit me pretty hard and it was an unfortunate situation.”
    The public humiliation didn’t hurt Ford with his constituents.
    In November 2006, Ford was re-elected in Ward 2 Etobicoke North with 66 percent of the vote. It was just two months after his father had died of cancer.
    According to those close to him, this was the moment when things changed—for the whole family. The authoritarian figure was gone. The boys had lost their hero.
    Ford would come home at night and drink himself into another world. He sometimes used hard drugs or prescription pills.
    Soon, Ford was spending time at Kathy’s home, which is just around the corner from the Royal York Plaza and his mother’s house. Some old family friends tried to warn him to stop, but he refused to listen. He was increasingly isolating himself frompositive influences. This seems to be the period when Ford transitioned to using crack cocaine, although his drug of choice continued to be alcohol.
    A convicted heroin dealer who used to sell to Kathy Ford recalls partying one time with her baby brother in a grungy hotel not far from the soon-to-be-mayor’s Etobicoke home.
    “He didn’t like that I was there. He was with a few guys he’d known for years,” said the man. “Rob doesn’t like strangers.”
    A MYTHOLOGY ABOUT Rob Ford had taken shape. Average citizens didn’t follow the daily dramas in City Hall back then. People didn’t know councillors’ names, and they knew even less about what any of them stood for. Yet year by year, Ford was able to build a profile for himself. Rob Ford? Wasn’t that the guy who never spent any money and sometimes got in trouble? Partway through his career as councillor, Ford landed a Thursdaymorning radio segment on AM640’s John Oakley Show called “What’s Eating Rob Ford?” The show gave him unfiltered access