If yesterday's carefully worded I-am-not-a-crack-addict news conference made for a bleak day for Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, today isn't much better. The respected Globe and Mail is out with an investigative piece on the mayor's family, including brother Doug, a city councilor. It includes paragraphs like this:
- "What has emerged is a portrait of a family once deeply immersed in the illegal drug scene. All three of the mayor’s older siblings—brother Randy, 51, and sister Kathy, 52, as well as Doug, 48—have had ties to drug traffickers."
Doug, in particular, is portrayed as the go-to guy for hash in the city back in the 1980s. One of his associates reportedly was David Price, who now works in the mayor's office under the vague title of "director of logistics and operations."
Kathy Ford, meanwhile, was associated with white supremacists in the 1980s and is linked to a slew of headline-making incidents of the wrong kind. In one, her longtime boyfriend, a convicted drug dealer, was charged with threatening to murder the mayor; he also was once accused, along with another man, of shooting Kathy Ford in the face. While many of the events took place years ago, "as mayor, Rob Ford has surrounded himself with people from his past," says the story. The Globe began working on the piece in 2011—well before the recent allegations emerged about the mayor smoking crack on video. In a letter to readers, the paper's editor writes that it would have been "irresponsible" not to publish the story, given the Ford family's huge sway over the city. "Character matters," writes John Stackhouse. Click for the full piece. (More Rob Ford stories.)
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