Toronto Mayor Crack Video 'Gone'

A video that allegedly shows Toronto mayor Rob Ford hitting the crack pipe is "gone," Gawker has discovered after raising $200,000 to buy it. After a long silence, the video's owner reached out to an intermediary with the message, "It's gone. Leave me alone," Gawker editor-in-chief John Cook writes. Cook suspects Ford was able to track the video's owner down after the Toronto Star revealed facts about him, including his Somali ethnicity.

Ford has strong ties to power brokers in Toronto's Somali community, and the intermediary says the community put a lot of pressure on the video owner to "make the whole thing go away," Cook writes, adding that a copy of the video was made and moved outside Toronto for safekeeping. It's not clear whether that copy is also "gone." If the video doesn't surface soon, the cash raised will, as promised, be donated to a charity helping people with substance abuse issue, Cook writes. (More Rob Ford stories.)