1. The mayor’s “lost” cellphone
Ford carried two – one for personal calls, the other for constituents. The former was stolen on April 20 during one of Ford’s crack-smoking binges at the Basso residence, known to the whole world by now as the crack house where the video of the mayor smoking crack was also reportedly filmed sometime in February.
2. Liban Siyad aka Gully
All roads lead to Gully. He was the man Elena Basso called and ordered to “come over quickly” because the mayor was waiting to score drugs the night his cell later disappeared. Siyad was arrested in June in the Dixon sweep and charged with participating in a criminal organization.
3. Alexander Lisi payoff
The mayor’s sometime driver and alleged drug dealer got the mayor’s phone back from Siyad in exchange for “1.5 of kush [marijuana]” after threatening that if he didn’t get the phone back the mayor would “put the heat on Dixon.”
4. Abdullahi Harun death threat
Siyad’s alleged partner in crime, Abdullahi Harun was also at the Bassos’ the night the mayor’s cell vanished. In a wiretapped conversation he’s overheard saying that the mayor’s driver told him that Gully “was ‘halal meat.'” In street parlance, that means dead.
Harun himself took some heat in the form of a bullet in that mysterious shooting at 320 Dixon on May 21, days after the crack video story broke.
5. Shooting at 320 Dixon
Harun told police he was sitting alone in the stairwell drinking at 4 in the morning when it happened. However, a witness eyeing trouble through his peephole told police he heard arguing among a number of men and then two shots.
He didn’t have an explanation for police. But in another wiretapped conversation, this time with Siyad, Harun is heard boasting that he has “so much pictures of Rob Ford doing the hezza,” or heroin, from that night at the Bassos’.
6. In Dave Price the Fords trust
The mayor’s then head of logistics told police he received a call at 8 am from an “unknown caller” while he was waiting for the mayor outside his house on May 16, the morning the crack story broke.
It was from someone with info “about the drug dealers who have this tape.” The caller gave Price the 320 Dixon Road address with a unit number, 1703, and two names, “D” and “Gotti.”
Price told police he visited the Bassos’ that day to “check if they knew anything about the situation” but says he was asked to leave. He told police he visited the Bassos without the mayor’s knowledge. He was “in crisis management mode,” he said.
The mayor’s then chief of staff, Mark Towhey, told police that Price told him on May 20 or 21 that “the situation with the video would be taken care of as they spoke.”
7. Mohamed Siad, aka Gotti, $5,000 and a car
Police later identified the “Gotti” mentioned to Price as Mohamed Siad, the man who tried to sell the crack tape to the Star – and to whom the mayor, according to wiretap conversations, offered $5,000 and a car.
Siad told Siyadin Abdi in another wiretapped conversation about planning to meet with Ford to ask him for $150K for the video.
He was warned against that, told that he “would be putting himself in jeopardy,” according to the Project Traveller documents.
But it appears that Abdi had his own designs on the video. On May 30, he was overheard talking with another man, Abdinaim Hussein, about having “kidnapped” Siad to talk to him about “the video.”
8. Don Jail incident
On June 15, two days after he was scooped up with 43 others in the Project Traveller raids, Siad was stabbed in the back, chest and cheek in an altercation in the Don Jail. He refused to discuss the matter with police or to sign a medical release form.
But a conversation police had with one of the men involved suggests the crack video, and efforts by every gang member and his brother to get hold of a copy, was exacerbating a turf war between Dixon and Rexdale crews in the city’s northwest end.
9. Anthony Smith murder connection
Price told police the crack video was the motive for Anthony Smith’s murder in front of Loki Lounge on King West in March.
The cops didn’t buy it, however. They say Smith’s murder was in retaliation for a robbery of one Saaid Mohiadan.
But Smith was in telephone contact with Siyad – yes, he of the mayor’s “lost” cellphone drama – in the minutes before he was killed.
Siyad was the one, police documents say, who instructed Smith, to off Mohiadan.
10. Rob Ford full circle
The mayor has refused to discuss the latest allegations, except on a U.S. sports radio show. He called the talk “outright lies.”
The latest court documents, however, bring the crack video scandal full circle. What’s unbelievable is the suggestion that Ford didn’t know anything about it. The court documents reveal that Ford gave his former press secretary, George Christopoulos, the Dixon Road apartment address where Harun was shot. The mayor also logged dozens of telephone calls with Lisi at key times throughout the entire video affair. There are no wiretaps of those calls in the Project Traveller documents. Question is: are there any wiretaps of conversations between the mayor and Lisi related to any other investigation?
