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Here’s how efforts by the mayor’s office to retrieve the infamous video of the mayor smoking crack led to a kidnapping, the mysterious shooting at 320 Dixon, and exacerbated a gang turf war.

Rob Ford’s offer: $5,000 and a car

The latest dump of police documents into the Ford crack scandal reveal frenzied attempts by gang members in the city’s northwest end to get their hands on whatever copies were floating around of the crack video. In one instance, leading to a kidnap plot.

The mayor, according to wiretap conversations intercepted by police, reportedly tried to bribe Mohamed Siad, with $5,000 and a car for the cellphone video.

Siad, who’s is the same man who would eventually try to sell the crack video to the Star, boasted in one phone conversation with Siyadin Abdi, about planning to meet with Ford to ask him for $150,000 for the video. That much we know.

A little deeper in the documents, however, we find Siad being warned against meeting with the mayor by Abdi. To quote from the police documents: “Abdi told Siad that would not be wise, as Siad would be putting himself in jeopardy.” That was on March 27.

But it appears Abdi had his own designs on the crack video. On May 30, Abdi’s overheard talking with another man, Abdinaim Hussein, about having “kidnapped” Siad to talk to him about “the video.” Siad manages to run away after about an hour. Hussein is quoted as saying, “You guys are stupid. You should have really hurt him.”

The Don Jail incident

On June 15, two days after being scooped up with 44 others in the Project Traveller raids, Siad was stabbed in the back, chest and cheek in an altercation in the Don Jail involving three other men. He refused to discuss the matter with police or sign a medical release for jail guards to indicate the incident had taken place.

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 a hold of a copy, was exacerbating a turf war between Dixon and Rexdale gangs.

The mayor’s “lost” cellphone

Police documents reveal the mayor’s “lost” cellphone, one of two he typically kept, was actually stolen at the Basso residence, the 15 Windsor road bungalow that’s a known hangout of the Dixon Bloods, during one of Ford’s crack smoking binges in the early morning hours April 20.

Liban Siyad received “1.5 of kush” (slang for 1.5 pounds of marijuana) from Alexander Lisi (there’s that name again) in return for the mayor’s phone. It would be more accurate to say that Lisi threatened Siyad to take the weed or else the mayor, to quote Lisi, would “put heat on Dixon.” Maybe Lisi was bluffing. And maybe not. The division within police ranks over the Ford scandal has been a thread throughout.

He’s since been charged with extortion in the matter and ordered to stay away from Siyad and the Basso’s.

The interesting part: Siyad was at the Basso residence the night the cellphone was “lost,” documents suggest. He was the man Elena Basso called and ordered to “come quickly” because the mayor was waiting, presumably to score drugs.

Siyad figures prominently in other parts of the drama: the shooting outside the Dixon apartment where Ford told one staffer the video might be and the shooting death of Anthony Smith outside the Loki Lounge on King West on March 28.

The Anthony Smith murder connection

The mayor’s former director of logistics, Dave Price, told police the crack video was the motive for Anthony Smith’s murder in front of a King West club in March.

Why Price, a close friend of the mayor’s brother, Doug, who was hired to protect the mayor, would volunteer that info to police is curious.

The cops didn’t buy it, however. They say right in the documents that other info received from wiretaps suggest Smith’s murder was in retaliation for a robbery of one Saaid Mohiadan.

Price’s Smith theory, however, bears some investigation.

Smith was in telephone contact with Siyad, yes he of the mayor’s “lost” cellphone saga, in the minutes before Smith was killed outside Loki Lounge.

Smith texted Siyad several times to report he’d recognized Mohiadan in the bar.

Siyad was the one, police say, who “instructs Smith, ‘Okay, halal meat,’ which is believed to mean ‘dead meat’ or ‘kill him,'” according to police. But Smith is the one who ends up being killed.

Mystery shooting at 320 Dixon

Siyad shows up again in the Lisi documents in relation to another shooting tied to the crack video. That when Abdullahi Harun is shot on May 21, just four days after the crack story broke, outside unit 1703 at 320 Dixon.

Harun was with Siyad the night the mayor’s cellphone went missing. In a call intercepted by police that night, Harun is heard telling Sayid that he “had Rob Ford smoking on the ‘dugga” and that he has “so much pictures of Rob Ford doing the hezza,” slang for heroin.

In Dave Price the Fords trust

The police documents also offer an inside look at the mayor’s relationship with his staff. The mayor played members of his office one off the other. He didn’t trust any of them. But Price is the one he trusted the most.

The mayor’s ex head of logistics proved a slippery interview for police. On the one hand, he adopted the Fordian lie that if a video did exist “it may be altered, doctored or fabricated.”

And on the other telling police he visited 15 Windsor the day the crack story broke to talk to the mayor’s chum, Fabio Basso, “to find out if he knew anything about the situation.”

Price said he went to the Basso’s on his own volition, not telling the mayor or his ex chief of staff Mark Towhey about it. He “was in crisis management mode,” he told police.

It’s difficult to believe Price was freelancing. He was at the mayor’s house with Lisi the morning the crack scandal broke running interference for the media staking out the mayor’s place. The rest is history.

enzom@nowtoronto.com | @enzodimatteo

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