Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

company, set up shop in a meeting room at Deco. The retired officer conducted the short interviews over two days. As each of the Fords and then Stirpe sat down, Scharger explained how the machine worked. He would ask questions, and it would measure each person’s breathing, blood pressure, and any nerve activity on the skin. They could leave at any time, he said. But none did.
    What do you think happened to the money? he asked each of them. None of the five admitted to taking it.
    Did you steal the can of cash?
    Randy, Doug Jr., and Rob said no and passed the test. Kathy and Ennio Stirpe were lying, according to the machine. What they did with the money was unclear.
    Predictably, the unremittingly strict Doug Ford Sr. lost it.
    Kathy and Stirpe split up. She took their baby son andmoved in with her high school sweetheart, Michael Kiklas, the father of her eleven-year-old daughter.
    In July of that year, Stirpe broke into Kiklas’s home carrying a sawed-off shotgun. Stirpe opened fire on his estranged wife’s boyfriend in front of Kathy and the couple’s young daughter. The blast hit Kiklas in the chest. News reports suggest he was dead by the time emergency crews arrived. After a three-day manhunt that ended in a high-speed chase, Stirpe was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Kathy moved back home after that.
    DOUG FORD SR., while tough, loved all his children fiercely and would have done anything for them. But he was never able to understand how his family ended up poisoned by drug use. The Ford patriarch had provided his four children with wealth, power, easy career choices. Theirs were extremely privileged lives compared to his humble beginnings.
    The year Douglas Bruce Ford was born, nearly one in three Torontonians was unemployed. It was 1933, and the Great Depression had hit Canada hard. After the stock market crash, President Herbert Hoover had signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, driving up the cost of nearly nine hundred import duties. Canada’s prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, retaliated, setting off a tariff war.
    It was a catastrophic blow to the Canadian economy. The United States was, and still is, our largest trade partner. The output of Canada’s manufacturing sector plummeted by more than 50 percent. Between 1929 and 1932, the cost of lumberdropped by a third. Pulp and paper companies—a staple in Toronto’s economy—were going bankrupt across the country. By 1933, workers in Toronto were earning 60 percent of what they had been four years earlier. Two years later, a quarter of the population in and around the city was drawing on social assistance. Commercial and industrial construction ground almost to a halt.
    Toronto the Good, as this city had once been known, had become Toronto the Hungry. There was fear, resentment, and ultimately racism. By the early 1930s, 631,000 people were living in Toronto and about 80 percent of them were of British heritage. The two largest ethnic groups, Jews and Italians, weren’t welcome on public beaches and at least one city-run swimming pool. By the summer of 1933, the peak of unemployment, Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany. Anti-Semitism was rampant on both sides of the ocean. In Toronto, those racial tensions came to a head on a warm summer night in August on a west-end baseball field. The Christie Pits riot, considered one of the darkest days in Toronto history, broke out after a group of thugs unfurled a black swastika. Hundreds of men, Jews and Italians versus English and Scots, battled for six hours, clubbing each other with whatever they could find—pipes, pokers, bats, and their bare hands.
    It was against this bleak backdrop that Doug Sr. came into the world on February 27, 1933. Like many children of the Great Depression, the times he grew up in forged his character. He knew the value of hard work and self-reliance. And he did his best to