The Rob Ford piece that the National Post wishes you’d forget [Updated, with the original article text!]

Update, October 20, 2014 at 3:07 p.m.: A couple of commenters have pointed me to the text of the deleted Post article, along with the Facebook promo they forgot to delete. It’s at the end of this post.

Click the image to see this page on the Wayback Machine.

While cleaning out my bookmarks, I stumbled across a link to a National Post article titled Is the alleged Rob Ford crack video evidence of a set up? It’s from May 23, 2013, back when Gawker had broken the story and it was revealed that the Toronto Star had been conducting a long investigation into the same issue. well before Toronto’s Peter Griffin-esque mayor fessed up on TV. The teaser for the article still appears on the Wayback Machine’s archive of the National Post’s front page for that date, but when you try to read the article in question, you get this:

Click the image to see the actual web page.

The article was written by staunch Ford supporter and Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran, who remained a true believer even after all hell broke loose in November. Written in question form, the headline allows the Post and Corcoran to back their boy and seed some doubt while giving them the cover of saying “Hey, we’re just asking a question!”

The story’s since been yanked, probably in the hopes that you don’t remember it was ever written. However, there are some “We love Rob Ford!” pieces that the Post can’t remove without bringing unwanted attention, including this classic:

Click the image to read the original article.

Update 1: The text of the deleted article

A couple of readers have pointed out to me that thanks to a “splog” — that’s a spam blog, which automatically swipes other blogs’ content and republishes it in order to get advertising bucks — the Post’s article lives on, although without permission or attribution. The splog in question is AR24News, and I’ve posted a screenshot of the article below:

Click the image to read the article on its source page.

Here’s the text of the article, which I’m preserving for the historical record:

Is The Alleged Rob Ford Crack Video Evidence Of A Set Up?

The swarming of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is entirely understandable; the mayor, caught on video allegedly smoking crack, has a lot to clear up. But there are as many unanswered questions on the other side of this bizarre international confluence of drug dealers, politics, comedy shows, news media and blogging low-lifes such as gawker.com. Questions about the video, the role of newspapers, organized crime, crowdsourcing social media, and the implausibility of a shock-blog like gawker raising $200,000 in ransom money that will have to be run through a money laundering operation to reach the drug dealers.

The ethics of it all are murky enough. Globe and Mail columnist Lysiane Gagnon called it “a lynching” and former Toronto Star editor and journalism chair John Miller pretty much accused his former employer of breach of ethical and journalistic conduct. But media ethics are the least of the problems looming over this phantasmagoria of improbable events.

Some of the questions are kind of obvious. Here are a few, in no significant order:

Who are these men?

Let’s start with the still photo that we’ve all seen of Mr. Ford in grey sweater allegedly taken—according to gawker—“while Ford was going to the [Toronto] neighbourhood to purchase and smoke crack cocaine.” Far too little has been made of the fact one of the men in the picture is Anthony Smith, a 21-year-old who was murdered outside a Toronto night club last March. Who killed Mr. Smith? Might the other two gentlemen in the photo, their faces judiciously blurred as if protecting the innocent children of a family crime, have any link to or knowledge of the murder? Or what about the third person involved here, the taker of the picture?

Who is the “organizer in the Somali community” that the Toronto Star reporters say orchestrated their meeting with the drug dealer who says he took the video?

The Toronto Star reporters said last Saturday they continued to have contact with the Somali community organizer. They must know his name. They sat in his car (did they get the plate number?) while he drove them to the meeting with the drug dealer outside a high-rise complex where drugs are trafficked near Dixon Rd. and Kipling Ave.

The dealer is said to be the cinematographer who shot the video of the mayor smoking crack. This man should now be traceable through the Star’s community organizer contact. Are the Star’s reporters co-operating with police to track down a known criminal? Shouldn’t they be?
Related

Is this whole exercise in media extortion possibly a crime in itself?

There are indications this is a set-up from the get-go. The video is said to show Mr. Ford sitting alone in a white shirt, smoking a crack pipe. Both the Star and gawker versions are stunning similar, almost as if one had copied parts of the other’s reports. An off-camera voice is said to be “goading” the mayor into unseemly political banter. Who’s in the background, baiting Mr. Ford to say outrageous things about Justin and/or Pierre Trudeau?

Anyways, if it is a set up, who set it up? Who directed the cinematographer-drug dealer, who by description in the Star is a nervous street guy rather than a drug boss? Someone with media savvy, it seems, although not savvy enough to know that Canadian media do not pay big bucks, British style, for incriminating videos of celebrities and politicians. Still, it looks very much like a form of extortion and/or blackmail, the video held for ransom to the highest bidder, with the media acting as go-between.Where’s the video now?

I would speculate that the odds are high that it will cease to exist, if it has not already been destroyed. The owners/dealers obviously wanted a secret cash payment that would allow them to disappear while the video was released by the media. With the gawker leak (possibly much to the shock of the drug dealers), the video is now a hot property, possibly too hot to trade without getting caught up in a legal and possibly criminal process.

A major risk comes in getting the cash. Most unreal here is the gawker.com’s so-called crowdsourcing of $200,000. It’s a great publicity stunt, but how would the money ever be assembled and then transferred to a criminal organization such as the Somali drug dealers? Moving that kind of cash from an identifiable source (gawker or anyone else) to a crime group would be impossible without triggering a money-laundering trail. An above board transfer would require HST tracking, among other things, and would be open to banking and police pursuit.

The video peddlers may find this too much heat to bear. The original plan has backfired. Gawker also claimed that the dealer said he supplies “a lot of prominent people in Toronto [who] purchase and enjoy crack and powder cocaine.” If I were this dealer, I would leave town fast. Let’s get out of here, kill the video, and move on before the police and others move in on us.

That’s where I think this story is going next. Rob Ford may be doomed as a result of the video. But so should the media and drug dealers who perpetrated the events of the last week.

Update 2: The Facebook post the Post forgot to delete

Click the image to read the Facebook post.

That’s right, in their efforts to put this piece into the Memory Hole, the history editors at the Post forgot remove the Facebook post promoting the article. A reader found it for me, and I’m sharing it with you.