ABOVE: Do Toronto police have the second Rob Ford “crack video”? Sean Mallen reports
TORONTO – Police are searching an iPhone they believe was used to capture Rob Ford smoking what might be crack cocaine in his sister’s basement in April for evidence they can use to charge the mayor with drug possession, according to court documents made public Wednesday.
“I believe that the aforementioned video will be found on one of James’ mobile devices, and that it may provide evidence of drug trafficking and drug possession against James and/or drug possession against Robert Ford,” Toronto Police Detective Constable David LaVallee wrote in the document, referring to the alleged drug dealer police believe recorded the video.
The new information comes from an Information to Obtain – documents police file in court to back up their request for a judge to give them a search warrant. The documents, related to Project Brazen II, a police investigation into Mayor Rob Ford and Alexander “Sandro” Lisi sparked by a different suspected crack video, were made public after a protracted legal battle by Global News and several other Toronto media outlets.
None of the statements in the documents have been tested in court.
The ITO includes information allegedly gleaned from interviews with both Michael “Jugga” James, the alleged drug dealer believed to have filmed the second video; and Kathy Ford, the mayor’s older sister, in whose basement the video was purportedly filmed.
WATCH: Media lawyer Peter Jacobsen explains why the public deserves access to all the Brazen 2 documents
Police seized the iPhone, as well as a flip phone and a Samsung phone, from James when he was arrested in May and charged with possession of a prohibited weapon – brass knuckles – two weeks after the surreptitious filming of the video. The charges against James have been stayed.
The alleged crack video, stills from which were published in the Globe and Mail on April 30, was the second widely published incident of the mayor being surreptitiously caught on camera smoking what might be crack cocaine. The publication apparently spurred him on to take a six-week leave from his job to seek help for substance abuse issues at a rehab clinic in Muskoka.
According to the documents, in an interview with Brazen’s lead investigator Det. Sgt. Gary Giroux, James “points at the picture of the 3 cellular phones, specifically the iPhone, and says that the video is on that phone.”
Police statements in the documents go on to say the mayor and his sister are the only people they were able to identify in the videos.
The video was filmed in Kathy’s Etobicoke home on Saturday, April 26, the night there was a power failure in the west end of the city when poles at Kipling Avenue and Dixon Road caught on fire, Kathy Ford tells police in an interview, according to the documents.
Her brother was already “intoxicated” when he was dropped off at Kathy’s house by his driver Jerry Agyemang, she allegedly told police.
At some point after the mayor arrived, James showed up and was invited by Kathy into the basement to join the others, she said.
Kathy, Rob Ford, James (who allegedly supplied the crack that night) and Lisi were in the basement of the home while her daughter was upstairs sleeping, the documents state the mayor’s sister told police.
The mayor, dressed in a white shirt with a black tie, was drinking and “kidding around fighting” with Lisi. At around 1:15 a.m., as he was getting “loud and boisterous,” James took the video, police claim Kathy Ford said.
According to a report in the Globe and Mail, the mayor can be seen taking a drag from the pipe and exhaling a “cloud of smoke and then frantically shaking his right hand.”
James then left, according to the documents, and soon after contacted Globe and Mail reporter Robyn Doolittle – the then-Toronto Star reporter who was among the first to see the video where Ford is said to smoke crack – and was able to sell stills of the mayor holding a crack pipe, to the newspaper.
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