Free Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story by Robyn Doolittle Page A

Flynn. “I remember hearing [Ford] was really ticked off that Dennis Flynn decided to run again,” Lindsay Luby said. “He thought there’d only be the three of us in the campaign, and the odds of getting two out of three were better.”
    Ford was young and thinner back then, with a full head of blond hair. Even in his youth, Ford was always in a suit and tie. Lindsay Luby didn’t know anything about Ford at the time. She doesn’t remember debating him or even seeing him much. Giansante, on the other hand, was well acquainted with the Ford family. Both Giansante and Ford had their brothers running their campaigns.
    “We’re both business people and we met on the street and we got to know each other,” said Giansante, a real estate broker. “I guess we sort of had an admiration for one another that worked out well.”
    Giansante says twenty-something Ford was a lot like forty-something Ford. He didn’t change his mind once it was made up, and he saw the world in black and white. As a campaigner, he was a natural. “The showmanship is what really stuck out with me—and not just him, the whole family. The American way of politics.” Ford’s candidate signs were four feet high by eight feet wide, twice the size of everyone else’s. He wasn’t big on policy, but he was “flamboyant” and personable. And while Lindsay Luby and Giansante typically canvassed alone or with a few volunteers, Ford would door-knock with a full entourage.
    The Fords and Giansantes struck up a bit of a friendship, sometimes sharing information and keeping an eye on each other’s signs. Vandalism was a problem. Lindsay Luby, the lone woman in the race, experienced the most harassment. One morning, she looked outside and realized that one of the two stone Labradors at the end of her driveway had been stolen. A few days later a note arrived in the mail, written in cut-out magazine letters. “We have your dog. The ransom is 1000 dog biscuits.”Pictures started arriving showing the dog, in sunglasses and a hat, posed beside a recent edition of the newspaper. Another showed a masked, burly looking man in military garb holding a gun to its head. The next photo had the stone dog’s head cut off. It had “what looked like fire burning around its head,” Lindsay Luby recalled. The Lindsay Luby family was getting 3 A.M. calls from a Mississauga pay phone. Lindsay Luby went to the police, but no one was ever caught.
    When the election ended, so did the harassment, and Lindsay Luby had won. Giansante was second. Flynn came in third. Ford was fourth.
    Doug Ford Sr.’s old business partner, Ted Herriott, called the Ford family to offer his regrets.
    “So, I guess he’s done,” Herriott remembered saying to Diane Ford.
    “Oh, no, no, Robbie’s a career politician.”
    THEY MET AT A RESTAURANT that doesn’t exist anymore in an Etobicoke plaza. Doug Ford Jr. was already at the table when Gloria Lindsay Luby arrived. The conversation didn’t last long. She can’t remember if they even bothered ordering anything besides coffee.
    This was in the early months of 2000, a municipal election year. Lindsay Luby didn’t know the Fords very well, except that Doug Ford Sr. was in provincial politics and the youngest son, Rob, had run against her in 1997 and finished fourth. Doug Ford Jr. was his younger brother’s campaign manager. She had no idea why he had asked to meet.
    “We wanted to know,” Doug Ford began, “if you’d beinterested in running in Ward 5. Then Rob can run in Ward 4 and you’ll both win.”
    Lindsay Luby must have looked startled. Doug moved to phase two of his sales pitch. “We’ve done some polling, and you can win south of Dundas as well as north.” And, of course, the Fords would help her with her campaign.
    She had been a councillor in central Etobicoke since 1985. Now Doug Ford wanted her to step aside so his kid brother with no experience, whom she didn’t even know, could get elected? “They thought they could be