What?! “And then all of a sudden, I’m being offered money for it. Rather, Steele felt bad for the staff in the mayor’s office.“I want to clear everyone’s name out of this, because I faked the whole fucking thing,” he said. Steele says that all of his direct communications with the outlet were through a long-gone Hushmail account, as well as some phone calls he conducted from an anonymized number. The Top 5 moments that defined Toronto in the 2010s. At a quarter past noon on November 5, 2013, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford casually admitted — after months of denying it — that, yes, he had smoked crack cocaine. This had most likely occurred, he quickly explained, in one his drunken stupors.Nearly three hours later, as reporters stood crushed against the glass wall of Ford’s office, tensely awaiting entry to what promised to be one hell of a press conference, Vice dropped a bombshell: The story was bursting with jaw-dropping details concerning alleged efforts by Ford’s communications director, Amin Massoudi, to pay a “hacker” to break into a password-protected server in order to find and delete a video of the mayor smoking crack.
But one moment involving the former mayor stands above all others . Rob Ford, the former Toronto mayor who polarized voters with his brash, uncompromising political style and became an international celebrity for his drug and alcohol use while in office, has died. Ford's voter base resided mainly in the outer suburbs, a result of the Conservative provincial government's decision to force liberal Toronto to merge with five of its neighboring municipalities in 1998, creating a mega-city that now has 2.7 million residents. Canadian news, COVID-19 news and headlines from around the world. Ford mayor met his wife, Renata, in high school, and they were married in 2000. Within that realm, he wasn’t especially obscure.But his confession somehow escaped broader notice, even as he immediately stepped away from Twitter, letting those eight tweets linger at the top of his timeline for the next three and a half years. He was a scruffy white guy in his early 30s, or maybe late 20s. Just completely bogus. Asked in 2016 if he considered himself a Ford supporter, he said, “I like a lot of his policies. No. "I know there are many who were affected by his gregarious nature and approach to public service." He underwent a series of aggressive chemotherapy treatments.
But his popularity continued. It was in the same suburban district where he launched his political career and where his everyman style and conservative fiscal policies first gained a faithful following that became known as Ford Nation. Current Toronto Mayor John Tory said in a statement that "the city is reeling with this news." “But there was never a proper time for me to actually disclose it.”The story had falsely implicated Massoudi and former chief of staff Mark Towhey in the supposed (and likely illegal) hacking scheme. Am I addict? WHAT!?" “Sat there for like three to four hours in total, typing emails back and forth to myself.”Because he couldn’t easily backdate all the emails — just the ones threaded in replies — he made sure the messages made reference to specific recent events, and then took screenshots with the email headers conveniently out of frame.He also set up a free server at goonies.bugs3.com, its name a reference to the Dixon Goonies gang that had just been raided by police and whose members were rumoured to be in possession of the video. “Any alleged evidence is clearly fabricated.”But when, on Halloween, Toronto’s police chief confirmed his force had recovered the video — reconstructed from a deleted file on a computer seized in the raid of the Dixon gang — Vice apparently considered its qualms to have been sufficiently addressed.“VICE exhaustively compared the emails allegedly from Massoudi with public notes and comments Massoudi left on his Facebook profile,” McGuire wrote in the story. He was 46. The absence of the email headers proved a sticking point for McGuire’s superiors in New York, and Steele’s excuse (that he had shut down the account before he approached Vice) left something to be desired.“The unnamed source claims to have deleted the very evidence he or she is now trying to pawn over the Internet,” Massoudi noted in his public statement. I just know a little bit more than the average squirrel.”As of this moment, the piece remains on Vice’s website, unmodified since the one small update in 2014.What we’ve learned about WE’s main American entities, whose address is a law firm in an office park outside Buffalo“Only private charters could land at Bogani,” says former WE employeeThey won’t say how much international-development money actually gets spent in CanadaThat Time Vice Paid A “Hacker” $5,000 For A Fake Rob Ford Story News. Everyone appeared to be skimming the story at once, another astonishing branch of the Ford saga seeming to sprout before our eyes. There was, after all, no longer any doubt that Ford had smoked crack and that police possessed a gang-connected video of him doing so. TORONTO (AP) — Rob Ford, the pugnacious, populist former mayor of Toronto whose career crashed in a drug-driven, obscenity-laced debacle, died Tuesday after fighting cancer, his family said. His supporters got perhaps more turmoil than they expected. Live breaking news, national news, sports, business, entertainment, health, politics and more from CTVNews.ca. In a news conference at Queen’s Park, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and provincial cabinet ministers Christine Elliott (health) and Todd Smith (social services) provide an update on their government’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus) outbreak. An update on Mayor Rob Ford's health is expected to come on Wednesday. COVID-19: Help, information, stimulus and business updates. One after another, his statements and actions became nightly fodder for TV comedians and an embarrassment to many of the suburbanites he championed. MORE By Crimesider Staff November 5, 2013 / 4:50 PM / CBS News According to police interviews, members of Ford's staff accused the mayor of frequently drinking, driving while intoxicated and making sexual advances toward a female staffer. I am one myself.”The germ of the hacker story began in June 2013, in shit-talking Twitter DMs with an acquaintance. The pitch would be: all of the information, including server login info and encrypted video files, for $5,000.As a matter of principle, news organizations generally refuse to pay for information, specifically because it creates a market for false information. As a matter of principle, news organizations generally refuse to pay for information, specifically because it creates a market for false information.