Funny... Just irresponsibly putting this out there (humour me), but, I am 90% certain that I got into an altercation with Rob Ford at a strip club a year or two before the election.
Never shared this publicly before, but, the clients that I was entertaining that night swore/swear that it was him or his exact doppelgänger -- especially as/bc the person was pulling "do you know who I am?" as his line of defence pre-brawl, at first to imply he was a VIP and then more that he was "street" and connected. The Ford lookalike called over one of the bouncers and told them by name that "we're going to knife these fuckers (my clients and I) in the lane-way". That resulted in the house lights coming up, the dancers running away, and us being separated by security before any bloodshed (which would have been inevitable, my sidekick was armed and I was ready for a bottle-smashing good time).
My clients just stood back and let my sidekick and I take care of things. They loved it. Was their best meeting in years. Questions about "was that guy a city councillor??" began the second we started walking away from the strip-club afterwards.
A few months later, when his mug was on the news one night, I recognized him as being the man I nearly clobbered in a peeler. A pot dealer visiting my friend's house, seeing footage of the Ford boys on TV and hearing me remark about the incident, exclaimed "yeah, so, do you know who that is? The 905 just elected my biggest hook-up as the mayor of Toronto. WTF is going on?"
Then, the rumours started coming in about the Fords from stunned friends in Etobicoke who knew the true side to them, stories of fights in strip-clubs and such, and that most of them had bought weed, hash or coke from them back in the day. The whispers and buzz about it obviously hasn't stopped among those circles since they became public figures.
Strip club aside, it's all made me a bit OCD about exposing the outsiders running my home town.