Police say have missing 'crack' video of Toronto mayor

Canadian police have recovered a video reportedly showing Toronto's embattled mayor, Rob Ford, smoking crack cocaine, the city's police chief announced today.
"The mayor does appear in that video," Chief Bill Blair told a news conference on an extortion investigation, ending months of speculation after the mayor denied illicit drug use.
The 90-second clip had caused an uproar after Canada's largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, and US online gossip website Gawker reported its existence in May.
The Star said it had been approached by drug dealers looking to sell the video, allegedly shot using a cellphone by a person who claimed to have supplied Ford with the drug.

The paper said it viewed the video but declined to pay for it.
Gawker had also said that it had seen the footage, which reportedly showed a man resembling Ford leaning back in a chair in a room, inhaling from what appeared to be a glass crack pipe.

But later, after raising more than USD 200,000 in an online campaign to enable it to buy the video, Gawker said it was told by its unnamed source that the video was "gone."
Blair said forensic technicians recovered the video from a hard drive seized mid-June, after it had been deleted.
Ford's friend and occasional driver, Alexander Lisi, who already faces marijuana trafficking charges, was again arrested and charged with extortion in the case.