Toronto police officers investigating Mayor Rob Ford’s associate Alexander “Sandro” Lisi travelled to Apple headquarters in California to access Lisi’s iPhone, police documents show.
Investigators successfully accessed text messages, images, videos, Lisi’s phone contacts and his iCloud storage account, according to an ITO document from Project Brazen 2 released Monday.
ITO stands for “Information to Obtain” and is used to get a search warrant.
Police had requested access to Lisi’s phone on March 7.
Lisi has been charged with extortion for allegedly threatening two men to get a notorious video that shows Ford smoking from a glass pipe.
The documents show that police are awaiting the results of analysis of Lisi’s cellphone, which was found during a search warrant executed on his Land Rover, media lawyer Peter Jacobsen told CP24 Monday afternoon.
“Now they’re going to unpack it and find out what’s there,” he said.
The document reveals that detectives took Lisi’s phone to Apple’s offices in California to have technicians extract the data.
Jacobsen said the documents show police were able to access the active files stored on Lisi’s device.
“And they said it’s got text messages, pictures, video, audio recordings, phone access logs, and an address book. So we don’t know what the content of that is, but what we do know is that the police are actively investigating this,” Jacobsen said.
In an interview on CP24, Ford’s lawyer Dennis Morris questioned why police didn’t try to access the iPhone information earlier.
“Lisi was arrested Oct. 1 of last year. I would assume they had his cellphone, which is normal in these warrants,” Morris said. “Why did it take so long to get a new ITO?
“This is the first thing that any police officer would do, would be to check the telephone of a suspect. Why it took months to do that is beyond my understanding.”
