Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  WE APPEARED IN CHICAGO, attended by hundreds of journalists, in late November. The courthouse, a twenty-seven-storey building designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was a monument to the first Mayor Daley’s political influence.

  Having so often seen in newsreels and dramatizations accused people mobbed by journalists in front of court houses, I didn’t find it such a novel experience. Like many other things, it is surprising how much it resembles the imagination of it. Genson had had no idea of how prominent a case this would be, and performed valorous service for me by clearing a path with his motorized tricycle and threatening to batter intrusive journalists with his silver-tipped cane. The press swarmed, but were not abusive or physically aggressive.

  I was surprised by the judge. Amy St. Eve is diminutive and has a mane of well-kempt blonde hair, an intelligent face, bright eyes, and a clever, quick, mobile expression. She wore a U.S. flag pin on her robe (though a couple of times it was almost upside down, like a navy distress signal). She was courteous and rather amiable.

  Some of the press called her, generally respectfully, Peppermint Patty, or Mighty Mouse, and she did somewhat fill the latter role when she stood with her hands behind her back and under her robe: a pleasant, pretty, clever mouse. As with Kimba Wood, the New York federal judge who was an Attorney General candidate with Bill Clinton but because of her domestic hiring practices was passed over for the terribly mediocre Janet Reno, Judge St. Eve communicated a scrubbed and groomed pride and authenticity, which indicated that she would be sensible. I was assured, and did not doubt, that compared with the generality of judges in the Dirksen Federal Building, she was a godsend of wisdom and fairness.

  Genson entered my not-guilty plea to the many counts of mail and wire fraud, the charge of money laundering, and the inanity that I had obstructed U.S. justice when I removed those thirteen boxes from my office on Toronto Street. There would be superseding indictments for racketeering and tax fraud. I assumed they had delayed charging these because they were afraid I might not appear in the United States if I were aware of them and because Canada would have been reluctant to grant extradition against such a barrage of unfounded allegations.

  They need not have entertained any such fear. I would not be a fugitive from justice, and I would not have counted on the Canadian courts for much either. Whatever legal advantage Canada has over the United States resides in the prosecutors and the procedures, including the limits on what is justiciable and what is publishable, and not, from what I had seen, in the judges. St. Eve would prove a better judge than any I had known in Canada since my friend, and eventually Hollinger Inc. director, Charles Dubin, if not my father’s friend and mine, Chief Justice Brian Dickson.

  We were accused of the American federal offence of not paying taxes owed to a foreign power. The United States was charging me with a Canadian tax offence, as if Canada needed the assistance of a Sussman to collect its taxes. No such charge was ever laid against us in Canada. (The Canadian Justice Department sent two observers to the trial, who concluded there was no case against the defendants.)

  The U.S. government, reduced by jurisdictional factors to invoking the mails and wire-links, would lay sixteen charges against me and seek the complete impoverishment of my family and my imprisonment for life. I found it somewhat invigorating, so surrealistically corrupt and dishonest was the process and the conduct of the prosecutors. (The trial was set for sixteen months later, March 2007, and there would be progress hearings every month or two.)

  I was unimpressed by Kent and Sussman. Kent was an oaf, tall, slow, and monotonous. He left the case and went into private practice after a few weeks. Sussman had a crewcut top knot, with a pintail swoop to a point at the back, and his head looked like the flight deck of an Essex-class aircraft carrier: top-heavy and rectangular. He had compulsively darting eyes that would stop and then stare, with small pupils amid large, sallow whites, and a triangular nose, like an overly large spinnaker, capable of capsizing the vessel behind it. When he spoke, his wrists and hands moved jerkily, as if they were being manipulated by an amateur ventriloquist. When he stopped speaking, he went to a default countenance that was gape-mouthed, punctuated by his tongue bulging against the inside of his cheek like a lingual erection. He is a hollow-chested man who compensates with heavily padded shoulders and overlong jackets, a retrogression to the 1950s zoot suit. The overall effect was disturbing. He was all nose, mouth, and fake shoulders.

  But just as nauseating was the even more mouthy co-prosecutor, a gargoyle. Jeffrey Cramer would soon be strutting in mid-address, shouting and pointing. Sussman and Cramer were a hideous pair.

  The third prosecutor, Julie Ruder, had a pleasant face but a grating voice. Her sole manual gesture was putting both thumbs and forefingers together as if describing a recipe to a cooking class. The fourth prosecutor, Edward Siskel, seemed fairly unexceptionable and was completely forgettable, a distinction in such a horrifying quartet. In fact, he was there to familiarize himself with the trial in the event of an appeal.

  I encountered Peter Atkinson for the first time in nearly two years as we were being processed, fingerprinted, photographed, and giving urine samples in the “lock-up.” We had a cordial chat. The whole ambiance was quite affable; the finger-printer was a very large man who loved camping and hunting trips in Canada and conversed very jovially with Peter and me. Waiting FBI officials were also very agreeable, reminiscing about their time in the Bureau and about FBI directors going back to J. Edgar Hoover. I was prepared to be handcuffed – I was curious about the sensation – but it didn’t happen.

  The court appearance itself was uneventful. I told the massed and swarming press as I left that the charges were nonsense and that I had been a victim of a smear job, that all the accused were innocent of crimes they would never dream of committing. This was nothing but the truth. I was generally credited with a decorous performance in distasteful circumstances. I told the media that it was like the first day at university registration.

  THERE IS A DRAMA IN NOTORIETY that is sanitized, even made wholesome, by being guiltless in fact. Let Breeden and his gullible accomplices in the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago get on with it. My nerves, far from cracking as Radler’s had, became serene. I again dispensed with sleeping medicine and awaited events, confident that on Crispin’s Day, my innocence and the quality of my counsel would turn the battle. Barbara, family, and friends would help me through, just as sales of a home and some other assets had defeated, by a hand’s breadth, at least up to this point, the concerted effort to run me out of cash. In my parish church, the congregation extended their discreet friendship.

  The mobs, still snarling with execration, would turn on my tormentors when they failed. I was ready for the fight of and for my life. So Barbara and I even joked about what was coming; what everyone knew was coming and wanted to come; and what, in a way, we, too, wanted to come: judgment, the supreme test, where my enemies would have to prove false charges beyond a reasonable doubt. I conserved what strength I had and awaited the prosecutor, slouching toward us from Chicago, the once “great, brave, heart of America.”

  * I had done my part to encourage the sale of American Trucker to a KKR (Kravis) company, by sending Henry and Marie-Josée American Trucker windbreakers and caps (which, unsurprisingly, I never saw them wearing) and a free subscription to the magazine, which had no editorial content and contained only advertising of used truck cabs.

  The Conrad Black “Industry”: I tried to reduce the number of books and articles about me by writing a book about myself in 1992, which was quite well-reviewed and sold well, to which this is a sequel. But it didn’t achieve its purposes. Several books and a TV movie came out as my legal problems burst. This threshold was not recrossed until years later.

  “Shades of Black: The Conrad Black Story,” which aired in 2006. Lara Flynn Boyle as Barbara. Albert Schultz as CB. (photo credit 2.2)

  U.S. and U.K. press coverage, in 2004.

  The front covers of Canad
a’s weekly newsmagazine, Maclean’s, over the years.

  Rosemary Millar ran my London office from 1989 to 2004. She had a heavy cold at the time my legal problems broke, which shortly became pneumonia, and then was diagnosed as inoperable lung cancer. She paid for expensive treatment at the London Clinic with her Hollinger stock options, but died in 2004, aged only sixty-one. She was a wonderfully capable, dignified, and good-humoured person, and her death is one of the greatest sadnesses of this entire cataract of horrible events.

  Joan Maida, my doughty and implacable and very nimble executive assistant in Toronto for twenty years. She is modelling a “Conrad Will Win” T-shirt, which, with other shirts of similar inspiration, were quite successful commercially. She has been invaluable, in good times and bad, and there has been much of both. She and Rosemary Millar got on perfectly, and I am deeply indebted to both of them.

  An imaginative and slightly gruesome treatment of my travails by artist Michael Harris. (photo credit 2.8)

  At home, in my library in Toronto, in 2005.

  At the centenary celebrations for Maclean’s magazine in November 2005, when I knew the indictment was imminent. The $84 million referred to was down from the Special Committee’s fable of a “$500 million kleptocracy” and eventually trickled down to the unfounded claim that I had improperly received $285,000. (photo credit 2.9)

  My chief counsel in Chicago, Edward Genson (left), one of Chicago’s best known criminal lawyers, and Edward L. Greenspan, probably Canada’s most famous barrister. They did a great deal of damage to government witnesses. (photo credit 2.10)

  Miguel Estrada, engaged by Barbara after a meticulous canvass, as we prepared our last conventional throw with an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. It only accepts to hear about 1 per cent of the petitions it receives. A unanimous court rebuked the Circuit Court and vacated all counts, but remanded the counts back to the Circuit Court panel for reflection on its own errors. We were always uneasy about the result of such a self-evaluation by Richard Posner. (photo credit 2.11)

  My daughter, Alana, and Barbara, who both attended almost every day of the trial, and my elder son, Jonathan, who came for several prolonged periods, as we enter the Chicago courthouse in mid-trial in the spring of 2007. Their solidarity, and that of my younger son, James, throughout all that is described here, has been inexpressibly gratifying. No one could have asked or received more from his family. (photo credit 2.12)

  [CHAPTER ELEVEN]

  IT WAS ANOTHER DIFFICULT Christmas. The 2003 holiday season had been implacably gloomy, but 2004, despite the Breeden report, was upbeat as we charged toward privatization. Now, as of December 15, 2005, the U.S. government was trying to send me to prison for ninety-five years and impoverish me. On Christmas Day, I read the Book of Job. I discovered that while Job had endured more severe oppression than I had, he had been much less patient. I aspired to his deliverance but not to his additional rewards of living one hundred and twenty years and having forty more children.

  I now organized what I called “the little boats of Dunkirk” to address the immediate financial crisis and borrowed from Barbara, two of my children, and a few very close friends small amounts of money to pay and thus keep the data company on side. I was told by the company that if their invoices were not paid within days, all outstanding data would be inaccessible to us and could be permanently deleted. Then we would have to try to fight a trial with hundreds of thousands of pages of material available only by hand; it simply could not be done. The pressure for money had driven Barbara to desperate measures. She was trying to sell her jewelery and discovered only gemstones were marketable. The valuable antique pieces she had were not of interest. Her large diamond ring, which became an object of desire for Prosecutor Sussman, was my gift to her on her sixtieth birthday. She knew how upset I would be if I heard what she was doing, and so she kept quiet until it was necessary to get information from me for possible buyers. Being accused of facilitating money laundering was a fear for anyone buying from us because the prosecution had done such a thorough job of tainting us. Barbara was reduced to sitting in odd locations to hand over the stone and its Gemological Institute of America certificate for examination by various oily gem dealers who seemed to take pleasure in telling her how fine it was before rejecting it on moral grounds. Whether this was a negotiating tactic is hard to say. Those with whom I dealt by telephone were among the most repulsive businessmen I have encountered, and I stopped the whole process.

  In one of several coincidences that struck me as somewhat providential, on the airplane back from Washington to Toronto on the day of the New York seizure, I encountered Gordon Arnold, a school-friend from fifty years before, whom I had rarely seen since our school days. He was now a neighbour and offered his assistance in any way possible. At the decisive moment, he lent me several hundred thousand dollars against some furniture and works of art. It was a lifesaver in this very difficult time, and he was a true and unsuspected friend.*

  When I walked through or around my house, I now found a crowded gallery of mementoes from my early youth, my adult life, and from the residences in London and New York. Even the trees had been familiar to me for more than fifty years. Almost every step, inside or out, brought flickerings, at first premonitory and subconscious, and then precise, of what had been lost or severely compromised: people who had died, friends now lost, pleasant connections gone forever. It was a cavalcade of the departed, great and small, but each person, thing, or revenance was something comfortable or satisfying, and apparently irreplaceable. I was prematurely forced to embrace Dr. Viktor Frankel’s famous consolation that “to have been is a form of being, and in a sense, the surest form.” I would have to get by for the duration of this combat with memories that were beyond re-creation. In our barricaded domesticity, I even set up a little cardboard shelter in the garden room for dazed ladybugs that had been shut in by the elements.

  Nostalgia was the constant companion of my thoughts, and melancholia was never far off. I battled to fight off morose impulses, like a retreating army fighting marauders. I retained memberships in all my clubs, in Toronto, London, New York, Montreal, and Palm Beach, but almost never set foot in them. Famous or once-familiar addresses were mute effigies of what life had been. I clung to vestiges of my former life, still struggling to convince myself that some of it could be recovered, that I would find the money to oil the greasy legal system, that justice would ultimately prevail despite its many setbacks. The question of whether I would survive long enough financially to defend myself against false and malicious charges was still unanswered.

  HOLLINGER INTERNATIONAL HAD finally come current on its financial reportings, not having fired and sued KPMG as it should have done, because Breeden, who had recommended suing KPMG, had since become the court-appointed monitor of KPMG, and their testimony was thought likely to be useful against us. (In fact, it would be useful to us.) He resolved his evident conflict of interest in favour of the larger source of payments to him.

  Barbara had exercised her options at Hollinger International and moved to sell her shares in January. The transfer agent, under orders from the company, held up the transaction for almost a week. I got Canadian counsel to threaten the transfer agent, and eventually, just in time, $2.4 million came in from this source. This allowed me to start to pay down Baker Botts, pay the emergency lenders, and start on the Greenspan and Genson retainers.

  The light at the end of the financial tunnel was growing brighter – and it was distinctly not an incoming locomotive – when Leo Strine, doubtless pleased at his role in producing the criminal indictment he had effectively solicited nearly two years before and showing no sign of realizing the billions of dollars of shareholders’ lost value he had caused, warned Hollinger International that he would not allow them to welsh on their indemnity of former officers’ legal fees. The company was happily paying the legal fees of the docile directors, but not of Breeden’s foes. Strine, to his credit, balked at this.

  My new De
laware lawyers, David Jenkins and Joelle Polesky, replacing the gentlemanly but unsuccessful Jesse Finkelstein, came to see me in Toronto in early February 2006 and soon arranged a deal with Hollinger International’s Delaware counsel. Rather than face Strine, with whose equal-opportunity arbitrariness my opponents too were quite familiar, they chose to pay a high percentage of my past and current legal bills. This was another big step forward, as it wiped away most of the arrears to Baker Botts and further assisted me with my new lawyers.

  These were stop-gaps, but they kept body and soul together. I really cracked the financial problem when I recruited Stan Freedman, an able commercial lawyer, to become so obstreperous as a minority shareholder in Horizon Operations, one of the private newspaper companies, that we effectively obliged Radler to buy us out. Radler had recruited new investors, so this now became possible for him. He was happy enough, I’m sure, to see the back of me.

  The formal defection of Radler prompted us to consider what deal he had made. His sentence was twenty-nine months and non-objection to a treaty transfer, which, in practice, meant a six month, minimum security confinement in Canada, and he appeared to have saved the private newspaper companies, which were his intended corporate destination anyway. This assumedly meant that the Canadians had passed on their threat to charge him with perjury when he testified in Kelowna (BC) that he and I were equal shareholding partners in Horizon Operations, where Todd Vogt (innocently, as he later assured me) fronted a third 25 per cent block of stock that was in fact, Radler’s. Atkinson had scratched this out of public filings when we were squaring my position with foreign ownership rules governing newspapers in Canada, after I had ceased to be a Canadian citizen following my fracas with Chrétien.