Vogt, when contacted, would not appear as a witness in Chicago, though he was very embittered by how Radler had treated him, having formerly been virtually one of the family, and was severely embarrassed, he said, opposite his own in-laws, when Radler had tried to pretend in court that Vogt really was a serious Horizon shareholder while also being associated with his father-in-law in the competing local newspaper. The fact that he did not wish to testify did not mean that we did not have plenty of room to undermine Radler as a witness when the time came. He had not aroused Atkinson’s and my fullest suspicions when his chicanery first came to light in 2002 because Radler always went to ground an observed complete silence whenever anything embarrassing to him occurred. There was no shortage of these things: the failure of most of his private ventures on behalf of the small venture capital business he ran with Peter White and me as silent partners. There were the motels, jewellery stores, oil and gas wells, or at least sites drilled in the hope of finding some accessible energy reserves.
He showed the same furtiveness about the endless losses at the Jerusalem Post. He overpaid for the newspaper, left me to justify to shareholders the US$17 million he had paid, and held himself out to the world’s Jewish community as a champion of Israel. He was addicted to his status as an international notable in the Jewish community and too egotistically vulnerable to admit that his formula of endless cost-cutting would not eliminate the loss at the Post. He had put our Israeli partner in the printing of the Yellow Pages in that country on the board of Hollinger International. He didn’t tell us that our partner ditched us and took the profitable printing business elsewhere.
He compounded our problems by sponsoring an editorial policy that was too hawkish for all but the most ardent Zionists. Under Radler, the Post adopted a Jabotinskyan posture of pursuing a greater Israel; the inconvenient Arab populations that happened to be there would be induced to emigrate by unspecified means. It was an editorial and financial embarrassment, but it conformed to the Radler method: tough talk regardless of its cost and futility. He was a sort of misguided, kitsch John Wayne with both employees and readers.
I had a reasonably conservative definition of Israel’s security interests, but Radler’s ideas, imparted to him by tough-talking Israeli charlatans of a greater Israel, were too much for me, and Radler put some strain on my relations with sensible Israelis such as Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s brilliant fourteen-term mayor.
To accommodate the nasty gnome from Chicago, the Canada Revenue Agency had issued an absurd assessment, just as the OSC had laid ridiculous charges, to show Canada had not lost interest in, or even become a farm team in, the great championship round of what some of my friends now called the game of Let’s Kill Conrad. As in so many other competitions, Canada emulated the worst and not the best of America, and here earned a good second prize in the Lottario of persecution.
I relied on the cockiness and belligerency of Sussman to drive Atkinson and Kipnis and their counsel more closely into our arms and hoped that their presence would dampen any tendency by the jury to single me out for the punishment of the formerly rich and famous. It was a tenuous strategy, dictated more by necessity than by choice – there was hardly a menu of valid options. After a brief holiday in the now famous house in Palm Beach (an aerial photograph of it appeared in the New York Times), wondering again as I left whether I would ever see it again, we returned to Toronto and to the campaign for a buyout by Radler from more of the private newspaper operations.
The initial payment for Horizon Operations (Canada) under the shareholders’ agreement for Horizon Canada enabled me to remove all the Canada Revenue liens and appeal their entire assessment after I had paid it. Within a year, having done their obeisance to the shrieking Sussman, Canada Revenue remitted to me three-quarters of what I had paid, with interest, and acknowledged that it had not been owed. The Horizon payment left us a couple of million extra, which, coupled with Strine’s indemnity, enabled me to deal with the lawyers more effectively. As the Canada Revenue money came back and more of the community news paper sale proceeds came in, cash piled up in amounts I had not known for some time, and, once again I wondered at the strange turns in these struggles. Acute cash penury was transformed in a few months to a comfortable state and the defrayal by indemnity of most of my legal bills. This latter munificence at the behest of the inevitable Vice Chancellor Strine, who on his forays on the lecture circuit took to referring to me almost as Montgomery had described Rommel, saying I was “a great presence in [his] court,” as if to take some grandeur for himself in his scandalous ruling.
The removal of the tax lien on the Palm Beach house provoked Sussman to a bizarre exercise of frustrated aggression. Despite all the illegal telephone intercepts and pseudo-knowing tips from Radler (whom I never told anything about my investments and interests), and his incitements to belligerency of Canada Revenue, Sussman had no idea what my resources were. I had moved so cautiously to liquidate assets gradually and at reasonable values, that my durability galled him.
He had assumed that after his seizure of the proceeds of the New York co-operative apartment sale, I had no money and would be passing the begging bowl among my wealthy friends. Since Sussman was leading Radler by a chain, trussed, bound, and gagged, he could have stopped the Horizon buyout, but either Radler’s pride prevented him from mentioning it until it had happened or Sussman was already on to his next wheeze.
At Alberta Newspapers, the acquisition of which had not been a related-party transaction (Hollinger International had had no involvement), Radler had also brought in new investors to facilitate paying all the restitutions he had made himself liable for. I generated an offer for the entire group that was entirely reasonable, and this forced Radler to bring his new partners into line and meet the offer. In order to satisfy his concerns about foreign ownership, I had sold shares to Barbara at the formula price and in an arrangement entirely designed by the company lawyer, an obtuse minion of Radler’s. Now that arm’s-length, enterprise-value prices were being invoked, there was a real profit for Barbara. This had the double effect of producing cash and enriching Barbara, who was practically insusceptible to the rapine of the U.S. attorney and his Canadian accomplices. It was a win double, in sporting parlance, and Sussman was not much of a sport.
Sussman reacted to my defeat of his financial strangulation plan like an angry U-boat admiral dismayed that war time Britain was feasting on tropical fruit. He began a new offensive based on the canard that since obviously I wasn’t broke, I must have lied in my obligatory financial statement filed with the court and underestimated my net worth. In furtherance of this argument, Sussman, a bold but reckless tactician, ordered Radler to repay the shareholders’ loans at Horizon Publications (U.S.), a company that Breeden had called a scam by Radler and me but that had been passed as part of the Radler plea bargain so that after he had delivered my head on a plate and had his correctional golfing holiday, Radler could live prosperously ever after, screaming at the advertising salespeople in such centres of urban vitality as Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and Medicine Hat, Alberta. What Sussman was doing was a gamble: he was releasing money to me deliberately to further his argument in court that I had lied about my net worth. Two years later, which justified Radler’s soft sentence, praised him for keeping the prosecution abreast of all payments I received from the private newspaper companies. This helped Sussman allege that I had misrepresented the value of my assets, and assisted him in asking the Canada Revenue Agency to challenge my tax returns.
This generated $6 million for me, which, in one of our last conversations, Radler had told me would not be shaken loose for a long time, if ever. Sussman rushed to the judge to accuse me of perjury, released inflammatory filings to the press, and demanded that U.S. marshals be empowered to sell my Palm Beach house, that my bond be revoked, and that I be taken into custody at once. So began a four-month struggle that was a trial within the trial. The $6 million was put into escrow.
The world press was in
cited to new flurries of enthusiasm at the speed and proportions of my descent; the British press especially, which normally sniped at the vagaries of the U.S. justice system, became almost bestially aroused at the prospect of my being imprisoned without even the irritating formality of a trial. If I could be imprisoned sine die without trial, this would be a miraculous consummation, and the British press bandied it about as a live possibility for several weeks. The implication was that this would not indicate any absence of due process, merely a confirmation of my infamous crimes.
It would be unjust to underestimate the loyalists and the steadily growing group of supporters who saw at least part of the sham that was being perpetrated. Many friends – Elton John and David Furnish, Barry Humphries (Dame Edna), Lizzie Spender, Joan Collins and Percy Gibson, Martin Feldstein, author David Pryce-Jones and his wife Clarissa, historian Andrew Roberts, Anna Wintour and Shelby Bryan, and others – honoured us by coming out of their way to see us. William Buckley, George Will, Donald Trump, Seth Lipsky, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and more were publicly supportive. Philanthropist Lee Annenberg, financier Roger Hertog, New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, Commentary editor Neal Kozodoy, Brian Mulroney, writer Norman Podhoretz, international financier Ezra Zilkha, and many others were unwavering. Old friends rallied, from my early days, and virtually all my relatives. Many of these people I had not seen for decades, and I did not even know the current country of residence of many others. While there were many disappointing desertions, we never felt ourselves outcasts. The loneliness arose from the fact that though we had our supporters, social contact became difficult. Friends didn’t want to talk about our travails, yet ignoring them completely was difficult for everyone, as they were so preoccupying. The legal front either oppressed conversation or was the unmentioned 900-pound gorilla in the room. There was also a steady shift in the nature of friendly acquaintances. An increasing, and eventually very large, number of people from many countries who were complete strangers to me, including a large number of Americans, recognized the unfairness of the plea bargain system and many of the legal precedings, and the catastrophe of my successors’ management, came forward in droves, every week. I developed some close cyber-friendships with these far-off supporters.
WHEN SUSSMAN BEGAN HIS CAMPAIGN to have a forced sale of my Florida house and have me imprisoned for perjury because of the financial statement I had signed, it was hard to believe that a U.S. court would take such nonsense seriously.
Sussman poured it on: our Black Family Foundation’s contribution to the Canadian Opera Company was an act of fraud by me to deprive litigants and creditors. The contribution came from my father’s estate. Next, he put it about that Jack Boultbee was posting $10-million bond, when, in fact, Boultbee was posting $1.5 million. Sussman had already had his try at intimidating my mortgagee in Palm Beach not to renew my mortgage (though he also declined to call it) and then claimed that I was in default, and thus in violation of bail terms. Sussman endlessly accused me of sham transactions in transferring money to my wife, when the fact was that Radler had asked for these transfers to meet the foreign ownership of media restrictions in Canada and that Radler’s counsel had arranged all of it, including the sale to my wife, according to the formula that applied to all shareholders, as a matter of contract law.
Yet my own counsel fumbled meekly through these monthly scheduling meetings and Judge St. Eve felt her way very cautiously between the conflicting views. Finally, I prevailed on Eddie Genson and his colleague, Marc Martin, to produce a filing that detailed the assistant U.S. attorney’s many outrages. When our gloves-off rejoinder, imaginatively entitled “Basta,” came in, Judge St. Eve found resolution, and rejected Sussman’s demand for a revocation of bond. She released $5 million of the $6 million of shareholder advances at Horizon U.S. that Sussman had instructed Radler to pay to advance Sussman’s case for bond revocation and immediate imprisonment of me, by claiming I had deliberately undervalued these assets. She added a further $1 million to bail, bringing it to $21 million. She emphasized that she was not seeking the sale of my Palm Beach house.
My $21 million bail was secured now by more than $30 million, as Canada Revenue had departed Palm Beach (and other targets of mine for their abusive, Sussman-inspired liens and attachments). Another US$5 million from this unsuspected source, on the judge’s order, illustrated again the mercurial nature of my financial fortunes; four months before, I had been gasping for every cent. Now, Barbara and I had many millions in the bank. Between that and Strine’s enforcement of the legal costs indemnity, I could have afforded Brendan Sullivan after all, as I had unsuccessfully assured him would be the case.
IN APRIL 2006, I WAS READY TO START writing about Nixon. For two years I had been devouring books and documents about him, and my researchers, Adam Daifallah, a very intelligent young man who had helped me with FDR, and Edward Saatchi, son of British friends, were about to start work, with the blessing of the Nixon Library and Center, in the vast Nixon archives. I set myself the ambitious goal of writing three thousand words per day. It was an antidote to the legal travails. Instead of waiting for lawyers to telephone, I just wrote from the research material and interrupted myself as necessary to take calls from counsel and others.
I met my writing goals and had audaciously calculated that I could finish a draft of a four-hundred-thousand-word life of Nixon by mid-autumn and did so. My editor, the brilliant and delightful Bill Whitworth, former editor of The Atlantic magazine, and I spent two months editing it and started into production. Publishers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States all came forward nicely, and I received five times the advance I had had for FDR. I was now a known quantity, and the universal opinion on first reading was that this was a book of equivalent quality to my Roosevelt, and about a hotter button (though less distinguished) president. I must credit the ubiquitous Toronto-based entertainment lawyer Michael Levine for much of that; he is the personification of the conflict of interest, but also of the honest resolution of it, and of the related-party transaction that works for everyone. I wish that I had had the assistance of such a person in corporate matters.
It was a good time to be a Canadian. Barbara thought I was waving the Maple Leaf around a bit exuberantly in my newspaper columns on Canadian affairs, but I was both sincere and accurate. I concluded that a few interviews and three speeches – one to Moses Znaimer’s Idea City, one to the Empire Club of Toronto, and one to the World Presidents and Young Presidents – could be useful. They were well received. Even Eddie Greenspan, who had counselled silence, as lawyers normally do to clients, acknowledged that I had been correct. Miraculously, we even began to win a few motions in the courthouse in Toronto.
As my book on Nixon steadily advanced, it was inevitable that gratuitous comparisons, involving psychological liberties, would be made between my subject and me. In fact, there was little comparison, and not only because of the huge disparity in our positions and newsworthiness.
In my case, I could not give the authorities enough, was never reluctant for the whole story to be told, and wanted everything laid out. It was the prosecutors who were trying to suppress evidence of the looting of our companies by our successors, and to introduce the ravings of Strine and Breeden. I’m not a bit like Richard Nixon, though in most respects he was an admirable person with whom comparisons would be flattering.
EVENTUALLY, THE RAVELSTON RECEIVER changed the company’s plea to guilty and promised to pay a fine of $7 million to the United States, money that by now the company did not have. There was also an open-ended claim for restitution. It was completely irresponsible, and despite a brilliant argument by Peter Howard on our behalf in the commercial court, the atmosphere had not sufficiently evolved, there or on appeal, to prevent the judge from approving this insane scheme. The steamroller of the American prosecutors rolled on. At least I could afford to wait until my day in court.
Succeeding Walker, Carroll, and Kelly at Hollinger Inc., Wesley Voorheis’s
regime carried to new depths the pursuit of the creators of the company’s wealth, which they had entirely dissipated by mid-2007, as the share price evaporated and the company for which we had bid $7.60 per share in 2005 sought insolvency protection. In exchange for Hollinger Inc. not being indicted, Voorheis pledged every possible assistance against me. On this one point, at least, he was as good as his word and he outperformed even Walker and Strosberg.
At this point, the American prosecutors had sixteen charges against me. They had thrown all the spaghetti at the wall, and the general practice was that some would stick. If the jury clung to a sensible notion of a reasonable doubt, we should win – as long as Greenspan proved as good a barrister in his U.S. debut as he had been for nearly forty years in Canada. That was to prove a larger imponderable than I had foreseen.
The prosecutors withdrew their claim against me for receiving the CanWest non-competition payments (though they still claimed I had fraudulently included Atkinson and Boultbee in them). They also withdrew the charge of not paying taxes in Canada, to enable, Sussman explained with his usual veracity, the Canadian taxing authorities to proceed against me. He knew perfectly well that Canada Revenue was returning most of the money it had wrongfully assessed.
Sussman – stung by the sharp defeat he suffered after he had prepared the world for my imprisonment without trial, and hyperactive – advanced swiftly from another direction. Voorheis devised a lawsuit that held that my associates and I, twelve years before, had stripped Hollinger Inc. The allegation was that we had enriched Hollinger International, where our equity interest was 24 per cent, at the expense of Hollinger Inc., where we were 65 per cent shareholders. The transactions all produced huge gains for the Hollinger Inc. shareholders and were approved by outside advisers and independent directors in both companies. It was the most inane lawsuit that had yet surfaced in this mad sequence of almost totalitarian fantasies.
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