Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  Voorheis told Sussman that, based on this lawsuit, he might be able to find a judge willing to impose a total worldwide-asset freeze on me ex parte, a secret hearing at which I would have no representation, as in the New York apartment-sale freeze (it makes the prosecutor’s task considerably easier when the judges just seize the defendant’s ability to defend himself and tell him afterwards). He did just that. The most abysmally predictable of the mindless Osgoode Hall meddlers, the inevitable Colin Campbell, produced reasons for an asset freeze on my wife and me without notice to us that were so outrageously unfair that none of my counsel could believe at first that it wasn’t a send-up.

  In a special Voorheis touch, the service of the “Mareva” injunction, which had been obtained two weeks before, was effected at 6 p.m. on August 25, just before the arrival of my dinner guests for my sixty-second birthday and in front of my children. At the front door, a woman with a video camera taped the serving of the order to our baffled houseman, who had been told on the speaker phone from the gate that some boxes from Eddie Greenspan’s office were being delivered.

  A Mareva injunction tightly controls the access of an individual to his or her own money, ostensibly from fear that the person might move it to another jurisdiction and flee righteous creditors. By including Barbara, the claimant and the court were giving credence to the Sussman claim that the Chicago court had rejected as false – that I had improperly transferred assets to her. It also lent a completely unwarranted legitimacy to the unutterably fatuous Voorheis action.

  This was an almost unbelievable development. I was convinced that even in this degenerated jurisdiction, this was going too far. Despite the implications of it, I was determined not to mention it to my birthday guests, though it was hard to put it out of mind. We had a pleasant birthday dinner. I did not mention the latest and most hideous manifestation of the evil of the American prosecutors, the complicity of my usurpatory successors, and the witless credulity of the Toronto bench.

  Greenspan was on holiday in Venice. I worked with Earl Cherniak, and with David Roebuck and Peter Howard, all distinguished lawyers. Roebuck, cautious though he was, said that the Mareva conditions, which would have forced the sale of both my homes, could be beaten back.

  Voorheis’s lawyers wrote at once to the mortgagee of my Toronto house, Murray Sinclair of Quest, forbidding him to accept a mortgage payment. (Glassman had already tried to buy the mortgage from Murray, who explained that “that is not how we do business.” Thank God for a few honest men.) It had come to this new low tide in my affairs. Greenspan returned; I had summarized the statements in Voorheis’s supporting affidavit, and a group of my counsel, among the most distinguished barristers in the country, called on the chief justice of the court and suggested that in light of Campbell’s evident bias, he should recuse. They were referred to Campbell himself, who declined but admitted curiosity about why such a request could possibly be made of him. Greenspan walked him through the shortcomings of Voorheis’s affidavit. We did not want a court case on the subject at this point, as it might not be possible to keep Campbell’s mad Red Queen reasons for granting an ex-parte Mareva injunction out of the court record in Chicago.

  Both Campbell’s reasons for granting it and Voorheis’s reasons for getting it were so inflammatory they could have seriously affected my trial. Voorheis had to acknowledge that there were a few inexactitudes in his affidavit. Campbell urged compromise. Hollinger Inc. retreated to a point that permitted all existing normal expenses. In addition, as usual in legal matters, any payments to the professional legal class were permitted. The clannish solidarity in the matter of getting all bills paid is a tighter bond at the bar and bench than any other professional association I have known.

  The revised agreement effectively released Barbara from any onerous requirements. The remaining financial restraints on both of us were very irritating but could be managed. An impartial monitor was agreed and installed. Once again, the Americans, as Machiavelli had warned of mercenaries, had found their (Canadian) collaborators almost useless and completely self-interested. I could trace the jack-knife arc of Sussman’s disappointment from the tenor of press inquiries that he had eagerly generated and then vainly tried to control.

  There was a sad aspect that still perplexes me. Barbara was furious: she did not want to sign the revised agreement. Her inclusion in any sort of monitoring was so unwarranted that she was prepared to go to court and fight. “Let them send me to jail,” she said. Unfortunately, I knew that when she hit on a theme, she would follow it anywhere. She had no independent lawyer in Toronto at that point and so was dragged into this settlement without representation. “I’m trying to get my mouth to say yes,” she replied when my lawyers urged her to sign the settlement for my sake. I shared the view of counsel that we should take this deal now, to keep these bizarre allegations out of the Chicago case. Barbara went along with well-founded reluctance. In Vancouver, the judge turned down the request for a Mareva injunction against Radler, based on exactly the same claims, writing that “the evidence tendered in this case, including significant portions of the Voorheis affidavit, was objectionable on many bases. In many places in that affidavit, it is difficult to extract ‘facts’ from opinion, ‘opinion’ from ‘hearsay’ and ‘hearsay’ from ‘invective’ and ‘argument.’ In fact, I would describe a large portion of that affidavit as argument dressed up as evidence….” But in Toronto, Barbara, who had not a single criminal or civil charge against her, had to sign an agreement obligating her to follow tight reporting requirements. As Voorheis kept touting the fiction of “litigation assets,” i.e., against us, he appointed as trustee a contemporary of Justice Campbell, retired Justice Jack Ground. This boil will have to be lanced and will be, shortly after this book is published.

  The three usurper regimes at both Hollingers and Ravelston steadily devised new ways to annoy me. Richter claimed that Argus Corporation owned the three paintings of me by Andy Warhol, apart from the one I had given to an art museum in Vancouver. The actual papers were ambiguous, but in fact I owned them, as I had paid Andy for them. It was just another method to curry favour with the puppet-master in Chicago and try to generate demeaning publicity. We finally agreed to leave them where they were, one in my home, one in storage in London, and one in the office in Toronto, and I posted an insurance bond, through the courtesy of Duncan Jackman, Hal and Maruja’s capable and gracious son, who was now in charge of the Jackman group’s extensive operations. Though the temporary break I had had with his father naturally never came up, I was pleased to retain a relationship with the next generation of that talented family.

  This issue would arise again, as Richter desperately tried to extract the last cent from Ravelston and Argus. We eventually arranged that I would have an opportunity to buy two of the paintings at auction, and one at the auction price without auction. As I, in fact, owned them, it was inexpressibly irritating to have to pay for them twice, but I was not prepared to put the matters before another Toronto kangaroo court for the delectation of the press.

  AT EACH NEW STATION IN THE long, tortuous assault by the U.S. government and its quislings, there would be the very irksome racket of media helicopters. As our home is only about two miles from a hospital, we were accustomed to the noise of distant helicopters transporting emergency cases. The photographers were a different sound, closer, noisier, and aggravatingly persistent. Aerial photographs of both my homes were constantly in the press, as Sussman fulminated and erupted in his ambition to pitch me out of them. He later confessed that his chief ambitions were to force the sale of the Palm Beach house and to seize Barbara’s diamond ring. This was the infernal and psychotically aggressive mentality that was opposing us, in the name of American justice. (He failed in both ambitions.)

  In the spring, summer, and early autumn months, I enjoyed spending mornings working in the walled garden between my library and my chapel, with fountains on each side. There I altered completed Nixon chapters before sending them to editor
s or made notes for a National Post column, or read the daily newspapers. And in the late afternoon, I enjoyed the same activity on our terrace, watching the chipmunks and squirrels and bigger game including foxes and deer. This was the view from our drawing room terrace that Elton John had instantly recognized as “necessary for [your] sanity.” At such occasions, half-hour, low-altitude circlings of the house by helicopters with large cameras protruding in pods from their fronts incited musings about a loaded, over-the-shoulder, ground-to-air missile launcher.

  SUSSMAN’S ACTIONS WERE BOTH fanatical and vulgar. In dealings with my New York lawyer over Sussman’s seizure from me of the proceeds of the New York co-op sale, Sussman continuously referred to parts of “Black’s conspiracy to defraud the shareholders.” In part, he had taken the bait from Breeden. In part, he had torqued up his frenetic natural aggressivity and focused it on whoever happened to be in his sights. Thus any exculpatory evidence was, as he put it several times, “a hand-job for Conrad” or a “self-serving letter.” The absence of evidence merely meant it had been removed. Even when his case seemed to disintegrate, there was not a faint possibility that the targeted people might be innocent.

  It is a problem for all prosecutors to distinguish between their important duty to punish crime and protect society from criminals and the prior step of coming to reasonable opinions about whom to target. Since the subjects of prosecutor wrath are deemed by prosecutors to be offenders who have wronged society, there is a very swift leap from the presumption of innocence to the extermination of the possibility of innocence in the mind and hearing of the prosecutor. The cart surges in front of the horse, and instead of defending society against people who had been proved, or who he had good reason to believe, to be bad, by focusing on people presumed to be innocent, Sussman was instantly making them guilty.

  Because I had agreed with Malcolm Muggeridge’s view that almost anyone, in certain circumstances, could be guilty of crimes, and because I had seen enough of police and prosecutors to know how unreliable their judgment was, my attitude and behaviour to people I knew who came under this sort of scrutiny and accusation did not change. I had not foreseen the sadistic, bourgeois pose of offended decency that many would adopt toward me. This was why the posturing of seedy journalists, suddenly made over as Victorian dowagers, bandying about censorious descriptions of totally innocent people was especially odious. Being removed from Christmas card lists was particularly irritating. An abrupt end to most Canadian and American (but not British) invitations, the one place where it was practically impossible for us to attend such occasions, created a sense of eeriness.

  As a former chairman of the cardinal’s dinner in Toronto, a gathering of about twenty-five hundred people at the Convention Centre, I generally attended this gathering. In November 2006, when introduced along with many other former chairmen, I received a prolonged ovation. It was a moving moment. People I knew by sight but had not conversed with in my parish church wished me success with that Canadian understatement and even shyness that is such a pleasing contrast to the hale and bluff back-slapping of some other nationalities, including the most proximate one (as even Ernest Hemingway, briefly a Toronto resident in the early 1920s, observed).

  There were particular individual disappointments. Not just financiers I had dealt with, but a frequently consulted doctor who had been something of a friend, whom I had supported through financial adversity, and who had stayed at our home in London; an eminent clergyman also withdrew. They became insufferably indiscreet and unacceptably testy. These relationships just fell away. It was disorienting, but they were eventually replaced by happier successors.

  One of the most grinding clichés of the time was that we would “find out who are friends were.” More of a revelation was who our enemies were, and the crossover between them was substantial and sometimes piercingly disappointing. Yet there were heartening moments and many, in all countries, remained not only solid, but rallied in contrarian manner.

  In addition to winding up the Nixon project and going through the editing, and my writing in the National Post, I was composing case summaries for counsel. We now had the FBI–U.S. attorney interviews with scores of people. I wrote a seventy-two-page dissection of the contradictory remarks and testimony of Breeden, Thompson, Kravis, Burt, Healy, and Kissinger, as well as an outline of a response to all the counts.

  I eventually discovered that these interviews were rarely written up accurately by the government and the interviewees were not shown the summaries. With that said, as all interviewees had their own counsel present, those who wrote up the interviews couldn’t engage in wholesale fabrication. He recorded that Kissinger said that he believed I was guilty as charged of every allegation.

  This included a large number of charges that were later dropped or thrown out by the jurors. Kissinger supposedly added that this would not affect our friendship, but that our friendship made my crimes more painful. I can hardly believe that Kissinger thought I was a racketeer and money-launderer, and I would certainly rank his credibility above that of the FBI. But the formula is familiar. Henry professed agreement with the apparently winning side and imperishable goodwill to the other side. This technique may work in the Middle East and Indochina, where treachery and violence are everywhere, but it is not an appropriate way to treat a “best friend in the world” and “indispensable pillar of my life.” Five years later we rehashed these unhappy times. It was a cultural difference. Henry did what came naturally, and as he was advised by the doubtless dessicatedly cautious Paul Saunders.

  This work on the prosecution interviews and my wind-up of the Nixon book gave me some considered perspectives on my tortuous relationship with Henry Kissinger. Friendship is fine, but Richard Nixon warned me that Henry Kissinger is not reliable in a crisis. He does possess admirable physical courage, as when he proceeded to chair a conference session after being up all night when he lost the sight of his right eye due to a thrombosis.

  Henry owed me benign neutrality at least. I never asked for his help or for him to become involved at all. I sought only the heavily qualified prestige of his abstention. He withheld even that. I admire him. I greatly enjoyed my relations with him. It was an honour to be his friend, as he idiosyncratically defined friendship.

  And it did bother him to abandon me. He told several people, including some that he would not have imagined would communicate with me, that he regretted the strain on our friendship.

  Henry Kissinger deserted me by rote, by intuitive recourse to his formula, seeking the strategic position between principle and expediency even in this small matter, as a cat reflexively stalks a bird. There was no animosity in his sudden desertion, and he meant me no harm, any more than a cat dislikes animals it tries to kill. The Kissingers, though still sending amicable gestures, were among those who could not bring themselves to send us a Christmas card after 2003. Voting for Breeden’s outrageous putsch at every stage when he could have abstained, or even, with an updraft of bravery, dissented, was deeply offensive. His conciliatory messages in the latter stages of these events seemed to me to express a breezy idea that it had all been unpleasant but now we could be friends again.

  Henry had never really understood the cultural difference between Metternichian compromise and Reaganian focused strength, or between a ramshackle empire preserved by manoeuvre and autocratic chicanery, and a mighty republic with the strength to assert itself, but with the conscience to require that it be in a presentable cause. He and Nixon worked well together because both were devious and the fragility of Nixon’s political position required him to do a great deal by stealth. Henry came through Watergate apparently unscathed, but he never came back to government. He prided himself on the prestige he retained, but after 1977, they were barren years. Reagan didn’t trust him (“He wasn’t loyal to Dick,” he told me in 1989), and neither did George Bush Sr. His regime of endless conferences with other ex-office holders was no substitute for the real thing.

  One of his biographer
s said, with some reason, that Henry was “a combination of Beelzebub and Woody Allen.” Kissinger’s actions take nothing from his public career or his private standing, but I had taken his professions of friendship seriously, and reciprocated them. I must blame myself for not recognizing the nature of the beast. But abandonment by Henry Kissinger in the greatest crisis of my life, after decades of friendship, wreathed in superlative testimonials, following many years of my prior admiration of him, though it has had little practical consequence, was a terrible wound that I feared would never heal. In this, as will be recounted in the appropriate place in this narrative, I am grateful to report that I was mistaken.

  I WROTE FURTHER MONOGRAPHS on various parts of the case, as well as my fifty-page refutation of Tom Bower’s and others’ libels. I was a veritable torrent of composition from late morning to early morning, with only the twilight interruptions to watch the sunset from the terrace, and not even those once the mercury descended and daylight time was over.

  The immense, outsized United States has many faces. For four decades I was a vocal defender of most of them. It was now my strange misfortune to encounter, at point-blank range, the ugliest and nastiest American face of all, that of its legal system. Among these were Richard Breeden and Patrick Fitzgerald. The experience has been so repugnant that it could not fail to reduce my confidence in the country that I had admired above all others, for all my conscient life.