Eddie Greenspan was better organized than on July 19 and answered the judge’s questions fairly crisply. They had chased up the Mareva monitor on holiday in Israel, and Greenspan could confirm that an attempted variance of the settlement could be construed as a breach, so neither Barbara nor I could add to the bail if we wanted to, because of the settlement. (No one had imagined that more bond than the $38 million already posted would be requested. Sussman’s position was that civil claimants were going to take all my money anyway, so there was no disincentive to fleeing. His impudence was inexhaustible.)
The judge stuck to her nonsensical point that she wanted more bail. Greenspan gave an impassioned and rather eloquent speech about my right and desire to go home. Genson stirred himself and also made an impassioned statement that I was indeed a fighter, but that I would fight through the normal channels. They both did their best. Sussman didn’t have to say anything. The judge was not buying it.
Even though it came into evidence that the Canadians would admit me without a passport, she clung to her fear that I would return to Canada and then fight extradition. I had thought her quite a fair trial judge, but this was rank discrimination. How she imagined that borrowing more bail from rich friends, since I couldn’t provide it myself under the Mareva agreement, would reduce the chances of my jumping bail, I didn’t understand either. She seemed to have made the Manichaean leap from comparative fairness to part of the prosecution because of the findings, as if it were a rigorously condign process, the operation of which required the defendant to accept entirely a guilty verdict, no matter how passionately he had fought it and was still pleading his innocence, and no matter that he had debunked ninety per cent of the case. There was also a chance that she was just making an example, after months of press attention, of the consequences to my conspicuous lack of regard for the prosecution.
I REFUSED TO ASK ANYONE for money and I refused to consider more bail. I would go to Palm Beach. This I did on August 8, as Barbara flew to Toronto. It was not the end we had wished for our sojourn in Chicago. Barbara was welcomed back by Canada Immigration, by a woman who claimed to have been an admirer of ours for twenty-five years, and said that the U.S. treatment of me had been an outrage. Barbara wept at being kindly treated by a government official. She tried to pay duty at Canada Customs, but the inspector would not hear of it and said that the U.S. treatment of me had been disgraceful and waved her through.
HOT AND HUMID THOUGH Florida was, I was glad to return to our home in Palm Beach. It had been much publicized, but it was still ours, and had gone straight up in value throughout the persecution of us. It was time to regroup, yet again, in this long and horrible war.
Palm Beach proved a perfect place to rest. The long trial had been so enervating, I sometimes slept for more than ten hours a day. I worked on this narrative and contributed to motions and filings in the afternoon and evenings, and slept most of the morning. The evenings and nights, from my eastern terrace, overlooking the ocean, were very refreshing, with a warm, slightly salted breeze coming in off the water.
Alana came for a time. There was no shortage of well-wishers, by telephone and in person. Friends came from as far away as Britain and Italy and stayed with us. Barbara came from Canada after about two weeks and I had a good time with my neighbours, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, flamboyant champions of the political right. I had an amusing little spoof for Canadian television with humorist Rick Mercer, about waxing maple leaves when unable to enjoy the autumn within Canada. Seth Lipsky organized an uproarious dinner at the Breakers Hotel with some journalistic friends, including Mark Steyn, Ken Whyte, Taki, Bob Tyrrell (the American Spectator), and Roger Kimball (the New Criterion).
The eminent novelist and good friend Margaret Atwood assisted in setting up a Long Pen signing of my Nixon book from my southern home. Sitting in my library in Palm Beach in front of a camera, I was able to write a note on screen and have it exactly reproduced in the customer’s book in one of Heather Reisman’s Indigo bookstores in Toronto and later at Waterstone’s in London. My friend the historian Andrew Roberts, who with his wife had stayed with us in Palm Beach a few weeks before, moderated a press session at Waterstone’s. Here and in subsequent radio and television interviews with the BBC, I chided the British media for “bourgeois priggishness” and explained what rubbish the few remaining counts were. I reminded them of their usual relentless criticism of the U.S. justice system. When asked my opinion of Judge St. Eve, I replied that judges do the judging, not the defendants. All these events had the effect of psychologically loosening the impact of St. Eve’s unnecessarily restrictive bail terms.
The countless irritations incited by our discomfort did not abate. My dear friends at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce noticed in the newspapers that there was some restraint on my spending and abruptly determined to pass none of my cheques, or Barbara’s. This was a breach of their banking covenant and of the Bank Act. The information on which they acted had been in the public domain for more than a year, since the Mareva nonsense began. We demanded that Hollinger Inc. give CIBC the necessary assurances. Instead, it tried to renegotiate the Confidential Settlement Agreement. Campbell was now so overwhelmed by the controversies he had helped to precipitate and infect that he refused to judge anything, and his answer was to tell the parties to try to settle any issue. He had gone from a gavel-happy judge of poor judgment to a timorous judge reticent to judge. It was a marginal improvement. Finally, as Hollinger Inc. was besieged for demands that it be plunged from creditor protection into bankruptcy, and there was pressure on it to reduce legal bills, a passable settlement was agreed.
The nonsense with the Warhol silkscreen portraits of me arose again, and I secured funds for a bond, enabling me to buy the Warhol in my house and bid on the other two, of which the receiver, now desperate to find more money in Ravelston to appropriate, had the most inflated notions of value. In fact, I owned them, but the paperwork was almost non-existent and ambiguous, and I remained unwilling to entrust this issue to the Toronto courts. It was very annoying, but I was accustomed to this sort of harassment. I declined to chase the first one in New York, but determined to press for the second one, which Barbara bought at Christie’s in London in February, and to return to a quartet by having the silkscreens copied – not a great challenge.
For no given reason the insurer of my homes and their contents, abruptly defected. I was a toxic waste area. My legal condition had no bearing on such matters and it was high-quality business. Working with my agent (the daughter, as it turned out, of a man I had gone to high school with), I found other insurers. Having registered my grievance with Hal Jackman’s public comments about Barbara and me in 2003, I would be remiss if I did not emphasize the very benign role his son and their corporate group played in both the Warhol and insurance questions.
I learned from the press that the U.K. Conservative Party no longer considered me a Conservative peer. Departing that oft-defeated party was no great sacrifice, but learning of it in this way, and not being given the opportunity to await appeal, explain my side of things, or to withdraw voluntarily, was gratuitously insulting. I received a somewhat condescending letter from the chief whip eventually, to which I replied with approximately equal condescension.
Even Cardinal Leger’s charity sent me a letter purporting to require my retirement as a director, which was in fact an honorary position. I was threatened with being expelled by three-quarters of the members at the annual meeting in May 2008. I replied, in acidulous terms, with a handwritten riposte on their faxed letter to me that, given my past services (raising and contributing large sums of money) and the excellent prospects of my appeal, I would await the annual meeting. I eventually agreed, when they made a more diplomatic approach, not to stand for re-election. I had not attended one of their meetings in thirty years.
I responded to a request for funds from a friend for a conference at Laval University, and was advised that the university could not accept a contribution from o
ur foundation. I was invited to send a non-charitable contribution but naturally declined. Toronto’s venerable York Club, where I used to debate with Walter Gordon over his sponge cake and where my picture is on the wall for having given their annual Hungerford Address, sent me an insolent letter stating that I was suspended awaiting appeal, by unanimous vote of the directors. I gave the letter to Eddie Greenspan, whom John Turner and John Fraser and I had sponsored as a member of the York Club some years before. It was not long before he had the club scrambling and retrenching and reconsidering. Whatever his limitations in a U.S. criminal court, he still was well able to terrorize a club secretary and a ragtag of Toronto club-lizards. The tax-collecting authorities of Canada and the United States started up again, claiming to find unpaid taxes and wishing endlessly to converse with my counsel. Plodding, repetitive, and greedy, these people didn’t change much from one decade and country to another. After all I had been through, I wasn’t much concerned, and had little doubt we would see them off, once again. The IRS also intensified a spurious and systematic harassment of Barbara. I suspected that few of the people scoring off me in the press over these points had had to put up with more than the odd angry word or memo, and lacked the imagination to guess what Barbara and I were enduring.
THE WEEKS DRIFTED BY IN PALM BEACH as agreeably as they could. We had offered a solution to the Hollinger Inc. bondholders, who were now under water by 50 per cent on the cost of their investment. The fools did not wish to deal with us. Hollinger Inc. was, in fact, bankrupt, and Voorheis, now exposed, was reduced to claiming that the future of the company reposed in “litigation assets.” These were unfounded lawsuits against ex-directors, banks, the former management, launched by people who had milked and destroyed the company at great profit to themselves. This was the effect of the Campbell-Farley-OSC axis: the elimination of $250 million of the shareholders’ money, about half of it mine.
The bondholders shortly had the pleasure of seeing their position under water by 85 per cent, then 95 per cent, then 100 per cent, as the Sun-Times stock that secured it descended beneath $1. It had been at $22 after Strine’s infamous misjudgment in February 2004. Tweedy Browne bailed out, having lost their investors about $70 million, and helped indispensably (as Kissinger would say) to destroy the companies and the interests of all. This was the supreme coruscation in these matters of the corporate governance movement.
The surreal injustice and absurdity of it all continued to escalate. A 10 per cent shareholder of Sun-Times finally revolted and demanded the removal of Seitz as chairman and the complete departure of Paris, so horrible had his management performance been. The latest wrinkle was that Paris had invested $59 million in Canadian real estate–backed investments that had not met their redemption obligations. A loss of $42 million was booked. Paris had been fleeced by Canadian real estate financiers and piled into foreign sub-prime mortgages, just before they evaporated. This was an odd inspiration for a newspaper company, but a typical initiative of the Paris-Seitz-Breeden executive suite, effortlessly losing almost ten times what we had been falsely convicted of receiving improperly. There was some justice in this, but not for the suffering shareholders.
The myth continued to circulate that I could have got rid of the whole problem by paying a few million dollars at the end of 2003 and only my stubborn pride had prevented a settlement early on. This canard was propagated by Henry Kissinger and his New York social entourage of bearers, beaters, and trumpeters, to reinforce Henry’s inevitable self-image as a peacemaker frustrated by my inflexibility. I had done my best to settle with the institutional shareholders. Breeden was a mortal assailant even before he physically appeared. It was obvious from Breeden’s violation of the Restructuring Agreement and his refusal to deal seriously in January 2004 that this was always a vendetta, and the easy, early avoidance theory was one of the many self-serving myths confected for this case.
Henry’s approach reminded me of his exhortations to Nixon in 1969 to 1971 to be fierce with North Vietnam and North Korea, while assuring his liberal journalistic and social friends that he, Henry, was all that was preventing the madman president from blowing up the world. To adapt Churchill, it is in small as in great matters that statesmen fail to distinguish themselves.
As the fourth anniversary of the start of the nightmare approached, my $250 million of value in Ravelston had evaporated. The companies had been almost completely destroyed. America’s greatest, most prestigious, and most reliable source of general support in the international media, The Telegraph plc, was now in the hands of owners who were far from pro-American (the Barclays were influenced in part by Strine’s gross misjudgment). The corporate governance zealots had been exposed as the cynical or naïve but money-grubbing frauds I had always claimed they were. This was the fruit of the U.S. government’s four-year assault on honest men, at the behest of Breeden. Still, three-quarters of the allegations against the management had been rejected, and we retained a substantial possibility of complete official vindication. It was a war of attrition, and as Mort Zuckerman had said to me when early on we met on Madison Avenue, “It’s the last man standing.” Shortly after the trial, Candice Bergen, a very intelligent and generous-minded person, in addition to her better known talents and attractions, told Barbara what I took to be the view of her husband, the very able Marshal Rose, and the sophisticated circle of his business friends, who included my former director, Leslie Wexner: “What a time you’re having! Conrad will probably win, but at what cost!” Indeed.
THE JUDGE REJECTED THE defendants’ motions to overturn the convictions or declare mistrials, other than an acquittal of Kipnis on one count. Her reasoning, as Ruder was fond of saying, was “ridikalus” and disappointing: the fact that I hired a law firm that had a sizeable criminal practice demonstrated that I knew of the grand jury investigation of me, and confirmed the obstruction charge in the judge’s mind. How could an apparently serious judge write such bunk? We awaited her judgment on forfeiture (where Sussman had reduced his claim from $80 million to a still phantasmic $18 million); the sentences; and the continuation of bail, before taking the survivors among the government’s farrago of false charges to the Circuit Court of Appeal.
Sheila Lally submitted a favourable probation report, and I rounded up about a hundred letters of support from people in every conceivable walk of life. Many were very generous and moving. Barbara’s, Alana’s, Jonathan’s, Brian Stewart’s were among those that were particularly exquisite.
It was a little like reading my own obituary and being pleasantly surprised. Many former employees, people I had helped at various stages of their careers, as well as prominent people in many fields and from many countries, wrote embarrassingly generous requests to the judge for clemency. Carolyn Gurland performed prodigies in writing up materials for the judge and probation office, and by her fine sense of humour was a delight to deal with as well. I received up to fifty letters or emails of support a day as the sentencing date, December 10, approached. These ghastly afflictions are not without their rewards.
WE ATTENDED UPON THE judge yet again. The huge press contingent was relatively respectful: little jostling and no audible coarseness or abrasive questions on the way in or out (unlike the occasion early in the trial when Barbara had almost been knocked cold by a boom microphone). I sat between Jeffrey and Carolyn, majestic and well exercised as she entered the ninth month of her pregnancy. The Eddies, looking a bit out of place, were opposite; there was no shortage of people in the room who thought that if Greenspan and Genson had been up to the task, there would have been no sentencing. I shook hands with each of them on the way in and out, but there was no conversation between us.
Gene Fox from Cardinal Capital, a small institutional investor and former obsequious supporter of mine, rambled on in a hastily misconceived victim statement blaming me for the collapse of the company starting long after I had left. Sussman asked twenty years – a likely life sentence, as might be asked for murderers and rapists – and $27 m
illion of fines and forfeitures.
He grumbled about lack of “remorse,” as if the limited perspective and incoherent judgment of the jurors on a quarter of the counts must cause me at once to do a U-turn, acknowledge my guilt, and renounce everything I had said on the subject for the last four years. I was delighted that he was particularly miffed that I had publicly called the prosecutors “Nazis” and complained vociferously about my recent BBC interviews. Most of the media and even some of my counsel had expressed confidence (though not to me personally) that my remarks would cost me years in prison. I was to surface only occasionally, like the orange-suited defendants shunted into court in handcuffs to be momentarily represented by blasé legal-aid public defendants.
Jeffrey Steinback, a chronic optimist, thought he could get the announced sentence under three years; I thought a bit more. Barbara and Alana thought a little more negatively. Jeffrey rebutted the complaints about the interviews and produced a rather awful mangle of Portia’s speech on mercy from The Merchant of Venice. The judge invited me to comment.
Conrad Black Page 53