This entire prosecution, and a number of civil suits as well, were based on the report of the Special Committee of the board of Hollinger International, directed by its counsel, Richard Breeden, and published in September 2004. That report accused me of having led a “$500-million corporate kleptocracy.” The non-competition payments almost entirely legitimized in this case were described as “thefts.” And the authors of the report promised to lead the company back to unheard of levels of profitability. They did but not in the direction indicated. I launched the largest libel suit in Canadian history against Breeden and the others responsible for writing and publishing this infamous report.
My libel suit, and several other lawsuits around this case, are being settled, including a sizeable payment to me on the libel claim. This is the ultimate collapse of the Breeden Special Committee report, whatever other interpretation the defendants in the case may, consistent with their notions of accuracy throughout these proceedings, seek to place on it.
The authors of the report were not prepared to defend it where they would not have an immunity for perjury as most of the government witnesses did here. Nor were they prepared to defend their self-directed largesse of $300-million, as they drove the company into bankruptcy, taking down $2-billion of shareholder value with it.
Over 80 per cent of that value belonged to ordinary people throughout the U.S. and Canada, the type of people Mr. Cramer spoke about at the opening of the trial when he likened us to masked and violent bank robbers who stole depositors’ money at gunpoint, because we had supposedly rifled the shareholders’ family college funds. And Breeden’s original action of January 2004, containing the false charge that I had threatened the Special Committee, repeated just last month by the government in its presentence filings on May 27, has also been abandoned.
Mark Twain famously said that “A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth gets its trousers on.” It is very late in this case, Your Honour, but the truth has almost caught up with the original allegations.
I have at times expressed concern about the ethics of some of the prosecutors in this case, Your Honour, but never of the role of prosecutors, or of the necessity to convict criminals and protect society. But I must emphasize that I consider that the prosecutors, too, are victims. If they had not believed Breeden’s lies, now effectively abandoned in the face of my libel suit, the U.S. Attorney would surely not have launched such a fantastic assault on us.
And I can assure the assistant U.S. attorney that I did not say on Canadian television that I was like the person checking his own expense account. I said that for the appellate panel that had been excoriated by Madame Justice Ginsburg on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court, when assigned the task of assessing the gravity of its own errors, to resurrect these two counts after a gymnastic distortion, suppression and fabrication of evidence, was like someone reviewing his own expense account.
Your Honour, these are, in any case, very threadbare counts. Is it really conceivable to you that if I were inexplicably seized with the ambition to embezzle $285,000, I would have it ratified by a committee and then, after what the minutes of the meeting described as “extensive discussion,” by the whole board? I would have to have been mad.
And obstruction: It is clear from the evidence that I had nothing to do with selecting or packing the contents of the boxes, had no knowledge of any SEC interest in them after complying with five of its subpoenas, and after being assured by Mrs. Maida that it did not violate the Canadian document retention order, and checking with the acting president of the company, whose letter you have, I helped to carry out the boxes under the gaze of security cameras that I had installed. When these boxes arrived here, they were very full, so if I had taken anything out of them, why would I not have put them at any time over many weeks in my pockets or a brief case? Your Honour, again, to remove documents improperly in this way, I would have had to be barking, raving mad, and insanity is almost the only failing of which the prosecutors have not accused me.
I would like to express here my gratitude to you, Your Honour, for sending me to a prison with email access, where I was able to stay in touch with supporters and with readers of my newspaper and magazine columns. And I must also express my gratitude to the originally small but distinguished and often intellectually brave group of friends, but also of total strangers, who never believed I was guilty, when that was a less fashionable position than it has become. Their numbers grew to be an army that now includes many people in every American state and Canadian province, and region of the United Kingdom, and people in many other countries.
And my gratitude to the many friends I made, inmates and correctional personnel, at the Coleman Low Security Prison, whom I shall not forget, is beyond my ability to express today.
I am of the tradition that tends not to speak publicly of personal matters, but Your Honour, I hope it is acceptable to you if I vary that practice slightly, and briefly, in concluding, today. As you would know, or could surmise from many letters that have been sent to you qualified to comment, and as is mentioned in the presentencing submissions, I believe in the confession and repentance of misconduct and in the punishment of crime. I don’t believe in false or opportunistic confessions.
It is not the case, as has been endlessly alleged by the prosecutors, that I have no remorse. I regret that my skepticism about corporate governance zealotry, though it was objectively correct and has been demonstrated to have been so in the destruction of these companies, became so identified with the companies themselves that the shareholders all suffered from it.
I regret that I was too trusting of the honesty of one associate and the thoroughness of some others, and the buck has stopped with me. I repent those and other tactical errors and mistakes of attitude, Your Honour, and I do not resent paying for those errors, because it is right, and in any case inevitable, that people should pay for their mistakes.
I concluded many years ago in my brief stint as a candidate psychoanalyst that it is practically impossible to repress conscientious remorse. And I concluded some years later in reading some of the works of the recently beatified Cardinal Newman, that our consciences are a divine impulse speaking within us, as Newman wrote, “powerful, peremptory and definitive.” My conscience functions like that of other people, and I respond to it, if not precisely as my accusers would wish. But they are prosecutors, not custodians of the consciences of those whom they accuse.
Your Honour, please do not doubt that even though I don’t much speak of it, my family and I have suffered deeply from the onslaught of these eight years. I agree with the late pope who said “Life is cruciform.” All people suffer. It is a stern message, but need not be a grim one. We rarely know why we suffer, and only those who have faith even believe there is a reason. No one can plausibly explain in moral terms a natural disaster, or a personal tragedy. I see life as a privilege and almost all challenges as opportunities, and have always tried to take success like a gentleman, and disappointment like a man.
Whatever the reason my family and I have had to endure this ordeal, for our purposes today, in these personal questions, I only ask that you take into account the messages you have received about collateral medical problems in my family. I do not worry about myself, and I will not speak further in open court of the worries I do have for my family. But I most earnestly request, Your Honour, as someone who has shown and expressed family sensibilities several times in this case, that they too be taken into account in your sentence.
And I believe that even if a reasonable person still concludes that I am guilty of these two surviving, resurrected, counts, tortuously arrived at and threadbare though their evidentiary basis now is, that the same reasonable person would conclude that I have been adequately punished. I only ask you to recall the criterion you eloquently invoked near the end of the trial that the justice system not be brought into disrepute by an unjust sentence.
I conclude by quoting parts of a famous poem by Kipling, with which I’m su
re many in the court are familiar, and which I had known too, but not as well as I knew it after it was sent to me by well-wishers from every continent except Antarctica. And to the extent I was able, I tried to keep in mind throughout these difficult years, what Kipling wrote, which was, in part and as memory serves:
If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust your own counsel though all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, If you wait but are not tired of waiting, Are lied about, but don’t deal in lies, If some men hate you but you don’t stoop to hating; And don’t look too good or talk too wise; If you can talk but don’t make words your master, Can think but don’t make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with triumph and disaster, But treat both those imposters just the same.
And I address this directly to the prosecutors and some of the media:
If you can bear to hear the truths you’ve spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, And see the work you gave your life to broken, And stoop to fix it up with worn-out tools.
If you can make a pile of all your winnings, And risk it on a turn of pitch and toss, And lose and start again at your beginning, And never say a word about your loss.
And Kipling goes on to say that the reader will then be a man. Your Honour, when I first appeared in your court six years ago and you asked me my age, it was sixty-one. If I’m not a man now, I never will be.
I never ask for mercy and seek no one’s sympathy. I would never, as was once needlessly feared in this court, be a fugitive from justice in this country, only a seeker of it. It is now too late to ask for justice. But with undimmed respect for this country, this court, and if I may say so, for you personally, I do ask you now to avoid injustice, which it is now in your gift alone to do. I apologize for the length of my remarks, and thank you, for hearing me out, Your Honour.
PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
The photographs are reproduced by the permission of the following (page numbers refer to photographic inserts). All other photographs are courtesy of the author.
SECTION 1:
1.2 © Anthony Marshall.
1.3, 1.4 © Barry Swaebe
1.11 © Tom Tavee.
1.13 Photo by Norm Betts/Bloomberg via Getty Images
1.14 © Dick Loek, Toronto Star Syndicate
SECTION 2:
2.2 Screen Door Productions: “In Shades of Black: The Conrad Black Story,” © 2006. Lara Flynn Boyle as Barbara Amiel. Albert Schultz as Conrad Black.
2.8 Courtesy of Michael Harris.
2.9 Photograph © George Pimentel
2.10, 2.11 Photo by Frank Polich/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Photo by Kiichiro Sato, Associated Press
2.12 Photo by Frank Polich/Bloomberg via Getty Images
SECTION 3:
3.1 © Joshua Lott, Reuters
3.2, 3.3 Associated Press; Photo by Adam berry/Bloomberg via Getty Images
3.4, 3.5 photo by Mike Mergen/Bloomberg via Getty Images; photo by Win MacNamee, Getty Images
3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9 photos by Scott Olson, Getty Images; photo by Tasos Katopodis, Getty Images, photo by Frank Polich/Bloomberg via Getty Images
3.10, 3.11, 3.12 photo by Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images; photo by Tim Boyle, Getty Images; photo courtesy of POOL/AFP/Getty Images
3.16 Reuters/Hans Deryk
3.17 Reuters/John Gress
Conrad Black Page 68