Toronto Life: The Trial of Conrad Black

November 2007 Archive

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 30, 2007 by Douglas Bell

Whatever else one might say about Conrad Black (most of which must have been broadcast at one time or another by participants on this blog), I defy anyone to gainsay the man’s fluency. This morning Black engaged with BBC Radio’s John Humphrys for a quarter of an hour. No shrinking violet himself, Humphrys pulled few punches in carrying on an intense though entirely civil interview. Confronted by his current status as a convicted felon and all-around tragic figure “worthy of Shakespeare,” Black gave as good or better than he got:

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 29, 2007 by Douglas Bell

Another flood of Blackanalia this morning, what with reports on the defence’s 53-page response to the PSR, the hundred-odd letters from the great and good favouring mercy, his Lordship’s second LongPen event (this time in London), and even a story about Black litigating Revenue Canada over efforts to review his tax records. Where to start? The Globe and the Post devoted front-page coverage, offering comprehensive précis of the report, including contents of the various letters and the mitigating legal arguments. The Globe’s partial list of letter writers alone is jaw dropping:

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 28, 2007 by Douglas Bell

There was an avalanche of coverage this morning discussing the implications of his Lordship’s Pre Sentencing Report (PSR). Led by Times man James Bone, the consensus suggests that if it were up to the anonymous probation officer, Black would do a good deal less time than the braying tricoteuses would have predicted or preferred. “A confidential pre-sentencing report,” writes Bone, “gives Lord Black of Crossharbour hope of a jail term that is decades shorter than demanded by prosecutors in his U.S. fraud case.”

Return of the LongPen

Posted on November 26, 2007 by Douglas Bell

The mutually beneficial embrace entwining Conrad Black and the LongPen continues this Wednesday at Waterstone’s Piccadilly in London, where Crossharbour will repeat his recent performance at Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore. Black will spend 20 minutes or so discussing the Nixon book with Andrew Roberts, the conservative British historian and long-time Black ally. Roberts will play a similar though likely more polished role to that of Seamus O’Regan at the Toronto signing. Still, one hopes and prays that he will avoid the by now stale query “Where on earth did you find the time?” After that, things will likely get a little dicier. A report in The Independent last week indicated that Black will “spend a further 20 minutes speaking to hacks at the event.” In this context, “hacks” refers to a rather more aggressive breed of journalist than those who compliantly rolled over for Black in Toronto. Even the press release from Waterstone’s makes a pointed reference to Black’s travails: “Lord Black, once one of the world’s most powerful press barons, is facing a prison term as he is due to be sentenced on December 10th.”
The floodgates should open to a series of what by Canadian standards would count as rude and embarrassing questions. I can hardly wait.

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 22, 2007 by Douglas Bell

On several occasions on this blog, I’ve suggested that the entwined cases of Muhammad Salah and Abdelhaleem Ashqar might be something of a bellwether for Conrad Black’s prospects at sentencing. As of this morning, I hope for Black’s sake this isn’t the case.

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 21, 2007 by Douglas Bell

Fortune’s ebb and flow is never more apparent than at auction. Joyner Waddington’s fall sale of Canadian art last night was no exception. A room full to the brim with several hundred players, punters and mere observers (including, oddly, George Chuvalo’s former manager, Irving Ungerman) attended as 221 lots went up for bids. Of those, 163 sold, pulling down $4 million-odd in the bargain. And while there was some anticipation in the press regarding two works from Black’s Hollinger collection, the response from bidders was varying degrees of indifference. Paintings by A.Y. Jackson and Marc Aurèle Suzor-Coté, at $75,000 and $110,000 respectively, realized prices well below estimate, and in the case of the Suzor-Coté, Black and Hollinger in essence took the painting back in hopes of achieving a better price at a later date. After Black’s puffed-up comments in the Globe yesterday, detailing his success in forcing Hollinger to share in the proceeds, this all must have come as something of a disappointment. In the room itself, as these lots came up for bid, there was no response of any kind beyond the odd murmur. At the other end of the scale, when a tiny Tom Thomson fell to the hammer at $1.4 million, the room burst into spontaneous applause. Fortune’s ebb and flow.

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 20, 2007 by Douglas Bell

Besides keeping an eye on a couple of his Canadian paintings up for auction at Waddington’s this evening, no doubt Lord Black is watching with some interest and sympathy the plight of former H&R Block CEO and chairman Mark Ernst, who today resigned his position effective immediately. The man slated to take over as chairman is none other than Black’s nemesis, former SEC chairman Richard Breeden. Breeden led a proxy fight against Ernst in an effort to force the company to divest itself of its financial services operations and refocus on its core tax business. Having won the day, Breeden, not generally known for his warmth and generosity, said of Ernst, “In his years at H&R Block, Mark Ernst has worked tirelessly and with integrity to pursue the best interests of the company and its shareholders. The board of directors and his colleagues are grateful to Mark for his many years of dedicated service.” That’s just a smidge more congenial than his dictum that Black and his ilk be “left naked, homeless, and without wheels.”

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Douglas Bell

Recently a British composer of note described for me how the gutter instinct infects every strata of limey journalism. “The broadsheets can’t wait for the tabs to call somebody a pedophile because then they can call the same guy a ‘pedophile’—quoting the tabloids—and achieve the same effect.” A similar phenomenon was in evidence over the weekend in Sarah Sands’ fare-thee-well to Barbara Amiel in the pages of The Independent. Sands, who used to edit Amiel at The Daily Telegraph, has over the last several years made something of a cottage industry out of long “balanced” appreciations of the Blacks. It’s a neat trick. She sets up a distorted public perception of the Blacks as horror freaks, then knocks down those straw monster(s), all the while nudging and winking at the reader that, all this having been said, they really are pretty bad. Take the following two passages, for instance:

Black Watch: Today's Top Stories

Posted on November 15, 2007 by Douglas Bell

Smatterings of Conrad Black in the news today as his portrait by Andy Warhol sells at Sotheby’s for more than expected ($240,000 vs. $200,000 U.S.), and Judge St. Eve grants Black and his sentencing consultant Jeffrey Steinback another 10 days to prep for his hearing (now set for December 10). Continue...

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 14, 2007 by Douglas Bell

There’s something spectacularly beside the point in Theresa Tedesco’s opus in this morning’s Post. Tedesco reports that criminal lawyer (and fellow blogger) Steven Skurka reveals in his upcoming book on the trial that Tom Bower spent every morning chatting with David Radler around the pool at the Peninsula Hotel before our favourite snitch trooped off to court to testify against his former partner. This stunning bit of news leads Tedesco to call up a bunch of lawyers in Chicago who, on cue, profess to being squeamish at learning that a witness would (gasp!) speak to a journalist while on the stand. Tedesco puts paid to most of her innuendo when she quotes Randall Samborn, the prosecution’s chief flack and bottle washer: “The suggestion that journalists may only talk to witnesses after they have completed their testimony is simply not a rule, and there is no prohibition in this case on reporters talking to witnesses.” And a good thing, too, since the prosecutors were themselves given to leaking the odd bit of news when the fit hit them. Rules restricting the press at American trials are like the Geneva Convention: a nice idea in theory, but in practice, not so much. The fact is that everybody at this trial—defence, prosecution, everyone save the judge and Randall Samborn, it seems—spent some portion of their time leaking, spinning and leaking and spinning. So while I expect this won’t be the last we’ll hear of this, in the end it will amount to so much sound and fury signifying nothing.

Black Watch: Today's Top Stories

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Douglas Bell

It’s a theme that runs through our collective take on Canada’s great and not so great. McCall and Clarkson on Trudeau: “He haunts us still.” Newman on Mulroney: “He bugs us still.” And what might the noted historian Conrad Black say of David Radler? How about: “He (select any or all of the following) irks, betrays, bemuses, gammons, hornswoggles, bamboozles us still”?

The Science of Sentencing

Posted on November 12, 2007 by Douglas Bell

Reading the mind of Judge Amy St. Eve when it comes to sentencing Conrad Black falls somewhere between deciphering tea leaves and deconstructing molecular science. There are clues, but you have to know where to look. Broadly speaking, St. Eve is respectful of government sentencing recommendations. Sometimes these can be pretty far-fetched—as in the case of Abdelhaleem Ashqar, which I’ve discussed in this space before. In Black’s case, the government is asking for 19 to 24 years, which seems absurdly high both intuitively and in terms of the sentencing guidelines that were in place at the time Black committed the crime. Still, in the interim, the guidelines have changed for securities-related offences, and Black looks to be the last high-profile corporate felon heading up the river for a while, so St. Eve looks to have good reason to split the difference. Lawyers who’ve appeared before St. Eve agree she’s smart and supremely ambitious, and therefore realizes that sentencing in these sorts of cases is highly politicized. This, of course, cuts both ways, which at the end of the day bodes ill for his Lordship. If he gets less than 10 years, I’ll eat this blog on the courthouse steps. Continue...

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 8, 2007 by Douglas Bell

A careful parsing of his Lordship’s interview with Tom Moroney of Bloomberg Radio offers further evidence that despite his bravado, fluency and flashes of humour, Conrad Black’s most ferocious antagonist remains Conrad Black. To be fair, it’s clear that he was sandbagged. Nearly half of what Black clearly thought was an interview about Nixon was devoted to tough questions about the trial and his prospects on appeal. Black was sufficiently taken aback to ask the interviewer, “Do you really [want to get to the book]? Because I thought that was what we were supposed to be talking about.” For his part, Moroney’s approach, while genial, was nonetheless persistent and pointed—a happy relief from the obsequiousness of recent Canadian interlocutors (the Newman/Black imbroglio notwithstanding).

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 7, 2007 by Douglas Bell

This morning’s offerings include the usual assortment of Brits playing catch-up on Conrad Black’s most recent travails. Among these, The Times’ James Bone offers a brutally arch, though, as always, entertaining summary. On the margins of the case, the prosecutors continue to take laps of honour celebrating their much-prized victory. Eric Sussman recently flew into town and was rumoured to have palled around at the Toronto Star. And Julie Ruder, whose folksy summing-up at trial was the subject of rave reviews, turns up in the most recent edition of Crain’s Chicago Business magazine’s annual list of “forty under forty.” The theme this year is “my favourite hour.” Ms. Ruder’s preference?

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 6, 2007 by Douglas Bell

Plenty to mull over today in light of Amy St. Eve’s entirely expected ruling quashing Conrad Black et al.’s efforts to elicit a new trial or overturn their convictions (with one notable, if relatively minor, exception: the judge overruled one of Mark Kipnis’ three fraud convictions). Beyond recitations of the obvious, reports of St. Eve’s findings suggest that this could be the first in a series of legal routs facing Black up to and including his sentencing. Writing in the National Post, Peter Brieger and Theresa Tedesco point out that new sentencing guidelines introduced in 2006 for securities fraud could add as much as two years to each count of the fraud convictions facing the Hollinger four. The Eddies, on the other hand, argue that those guidelines were introduced long after the crimes were committed and that, at any rate, given the leniency of Radler’s sentence, the mammoth sentences being asked for by the prosecution (in Black’s case, 19 to 24 years) “offends fundamental notions of justice.” For all that, a close reading of St. Eve’s findings points to the desperation of the defendants’ arguments. To wit:

Black Watch: Today’s Top Stories

Posted on November 5, 2007 by Douglas Bell

Down the years, Conrad Black’s efforts at both practising journalism and owning the presses that print it have met with mixed results. As a journalist, his sensibility fell somewhere on a spectrum between afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable. As an owner, his attitude was rather more like that of Orson Welles’ fictitious creation Charles Foster Kane, with his famous dictum that the public will think “what I tell them to think.” Of course these two stances are somewhat at odds, which is why simultaneously owning the paper and writing its contents is generally frowned upon. Even Black knew that, as an owner, one needs to at least doff one’s cap in the general direction of that ethical bromide. Hence whenever he felt compelled to comment in the newspapers he owned, he would, like the rest of his paper’s readers, write a letter to the editor. That his scribbling for the most part made it into the paper in a timely and generally unabridged fashion always reminded me that the press, while free, is generally more congenial toward those who can afford it.

Timing is Everything

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Douglas Bell

As a businessman, Conrad Black’s successes were invariably put down to impeccable timing. In landing Argus and The Daily Telegraph, his unerring sense of carpe diem was generally conceded to be the deciding factor. And yet, just as fate deals Lord Black a cruel hand, it seems this instinct has abandoned him. Take, for instance, his decision to fight in open court the indictments against him by the government of the United States. These charges came during a period of intense focus on the part of the Department of Justice on so-called white-collar or corporate crime.

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