[A-List] "Like a toilet seat around their necks"

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm at war with the US government, says Conrad Black

Oliver Burkeman and Andrew Clark in Chicago
Saturday May 19, 2007
The Guardian 

The disgraced former media tycoon Conrad Black is at war with the US
government, he tells the Guardian in an exclusive interview today,
dismissing the fraud case against him as "bullshit" and "a joke", and
claiming that his legal rights have been infringed.

"I'm sending everyone a message. I'm saying this is war," Lord Black
says, explaining his decision to publish a 1,100-page biography of
Richard Nixon in the midst of a trial that could see him sentenced to up
to 101 years in prison. He has been "attacked in a violent manner [by]
the US government" he says.

"There's a promise in the fifth amendment of no seizure of property
without proper compensation. It's an outrage. Due process is guaranteed.
It's not happening," says the former owner of the Telegraph and the
Spectator, who stands accused, with three co-defendants, of siphoning
off $60m (£30m) of his shareholders' money through phoney
non-competition agreements, and enjoying lavish parties and private
jet-travel on company expenses.

Lord Black insists the extravagant lifestyle attributed to him in Tom
Bower's biography of himself and his wife, Barbara Amiel, is "a complete
myth". "My judgment isn't 'The game is won, I'm on an inexorable march
to victory'," he adds. "This still has its scary moments. But I see the
trend. My strategy is working."

Lord Black says he was genuinely shocked at how "under-appreciated" he
was by journalists at the Telegraph. Under the new owners, the Barclay
brothers, the newspaper has lost all of its influence and standing, he
says.

In Chicago, there has been mounting speculation that Lord Black may take
the stand in his own defence following two weeks of damaging testimony
by his former righthand man, David Radler. Radler has admitted fraud and
has been giving evidence against his boss under a plea agreement. He
says the fallen media mogul came up with the idea of looting non-compete
payments from Hollinger during a 1998 telephone call - and that Lord
Black provided the impetus throughout the fraudulent scheme.

In rancorous exchanges, defence lawyers have spent days pummelling away
at Radler's credibility. Radler has vigorously fended off criticism - so
aggressively that, at several points, the judge ordered him to restrain
himself and stop arguing with his questioners. Radler has insisted: "I
pled guilty because I am guilty. That's it."

'This still has its scary moments. But I see the trend. My strategy is
working' 

*****

Black at bay

Not everyone would react to the prospect of 101 years in jail by writing
a biography of Nixon, but Conrad Black is not everyone. Oliver Burkeman
meets the defiant ex-tycoon 

Saturday May 19, 2007
The Guardian 

The former media mogul Conrad Black has a broad face, as impervious as
an Easter Island monolith and nearly as motionless; he expresses himself
by tiny adjustments in the narrowness of his eyes, which are narrow to
begin with. In court in Chicago, where he is facing up to 101 years in
prison for fraud, he assumes a detached, sceptical air, as if the trial
were mildly amusing, and happening to someone else. Occasionally, when a
former friend enters the witness box to testify against him, he flashes
an icy glare. Then there's his third expression - a feline look of
pleasure, eyes almost closed - which is rarely seen these days, but
which will return, presumably, should he be acquitted of all charges.

Black, 62, considers this outcome a near-certainty, since the case
against him is "bullshit". It is also a "joke", an "outrage" and a
"complete fraud"; the idea that he and his wife, Barbara Amiel, enjoyed
an extravagant lifestyle is "complete and total rubbish". The
prosecution, he explains, are "suffering mood fluctuations" as it dawns
that they are heading for "a complete wipeout". It is a feature of
conversation with Lord Black of Crossharbour that his stormy language is
at odds with his implacable bearing: he calls his biographer, Tom Bower,
a "malignant psychotic", but were you just out of earshot, you might
think he was discussing baseball results.

There are no court proceedings today, so Black has agreed to meet at
Chicago's Four Seasons hotel to discuss his new book, a 1,100-page
biography of Richard Nixon. The fact that Black has chosen this moment
to publish a biography of Nixon is extraordinary but you do not need to
know all that much about the former Telegraph and Spectator owner to see
that it is entirely characteristic.

Nor should it come as a shock to learn that Richard Nixon: The
Invincible Quest is a work of rehabilitation, portraying the disgraced
president as brilliant, brave, and misunderstood. It's hard not to see
the book as a straightforward act of Freudian projection - or, failing
that, as a tribute from one wronged man of history to another. Look what
happens, it seems to say, when scandal-hungry journalists and envious
rivals try to bring down a successful maverick.

Black bristles at the comparison, partly out of deference to Nixon - and
partly out of deference to himself. "I feel terribly presumptuous
comparing myself to so exalted a person," he says in his Canadian
baritone. On the other hand, Nixon did behave in a "terribly tawdry"
manner over Watergate, even if he's far less guilty than believed.
"Whereas I am, in fact, an honest man, you know. And I don't believe in
lawbreaking. I don't take a cynical view of these things. I take a
reasonably indulgent view of other people under terrible pressures, like
he was. Reasonably but not overly indulgent. But by the end of next
month, everyone will see that any allegations against me are a complete
fraud."

We are sitting in leather armchairs in a dark corner of the bar,
drinking coffee. Now and then, Black scoops peanuts from a bowl and
chews them rapidly. "I have not made any effort to cover up anything."

Black's book is a persuasive defence of Nixon, crediting him with
steering America steadily in the world, avoiding isolationism but also
knowing when not to get involved in "quixotic or presumptuous" missions
abroad. Even the Watergate cover-up emerges as shabby, rather than
grandly criminal: Black's point, convincingly made, is that Nixon
doesn't deserve to be in a special category of badness, worse than all
other presidents, before or since.

"The US simply can't pretend that this guy was some aberration, some
kind of mutant, who ran on furry feet into the White House and hid his
real nature, until the brave people of the Washington Post pulled back
the shower-curtain one night, saw the cloven hooves, and threw him out."

Still, blame for Nixon's downfall must ultimately rest with the
president himself, Black argues: he lacked something - some internal
mechanism of self-correction - that might have held him back from the
precipice. "He did not seem to have the ability to see when he was
crossing the line into absolutely sleazy and outrageous things," Black
says, reaching for more peanuts.

Judge Amy St Eve is a brisk 41-year-old who presides over the Black
trial with a pencil tucked behind her right ear. Locally, she may be
more of a celebrity than Black (newspapers unfailingly mention that she
is not just a rising star in the judiciary but also a mother of three).
The prosecution and defence are ostentatious in their respect for her,
and she alone seems unscathed by the salvoes of malice and disdain that
ricochet around the courtroom.

When Black's lawyer, Ed Genson, shouts "Objection!" to the government's
argument, she tilts her head and looks upwards, thoughtfully, into her
brain, as if the correct response - "sustained" or "over-ruled" - might
be inscribed there.

One day last week, proceedings turned to the now infamous $62,000 bill
for Amiel's 60th birthday party, at the New York restaurant La
Grenouille in 2000. As Amiel and her stepdaughter Alana watched from the
public benches, the jury absorbed every detail of the event, projected
on to a large screen: the $13,000 spent on wine; the $320 bottles of Dom
Pérignon; the Beluga caviar, and the guest list featuring Donald Trump,
Tina Brown, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Henry Kissinger, Richard
Perle and, incongruously, Barry Humphries. Black, in pinstripes, turned
his back to the screen. Instead, he watched the jurors, one of whom took
detailed notes using a pen with a bright pink pom-pom on the end. She
was chewing bubble-gum, and once or twice she looked across at Black,
expressionlessly, and slowly blew a bubble until it popped.

Black is accused of illegally using money from his company, Hollinger
International, to pay for most of the party, along with various private
jet flights, and refurbishment of the couple's New York flat. But the
meat of the trial concerns $60m that he and three co-defendants
allegedly skimmed from sales of various Hollinger newspaper companies,
under the guise of "non-compete" agreements. In one extreme example,
Black and his co-accused shared a windfall of $400,000 for agreeing not
to open a rival newspaper in an isolated North Dakota town boasting a
population of 10,000 (and America's largest statue of a buffalo). The
government's case is that the arrangement was fraudulent, for various
reasons; and anyway, there was zero chance that Black would open a rival
paper there. Genson's counter-argument seeks to turn Black's legendary
self-regard into an advantage. "If you know Conrad Black's ego, and you
will by the end of this case," he told the jury early on, "you will know
that Conrad Black believes everybody wants a non-compete payment from
him."

That said, his perceived grandiosity may also prove to be the defence's
biggest challenge. If you believe Bower, the peer and his wife lived a
life of lavish parties, surrounded by servants whom they treated
viciously, taking £250,000 holidays in Bora-Bora and selecting their
evening-wear from overstuffed designer wardrobes. In a famous photograph
that seemed to crystallise the excess, the couple were photographed
arriving at a fancy-dress party at Kensington Palace dressed as Cardinal
Richelieu and Marie Antoinette.

Black insists today that this was all so much mythmaking. "It is a total
fraud that I lived with any particular extravagance," he says. A certain
amount of glitz was a business necessity. "I thought that part of the
transformation of the Telegraph was for the chairman to be - and I don't
mean this in an invidious way - a somewhat livelier presence around
London than [former chairman] Michael Hartwell," he says. "I had certain
ideas about how the chairman of a big newspaper should behave. So I
tried to conform to that. But I was not a vulgar person, and I don't
think anyone accuses me of being illiterate."

This last point seems a strange one to make, until you realise that, for
Black, it's all connected. History, he seems to believe, demanded that
he play a certain role - that of the munificent proprietor, at ease in
sophisticated society, agile with words - and he seems genuinely baffled
to have been demonised for trying so hard to comply. Besides, he adds,
apparently without irony, "my wife hated parties. This portrayal of her
as some kind of Marie Antoinette figure - complete rubbish." Far from
deserting him, as Bower has written, Black insists 95% of the couple's
friends have stayed loyal, though he is "genuinely shocked" at how
"under-appreciated" he was by Telegraph journalists. (He believes his
era is "looked on with some nostalgia" now; under the Barclay brothers,
he argues, the Telegraph doesn't have "any influence" or "any standing
any more".)

He has announced a C$11m (£5m) libel suit against Bower, one of several
he plans to pursue on acquittal. "Mr Bower is going to have a real
sleigh-ride. And he keeps compounding the libels with these absolutely
preposterous [articles] he writes!" He reels off a list of purported
errors. "Is the man mad? His malice is notorious. But I would not have
thought him so stupid as that."

Black counts Napoleon among his heroes, and sees his own battle in
military terms. "For years, I've been pummelled from all directions, and
I had to conduct an orderly withdrawal to a defensible perimeter." Then
he had to generate enough money to pay his legal bills, and his $21m
(£10.5m) bail. "I'm not Bill Gates, for God's sake. So I had to sell
some things."

Now he is staking everything on the trial. "And even the people who just
wanted me to be sent to prison without a fair trial - even they couldn't
say 'I don't want this man to have a fair trial.' Even a malignant
psychotic like Bower can't say that. And so this is the point at which
the advantage turns." The Nixon book is another salvo in the conflict.
"I'm sending everyone a message. I'm saying: this is war ... you'll be
aware of these stories that I was living in Toronto as some kind of
Howard Hughes, my hair to my navel. So I thought this could be my way of
demonstrating to my tormentors that they hadn't even prevented me from
writing a book."

Black sees his recent and future life in three distinct stages. "Stage
one were the ululations of joy at the so-called downfall. Stage two is
the big battle. The press like a big battle ... so they had to
resuscitate me to some degree, because you can't have a big battle with
a corpse. And then stage three is where I win."

The prosecution's case, he insists, is "hanging like a toilet seat
around their necks".

This all seems hugely optimistic, even if you take the view that Black
is innocent. The attempt to send him to prison has progressed quite
successfully so far, and it seems perfectly possible that a jury might
be persuaded - even if wrongly - to finish the job.

(He might serve his sentence in the US or Canada: Black gave up Canadian
citizenship to accept a peerage from the Queen in 2001 but is reportedly
seeking to regain it.) Would he be resilient in prison? "That isn't
phase three. Phase three is what happens when I win."

But you must have given it consideration - would you be resilient? "I
don't expect to get there. But yes, I would be. You know, Nixon said
some of the best writing's been done in prison: just think of Lenin and
Gandhi. Two writers with whom he was not in great sympathy! Nixon was
very entertaining at times."

A significant chunk at the end of Black's Nixon biography is dedicated
to the disgraced president's life after resignation. It is one of the
book's most absorbing stretches; the biographer seems fully to enter the
mind of his subject. Nixon's fall from grace was steep and painful -
but, as Black tells it, he soon began to recover, gradually gaining a
role of behind-the-scenes influence in American political life. The
lesson of his book, Black says, is: "Be careful about any rush to
judgment." There is something "still there, gnawing away at the
conscience of the country, saying 'wait a minute. Are we sure we didn't
mistreat this guy?'" He drains his coffee cup and glances at his watch.
It is time to leave: he has a court case to win.

The making of a tycoon

Born: Montreal, 1944, into a wealthy family. Tom Bower, his unauthorised
biographer, claims he was a rebel at his private school, showing "a
personality which savoured inflicting defeat".

Early career: Trained as a lawyer until, aged 25, he bought the
Sherbrooke Record, a small Canadian paper, with his business partner
David Radler, now the government's star witness. He gradually increased
holdings in newspapers (at one point owning 60 of Canada's 105 dailies)
and also mining.

Marriages: In 1977, to Shirley Walters, who changed her name to Joanna,
"at her husband's request", according to Bower: two sons, one daughter;
marriage ended in divorce. Then in 1992 to Barbara Amiel, a rightwing
journalist. "I knew what I wanted," she had written earlier. "To be
dropped at Selfridges or Harrods to pick up fresh salmon and search for
quails' eggs."

Rise to fame: His Hollinger International bought into the Telegraph
group in the mid-1980s, making the new chairman a fixture in London high
society, and breathing life into an ailing paper. In 1998 he launched
the right-of-centre National Post, which had the side-effect of forcing
up journalistic standards in Canada.

Becoming a peer: Black renounced Canadian citizenship in 2001 after a
dispute with Jean Chrétien, the prime minister. He is understood now to
be seeking to regain Canadian citizenship.

Criminal charges: Black is accused of fraud and obstruction of justice.
He and three other ex-Hollinger executives are accused of taking $60m in
phoney tax-free bonuses. Black is also accused of misuse of company
expenses. Hollinger International is also suing Black for $200m (£100m),
while Black is promising numerous libel suits.

Other books: Duplessis (biography of the Québécois leader Maurice
Duplessis, 1977); A Life In Progress (autobiography, 1993); Franklin
Delano Roosevelt (with Amiel and others, 2003).

· Richard Milhous Nixon: The Invincible Quest is published by Quercus
next month.


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