Conrad Black is not guilty

Like O.J. Simpson, Lord Crossharbour is being framed

By Frank Touby –

As I watch the prosecutorial abuse of my fellow media mogul, Lord Black of Crossharbour, it is apparent how that stilted skit we call a justice system plays to the very stages we erect.

Lord Black, or Conrad as I know him, has been targeted by a showbiz prosecutor in the States and it’s interesting to observe the mechanics of this operation. Many prosecutors in the U.S. and Canada are theatrical players of one sort or another, seeking fame by afflicting the famous to enhance their own dour personages, or to exhibit the outgoing sides of their personalities in an action format where they’re in charge.

Of course there are prosecutors who have great integrity and who truly seek justice. One wonders if that’s the case with Conrad’s tormentors.

Though the trial is far from over and there are still testimonies to be heard, the just verdict seems already evident, if unpleasant to the eyes of those who like to see the mighty topple: Like O.J. Simpson, Conrad was framed.

True, there were no cops carrying blood samples to various crime scenes as in the O.J. debacle. No police-department “criminalists” were dozily contaminating the evidence so as to make it unusable in any fair court.

Conrad’s prosecutors merely went for the low-hanging fruit, threatening those celebrities who had been hired at huge prices to be the watchdogs over Conrad’s corporate affairs, and who fell asleep on the job.

Having heard a complaint from a shareholder that Conrad and his associate David Radler were scooping funds that should belong to shareholders, Chicago’s celebrity prosecutor pounced.

Imagine: the two main individuals responsible for creating a massive lucrative newspaper empire sold off their rights to do so again in competition with the party who had just purchased their holdings. As individuals, Conrad and David, had a perfect right to turn around and use their well-honed skills and connections to get back into the business and go head on against those who were purchasing Hollinger’s assets.

Why should Hollinger’s public shareholders be entitled to a stake in payments to prevent those two (commercially speaking) potentially dangerous individuals from personally starting up a business in competition with those purchasing Hollinger’s assets? They aren’t so entitled. It’s simple logic.

So that should be the end of the matter. But no. There are celebrities to roast and a bigger stage upon which to prance in promotion of currently fashionable good corporate governance.

And thus it was that David Radler was hauled up in front of a Chicago grand jury and threatened with centuries in America’s cruel prisons unless he could place the neck of a celebrity in the noose.

Who better than my fellow publisher, the obscenely rich, Thesaurus-spouting, pompous, anti-democratic aristocrat, too-damn-smart Conrad Black?

So Radler, or “Rattler” as he was unaffectionately known amongst the minions who slaved beneath him at the Chicago Sun-Times and other journals, was terrorized enough to sign up for a couple of years in the joint if he’d rat on Conrad. And rat he did. We’ll hear the echoes of this betrayal in coming weeks as David spins in the wind while Conrad’s prosecutors attempt to cloak their prize witness with credibility.

That’s a monumental task, considering they don’t have a case to begin with and their panicked star witness has no guaranteed deal and his eventual return to freedom is utterly dependent on his putting on a convincing show favouring the prosecution.

Then the prosecutors sought to scare the daylights out of Hollinger’s blue-ribbon audit committee and recruit them against Conrad. More celebrities to flash about. They were a target because the audit committee is responsible for ensuring a corporation’s business affairs and reporting relationships with government and its shareholders are above board.

If they were somehow lax in their performance of their auditing duties—a few hours a year for which these celebrities were each paid a plumber’s annual wage—they could at best be held civilly liable to Hollinger shareholders. At worst, they could be charged with criminal offences such as allegations of conspiracy.

They’d better have sided with the prosecutors and tell the tale they all told. The prosecutors still hold an axe over the heads of former U.S. Ambassador Richard Burt, famed economist Marie-Josée Kravis and ex-Illinois Gov. Big Jim Thompson, just as they have a noose around David Radler’s Adam’s apple.

The trio’s tales were identical: None of them saw or willingly signed off on the allegedly improper non-compete payments; none of them remembered much, but all remembered that Conrad and David were so tight together they practically finished each other’s sentences. Not that they had seen David and Conrad together outside the board room where the pair would have been expected to be together on the same page in front of the audit committee.

It was clear that all three board turncoats had been prompted by the prosecution as to what the story line is. That became crystal clear when, at the end of his addled testimony, Thompson reportedly walked over to the prosecution table, shook their hands and gave them the thumbs-up sign.

Prosecutors no doubt were counting on the envy factor to play a strong role in getting a working-class jury to punish the dickens out of these unbelievably rich people by hoisting up the yardarm an adjective-spouting historian with a lavish wife and a lifestyle only achievable in romance novels.

They also likely were counting on numbing jurors into coma with accounting technicalities in hopes it might cause them to throw up their hands and just believe the experts. It didn’t work with the O.J. jurors in those hours of boring DNA testimony and it won’t likely work here.

Before the prosecutors’ three hostages had testified jurors were already getting glazed eyefuls of how all the pertinent information about the alleged theft-by-non-compete deal violated this and that beancounting protocol.

But more to the point, they were getting the very accurate picture of how Conrad had hired top-of-the-line advisors from major law and accounting firms—and had put together a blue-ribbon board of directors.

At this point I have to confess that although we’re both publishing entrepreneurs at opposite ends of the spectrum, aside from my possessing a Thesaurus I know only fractionally and an admiration for the writing of his brilliant and seductive wife, Barbara Amiel, Conrad and I share little else in common. Oh, and we’re both Catholic.

Perhaps that latter point helps me understand why Conrad remains bullheaded in face of such daunting brute prosecutorial power. The temptation to do a Radler must be strong, though there is no one Conrad can pull the plug on except himself. We Catholics believe that one can only commit a sin through intent. An inadvertent or ignorant act isn’t a sin.

But is it a crime? Probably doesn’t matter in this case. I think the prosecutors are going to have to show Conrad as a sinner in this situation, not just an inadvertent criminal. The jury will likely demand a very strict construction of the theft scenario that the prosecution isn’t able to erect.

Conrad hired seemingly the best professional advice in the market and had every right to depend on it. Jurors can see that. They’ve probably been screwed over by more professionals in their lives than Conrad has. This poor rich guy can’t get treated any better than we are even with all his fancy trappings.

And here are these prosecutors who ought to know better, trying to make a federal case out of a guy whose consultants let him down and who merely sold what he had a perfect right to sell: his personal pledge not to compete against purchasers of some Hollinger properties the corporation sold.

The prosecutors look like shits.