Entries associated with the tag "Conrad Black":

In a world swirling with danger and treachery, there's one thing Americans have always been able to count on -- the inferiority complex of our diffident neighbors to the north. The best Canadians have been able to do about it is tell themselves from time to time that they're somehow worthier than we are, if vastly less significant -- and they set great store by trifling evidence, such as the recent survey that reports Canada is a considerably happier country than the U.S. Well of course it is -- all the U.S. guarantees is the pursuit of happiness, and the fun's in the chase.

But the tide has turned. I was just in Canada (where I lived for a time as a boy), and came across a troubling cover story in Maclean's, the major national magazine up there. July 1 is Canada's "Canada Day" (sorta like our Independence Day but minus a war of independence), and Maclean's cover story took the familiar tack of thinking about Canadians in terms of Americans. What was new to me was the attitude!

The headline to this 12-page report: "How Canada Stole the American Dream. The numbers are in. Compared to the U.S., we work less, live longer, enjoy better health and have more sex. And get this: now we're wealthier too."

More money! More sex! They're beating us at our own games. I carefully studied the Maclean's report for the usual note of apology, the passage where the Canadian reporter allows that the numbers are subject to varying interpretations and, besides, Americans would be living like kings if they didn't spend so many billions defending shirkers like us and the rest of the free world. There was no such passage. In fact, Canadians aren't feeling like shirkers these days. Their soldiers have shed gallons of blood in Afghanistan, and when their lionized commander took over the army five years ago he said, "“We are not the public service of Canada. We are not just another department. We are the Canadian Forces and our job is to be able to kill people.”

That's how American generals used to talk.

My theory is this all began with the Conrad Black trial here in Chicago. The discovery that Canada could turn out a white-collar crook who impressed even Americans was a revelation in Canada, and those people have felt ten feet tall ever since. 

Conrad Black took plenty of notes during his long trial last year. He'd have thoughts and jot them down. It's what lots of defendants do while their lawyers try to get them off. Black wouldn't have made much of an impression on the jury if he'd sat there reading a book.

Black was a business executive accused of financial crimes. Reporters indicated that he was a colorful guy, but nobody tried to make anything of his note taking.

R. Kelly's a different matter. He's a singer up on sex charges involving an infamous video and an underage girl,  circumstances that bring out the virtuoso in a reporter. David Streitfeld wrote in the New York Times Tuesday that Kelly seemed to tune out the "wrangling" during jury selection. "Instead he spent most of his time intensely scribbling on index cards, taking dictation from a voice only he could hear." 

Richard Roeper questions the decision to give a photo of Conrad Black flipping reporters the bird the top prize in the annual News Photographers Association of Canada competition. "It's not even a good picture," Roeper says, eyeing the picture's technical shortcomings. Besides, "it's not even that unusual to catch a public figure in the act of giving the finger these days."

The photo was taken by David Chidley of the Canadian Press outside the Dirksen Building last July as Black arrived for a day of the trial that led to him serving six and a half years in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of justice. No, it's not a remarkable picture, and unless we take eyewitness testimony into account we can't even be certain that Black wasn't making some other sort of gesture. Where are the curled upper lip and mob boss scowl that normally accompany a first-rate mimed obscenity?

But on the other hand. Chidley's picture prevailed in the spots news category, where artistry plays second fiddle to immediacy. And the Canadian mind-set must be considered, not merely the preoccupation with all things Black but the normal cultural diffidence. "Canadian notable caught in demonstrative behavior" might have been the subtext that put Chidley picture's over the top.

The worst that can be said about the winning photo is that despite what it shows, it's false to Black. Susan Berger, a Chicago journalist who maintains a a blog on Black  and who alerted me to the win, observed in e-mail that for the most part "Conrad was totally a gentleman who actually enjoyed talking to the press. (I remember many times when his daughter Alana would just touch his arm and give him a look to get him to stop talking to us.) It was like his daughter and wife kept him in check. There is some irony that this photo won an award because it was truly not a depiction of his behavior during the trial but rather just one day when he lost it."

UPDATE: On the other hand ... 

Conrad Black, former owner of the Sun-Times, reported to a federal prison in Florida Monday to begin a six-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud and obstructing justice. His own man to the end, Black posted a statement Monday in Canada's National Post, a paper he founded, insisting on his innocence and declaring that he has "endured the most comprehensive international defamation I can recall in over four decades of close acquaintance with the media." Black noted that since "dissident shareholders" drove him away from Hollinger International, "our successors have made every conceivable business blunder and have eliminated $1.85-billion of shareholder value."

Black reported to Coleman Federal Correction Complex just before noon. In a separate story in the same edition, the Post said Black faces "a bleak and rigid daily prison life that is gruelling in its repetitiveness and fraught with risk." Because Black had renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to be named to Britain's House of Lords, he apparently made himself ineligible for transfer to a presumably gentler Canadian prison and that country's more lenient parole terms. And Canada's Globe and Mail observes that probably because he's British, a foreigner, Black was denied the prison camp in Miami he'd requested. 

But Black's not one for expressing regrets. Yet another National Post story has Black saying of his new home away from home, "I expect it to be somewhat boring," and allowing, "I'd rather do something bookish than physical labour. I wouldn't be the best guy they could have out mowing the lawn but I could do not badly teaching French or something like that." 

Black's downfall remains a huge story in Canada, and Chicago freelance writer Susan Berger was interviewed at length Monday by CBC TV. Berger covered Black's trial in Chicago from gavel to gavel last year and maintained a popular blog she continues to update. In January she passed a chatty evening with Black in Palm Beach.

And as for Black's partner in crime, David Radler, who turned state's evidence and got off easy, he's begun serving his time too.

As the year ends, a time to reflect . . .

Former CEO Dennis FitzSimons, who gave the Tribune Company 25 years, just walked out the door Sam Zell held open with a package worth $38.3 million in severance and stock. The sums bandied about in civil litigation were vastly larger, but in the end Conrad Black was convicted of stealing $6.1 million from Hollinger International and he just got six and a half years in prison. Maybe he should have fired himself instead.

The federal sentencing guidelines called for 30 to 37 months in prison. But Judge Amy St. Eve gave Mark Kipnis probation, ending the Conrad Black trial Monday night on a startling, almost-too-much-to-be-hoped-for act of mercy. It was the justice of Christmas movies, an unfamiliar sight in actual courtrooms. Steven Skurka, a Toronto lawyer who’s writing a book on the Black trial, said it was one of the most poignant courtroom moments he'd ever seen.

Skurka said that by the end of the trial the court had tilted back. The working title of his book, due out in February in Canada, is "Tilted: The Trial of Conrad Black," and Skurka’s thesis is that the federal courts in this country give every advantage to the prosecution. But Judge St. Eve didn’t. Taking full advantage of her license to veer from the stiff federal guidelines -- there’s an excellent analysis of that new license by Greg Burns in the Tuesday Tribune -- she handed down sentences far less severe than the government was asking for.

First up was Black himself. In a jammed 12th-floor courtroom, with banks of TV cameras in the Dirksen Building lobby below awaiting his descent, St. Eve sentenced Black to six and a half years in prison for ripping off Hollinger International shareholders of  millions of dollars in phony noncompete payments as he and his partner, David Radler, sold off the company. (Radler pleaded guilty and testified for the state in return for 29 months in a Canadian prison.) In a splendid demonstration of sangfroid, Black autographed copies of his new biography, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, during a recess. Unless the appeals process works a miracle for him he’ll be reporting to a minimum security federal "camp" in Florida in March -- a shame, really, in that I suspect Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, believes as I do that the only prison on earth worthy of him is the Tower of London.

Then two lesser Hollinger execs, Peter Atkinson and Jack Boultbee, who profited from the noncompetes at a vastly lower level than Black and Radler, stood before St. Eve in a half-empty courtroom looking miserable and were sentenced to 24 months and 27 months in prison respectively. It was 5:30 by then, and if Kipnis had wanted to, he could have come back in the morning. But he chose to get on with it. His family and supporters were waiting out in the hallway, and when they came in they filled the courtroom. "There’s the difference," Skurka told me as they found seats. When Kipnis -- who of course is a Chicagoan, while the other defendants are from Canada -- stood before St. Eve he also stood before a lot of people who actually cared.

Here’s another difference: The judge received about 200 letters singing Kipnis's praises, and a few days before the sentencing Ted Rilea, the vice president of labor relations for the Sun-Times Media Group, brought her a petition that had gone around the Sun-Times and had about 100 names on it. Appreciate that: People at the Sun-Times and the other Sun-Times Media Group properties despise Black and Radler (Radler ran the Chicago properties until the shareholders revolted) for their larceny. Yet they believed Kipnis, who’d been Hollinger's  corporate counsel, should be acquitted. When he wasn't they hoped he'd be spared prison.

The state saw it differently. Responding to a presentencing report that described Kipnis as a marginal participant in Black and Radler’s fraud, the U.S. attorney's office argued that on the contrary, as the lawyer who drafted the noncompete agreements Kipnis played a  "critical" role. "It does not matter that Kipnis was implementing other people's decisions rather than running the show," argued a government brief. "Nor does it matter that Atkinson and Boultbee received less money than Black and Radler, or that Kipnis received no money." St. Eve made it clear that these facts did matter to her, as did the letters and the petition, as did Rilea and Kipnis’s son Blair when they stood before her and pleaded for his freedom.     

Rilea suggested his friend's character by recalling the Sun-Times's 2001 contract negotiations with the Newspaper Guild, which were going nowhere before Kipnis proposed that the paper open its books and let the guild see with its own eyes how 9/11 had decimated advertising. "I know there was no intent at all to do anything dishonest," Rilea said. "In my opinion it would be a horrible, horrible thing for Mark to be in prison." Then Blair Kipnis stood before the bench, where he called his father "the rock on which his family is built," a man whose example he intended to follow by entering law school himself. "With all respect," Blair begged, "to imprison my father would be a horrible mistake. Please, please, don’t take the greatest thing in my life from me."

Kipnis’s lawyer, Ron Safer, described a life full of "acts of random kindness and generosity," and compared Kipnis to George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, a man brought to the brink of suicide by misfortune but then told to take stock of all the good he'd done in his life and supported by grateful friends. "I failed him," Safer told St. Eve. "I should have been able to convince this jury they should treat differently someone who received no money. But the final word has not been spoken. You will speak it." He told the judge she’d been fair throughout the trial and now he was asking her to be compassionate.    

And then Kipnis himself spoke. He said he'd joined Hollinger because he wanted to learn the newspaper business. "Ninety-nine percent of the time I believe I was competent," he said. "It was that one percent . . ." Yet "I never for a moment believed those noncompete agreements were illegal," he swore, suggesting that his mistake had been to assume there were other honest people around him who would tell him if they were. He said he'd been a lawyer for 30 years and despite the jokes was proud to be a lawyer, and now that life was gone. He and his wife had bought a little sign company and were struggling to make it go, and in the meantime the Sun-Times was struggling to survive "and it breaks my heart." He said, "My son should not have to put his life on hold. He should not have to stand before you today. My house should not have to be sold. My family should not have to be here today to hold me up."     

Last-second regrets don't often sway courtrooms, but in this case the audience didn't need to be swayed. Most reporters following the trial believed Kipnis had gotten a bad deal. When the trial began last March and federal prosecutor Jeffrey Cramer was laying out the government's case, he told the jury that Kipnis's share of the wealth was $150,000 in bonuses. "His price was just a little lower," said Cramer sarcastically. But Radler, the government's star witness, would later testify that the bonuses were a reward to Kipnis for his hard work and had nothing to do with the noncompetes. When the state rested, Safer asked for a mistrial on grounds that the prosecution had misled the jury. St. Eve denied his motion, but she said she was surprised by Radler's testimony and told Safer,"His testimony gives you a very powerful argument for your closing arguments."    

The argument didn't sway the jury. That's why Safer thought he'd failed his client by not making it clearly enough.  But St. Eve got it. She told Kipnis she understood "you didn’t receive a penny." She said "You are clearly the least culpable person," and she said she believed the price he had already paid for his crimes would serve as an adequate "deterrent" to the future crimes of others. She found it "telling" that Rilea had come to court to speak on his behalf. Probation with no time at all behind bars is a rare thing, but it's what Kipnis's supporters dared hope for, and I heard a slight murmur from their ranks as they began to understand that this is what the judge actually intended. She sentenced Kipnis to five years probation including six months of  electronically monitored home detention, and to 275 hours of community service. She fined him $200. There were gasps of joy, and hugs, and tears, and Kipnis stood quivering as euphoria overwhelmed him.     

Later I asked Safer when he thought St. Eve made up her mind. He said he had no idea. Euphoria doesn't last long, and when Kipnis adds everything up he'll be confronting the fact that he's middle-aged, disbarred, broke, and a convict, and for the next five years of probation his life won't be his own. But to enter prison is to die. To go home is to live.

If you ever worked for Conrad Black you might have wished you could mount his head on your wall. Now you can! A portrait of Black done by Andy Warhol in the early 1980s will be auctioned off in New York next month. London's Telegraph has the details. (The Telegraph, like the Sun-Times, used to be a Black paper. The Telegraph was far closer to his heart -- owning it was his ticket into Britain's House of Lords.)

Black counted Warhol among his pals, and the press baron -- who now awaits sentencing after being convicted in Chicago last July of fraud  -- owned four Warhols of himself, all silkscreened prints in different colors. Today a Vancouver museum has one, Black still has another, and Christie's will auction off the other two. Christie's expects the portrait that'll be on the block next month to fetch from $150,000 to $200,000. The price is of some interest to Black -- not that he'll see a penny of it. His old holding company, Ravelston, is in receivership and whatever the auction raises will be turned over to creditors, but Black must eventually pay something comparable to hang onto the portrait he's been allowed to keep.

Conrad Black will be hammered for “obstruction of justice”--hauling some boxes away from his office in Toronto. David Radler will be rewarded for greasing the wheels of justice--pleading guilty to fraud and testifying against Black. But as for the injustice itself--selling off the media properties of Hollinger International, which they ran together, and profiting handsomely from noncompete payments they set up--it’s pretty inarguable that if Black was guilty Radler was guiltier. Radler was the inside man, the guy at corporate headquarters in Chicago who regularly dealt with and apparently constantly bamboozled the cop on the beat, James Thompson, chairman of the board’s audit committee.

So while Black faces up to 35 years in an American prison, Radler’s looking at a maximum of 29 months of minimum security in British Columbia, perhaps at the place columnist Mark Steyn, a Black champion, likes to call a “golf therapy farm.” Now the Canadian media seem to be awakening to the fact that Radler’s coup might be even niftier than anyone thought.  I just had to turn down an invitation from a Canadian TV network that was putting together a discussion Thursday night of a story in last Saturday’s National Post (which Black, by the way, founded). The headline: “Radler quietly building local media empire.” 

The Post said Radler “has been quietly amassing a burgeoning community newspaper empire with his daughter.” That’s Melanie Radler, who for a while worked at Winston & Strawn when Thompson was chairman there. Last January I reported the deal that had Melanie Radler buying up a string of small Rhode Island papers. There's more. The Post reminds us that Radler still controls Horizon Publications, which owns a string of small newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, and he has a large interest in the Alta Newspaper Group, which owns papers in Alberta. The next couple years might not be easy for Radler--he said on the stand he doesn't play golf--but he can tell himself that once they're over he'll get to have the fabulous solo career he always deserved.

After the verdicts were in Friday convicting Conrad Black and three of his executives of fraud, Jim Thompson showed up on WBBM radio and was asked if he felt vindicated. “I wasn’t on trial so I don’t have to feel vindicated,” Thompson replied. It was a smart reply to a sloppy question. Even though Thompson testified three days for the prosecution at the Black trial, acquittals all around might have been better for him: Thompson couldn't be blamed for not seeing criminal behavior going on around him if there was none. But the jury said something criminal did happen--and Thompson hadn't noticed.

Thompson explained, “You can’t go on a corporate board with the assumption management is going to be dishonest. . . . Unless you went on there believing that Conrad Black and David Radler and Mark Kipnis and Boultbee and Atkinson were all out to deceive shareholders from the beginning, you wouldn’t have found it until we did our own investigation after the clues piled up.” He has a point. But Thompson was chairman of the audit committee. That’s the outsider who is supposed to guarantee on behalf of the shareholders that everything management does is on the up and up.

Let me make a comparison with the business I know: the audit committee chairman does roughly what a good editor does. Let’s say the editor oversees a group of writers she considers professional and upright. In a word, she admires them. Does this mean she takes it easy? No, because everyone makes mistakes, and her duty is to catch those mistakes and keep them out of the paper. In Thompson’s case, he was paid $60,000 of the shareholders’ money every year to be the board's worrywart: his job was to save his good friends Conrad Black and David Radler from some silly error in judgment that could eventually bring down the company--like, oh, selling off newspapers and making millions in noncompete payments they had no business getting.

It’s puzzling that during these do-nothing days while the Conrad Black jury is out more of the visiting Canadian and British press corps isn’t ducking into the “Family Secrets” trial. I mean, you're in Chicago already, seize the day! “Family Secrets” involves the Chicago mob, spiritually descended from Capone, in all its rancid glory, and how can any reporter who wallows in cultural cliche resist? You foreigners dissecting the ineffable lower-middle-class charms of Black's jury--don’t pretend you don't.

But though my Google search doesn’t turn up much in the way of international reporting on Calabrese, Lombardo et al, there are exceptions.  For instance, Nils Blythe of the BBC squeezed both trials into one story--not without strain. “So there is a curious connection between the two big trials in Chicago,” Blythe concluded. “Alleged murderers and mobsters are on trial on the 25th floor. A former media mogul is on trial on the 12th floor, under a law [the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act, or RICO] designed to prosecute the mob. Lord Black is 62--and if found guilty of racketeering and other offences, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. It is the same fate as that which awaits the alleged murderers in the court upstairs.”

And Rosie Dimanno of the Toronto Star began her piece: “Conspiracy, racketeering, usurious payment fees and a confederacy of sordid business wiseguys. No, we are not talking here about Conrad Black and his merry gang of alleged corporate hoodlums, although some similarities are tantalizing. Black et al haven’t been charged with whacking associates, rivals and plea-copping rats. There are boardroom hit men and there are gangland hit men, although both wear bespoke Italian suits.”

Dimanno smartly alerted her readers that among the crimes figuring into the Family Secrets trial was the murder back in 1986 of Anthony and Michael Spilotro, "themselves Mafia assassins. Martin Scorsese told their story in the movie Casino, one of them played by Joe Pesci. The film got some details wrong--the brothers were beaten to death a week before their bodies were found in an Indiana cornfield.” Thus she one-upped Leonard Doyle, a Washington correspondent for Britain’s Independent who’d written about “Family Secrets” a few days earlier and made his own allusions to Casino, the Spilotros, Pesci, and that Indiana cornfield but had failed to point out where Scorsese went astray.

After David Radler finished his eight days on the witness stand I went online to find out what they’re saying about him now in Canada. Radler was supposed to be the ballgame. The thunderbolt passing through the Dirksen Building May 10, halfway through his testimony, that Eddie Vrdolyak had just been indicted was enough to remind most of the local reporters there how little the Conrad Black trial actually matters to them. (The ones who used to work for him are a separate case.) But where Black and Radler come from, it remains the talk of the nation.

How Radler fared depends on who you read. If that’s Peter Worthington in the Toronto Sun, you're reading that "such self-immolation of a star witness" had never before been seen by veteran court observers. You’re reading it's unlikely there's anyone following the trial “who thinks Radler is capable of not lying.” (You’re also reading that "no one gives a damn about the other [three] co-defendants," and there’s no disputing that.) But if  syndicated columnist Allan Fotheringham is your choice, you're being told it's Worthington not to trust. "The Canadian journalism treatment of this trial has been a disgrace," says Fotheringham. "Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun, Mark Steyn for Maclean’s, Christy Blatchford for the Globe and Mail--all of whom have worked for Black at one stage or are friends--have been so vicious of Radler and fawning of their hero as to be embarrassing to their trade."

If Steyn's your man, you find him sneering that Radler cut a bargain with the U.S. attorney's office "that reduces what would have been a multi-decade deal to six months of golf and community theatre in a BC country club." And there's Blatchford measuring the star witness with contempt from her press pew and concluding, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, let alone for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, than it is to get a straight answer out of David Radler."

Early in the trial, Steyn had an exchange with blogger and radio host Hugh Hewitt. Steyn said, "The people who ran Hollinger had a strange board. In other words, it had mainly Canadian executives, and then its independent directors were all these big-shot Americans like Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle and Jim Thompson. . . . And basically, the  government's case in this trial is that these--this sinister cabal of Canadians came down from north of the board, the badlands north of the 49th Parallel, and cunningly pulled the wool over the eyes of these-- "

Hewitt broke in, laughing. "Over Richard Perle's eyes?"

Steyn went on, "Yes, naive, innocent, unworldly types like Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle. . . . I mean, this is a characterization of Kissinger and Perle nobody has ever attempted in human history."

In other words, you can't sucker the unsuckerable--a defense I’d say was shot out of the water when Thompson, who held down the big shot position of chairman of the audit committee, conceded in court he'd been barely paying attention. The mystery at the core of the trial, so far as the Canadian press is concerned, is the jury-- what are those people thinking? Steyn frets that "a Chicago jury is weighing the merits of a Canadian tax benefit to a British lord. . . . . A white-collar case is one thing, but an ermine-collared one is quite another." Steyn accuses the prosecution of "naked class prejudice," of sending the jury the message that "this guy’s rich and he's arrogant, and if that ain't a crime it oughta be."

For Blatchford's impression of the jury, as previously reported in this blog, click here.

Fotheringham doesn't see eye to eye with Steyn and Blatchford on much, but like them he informs his readers the jurors are the wrong sort. "The jury, one must understand,"  he writes, "for their sins is composed, out of the 12 jurors, eight--not to put too fine a point on it--middle-aged, rather plump women, rather plump--and rather uninterested in the whole mess." As the lawyers argue, Fotheringham reports, the jurors "chew gum and nod off." The Toronto Star's Rick Westhead, composing an article on the pros and cons of Black taking the stand in his own defense, allows for the possibility "that the blue-collar Chicago jury--two male jurors appeared in court yesterday wearing Hawaiian-print shirts while one female juror has scribbled notes in recent days with a pen topped with a marabou feather--might not warm to the British lord." I had to ask someone at the office what the hell a marabou feather is and what it signifies. "Cheap luxury . . . delusions of grandeur . . . Blanche DuBois . . . little girls' beauty pageants," a cultural maven replied. Before the trial, the court gave prospective jurors a 45-page questionaire to fill out. Feather preferences were neglected. Grounds for appeal?

Edward Greenspan stopped browbeating David Radler Monday and gave him some wonderful news. “Surely you’ve heard that the moment you go to a Canadian prison the Canadian rules of parole apply,” said Greenspan.

“I did not know what you just told me,” said Radler. 

“I think I’m going to send you a bill,” said Greenspan.

Greenspan, the trial lawyer for Radler’s former business partner, Conrad Black, wrapped up his cross-examination of Radler by letting Black’s jury know what a sweet deal Radler has going for him if he tells the court what the prosecution wants it to hear. Black’s charged with fraud. Radler pleaded guilty to fraud and is testifying against Black. Radler and the U.S. attorney have an understanding that when Black’s trial ends Radler will be sentenced to a 29-month prison sentence he can serve in Canada.

“You know in Canada anyone who gets three years or less for a nonviolent crime is out in six months,” said Greenspan. Radler replied, “I look the jury straight in the face. I did not know that. I heard rumors . . .”  

Radler, the former COO of Hollinger International, is a Canadian whose home is in Vancouver, although he was frequently in Chicago while he ran the Sun-Times and Hollinger’s other Chicago-area papers. Black, the former CEO of Hollinger, was a Canadian until he renounced Canadian citizenship in order to join Britain’s House of Lords.     

Greenspan was telling Radler something he clearly wished the jury to believe Radler already knew. Greenspan also said that in addition to being much more generous with parole, Canada has a policy of placing prisoners close to their homes. “I take it you know that the most likely prisons you’ll be sentenced to in British Columbia are Ferndale or William Head. Have you heard of Ferndale”    

No, said Radler, he hadn’t.    

“Have you heard there you can raise cattle? And there’s a golf therapy program.”    

“As a nongolfer,” said Radler, “that’s not going to help me.”    

Greenspan asked, “Do you  know William Head is called ‘Club Fed ’ in Canada? Did you know it’s got 86 acres of maintained grounds and until recently had a miniature golf course?”    

Radler insisted he was not conversant with the prisons of British Columbia.    

“You’re a bottom-line kind of guy, right?” said Greenspan. He told Radler the deal he’d gotten for testifying against Black “is the best deal you’ve ever gotten in a lifetime of making deals” -- better than the Paxton deal, the Forum deal, or any of the other deals in which Radler and Black allegedly made a fortune in fraudulent noncompete fees. “Sir, I do not believe that going to prison is a deal,” said Radler. Greenspan wants the jury to conclude that Radler did all those deals on his own, leaving Black out of it. “And for this unbelievable sweetheart deal,” Greenspan went on, “you have to give the government what they wanted when no crime was committed by anyone but you.”    

Greenspan is a sly fellow, and I wondered if Radler is in for a grimmer experience than Greenspan was letting on. Perhaps Radler, who contained his excitement at Greenspan’s gushing description of Club Fed, wondered that too.  I came across a memoir written by Ferndale’s late warden, Ron Wiebe. He allowed, “The golf course that we built at Ferndale has become a focal point for criticism.” But it’s taught inmates social skills, Wiebe maintained, not to mention “work opportunities that resulted in a number of men getting careers in golf-course maintenance and working in the landscape business.”    

Ferndale and William Head each holds about 140 inmates, who cook their own meals and live in residences they maintain themselves. Ferndale’s about 50 miles east of Vancouver. William Head, located at the tip of Victoria Island, has a celebrated theater program whose annual productions are open to the public. Inmates write some of the plays, but last November they did Macbeth.    

Assistant warden Chantal Jacques told me Radler could be released after six months, but it’s not automatic. That’s for Canada’s national parole board to decide, and if he’s paroled he might still have to spend months living in a halfway house. Fortunately, William Head offers a range of programs for visitors staying longer than they’d like. The title of one sounds fascinating, but “In Search of Your Warrior” is for aboriginal inmates only. However, there’s a quarterly inmate newspaper, Out of Bounds.

Craig and Carol Kilmer – of all the bit players in the Conrad Black trial, they’ve got to be the bittiest. Until I called Carol Kilmer in Kirksville, Missouri, they didn’t know they were players at all. Carol Kilmer was barely aware there even was a trial. She’d heard that Black was in some sort of trouble in Chicago. 

The trial hinges on the question of whether Black and Radler, who a few years ago sold off hundreds of the newspapers they’d acquired over the years, benefited illegally from noncompete payments that went into their pockets rather than to Hollinger International. Yes we did, says Radler, who’s pleaded guilty, turned state’s evidence, and now says he lied right and left to conceal his deals.

But Black’s attorney Edward Greenspan wanted to make the point that in the newspaper world there’s nothing exceptional about old owners being paid not to compete against new owners. Onto the courtroom screen he projected a list of American towns where Black and Radler had paid noncompetes when they bought papers there. Kirksville, for instance. Craig and Carol Kilmer weren’t names likely to strike fear into the hearts of big-timers like Black and Radler. Yet each had received $100,000 when Black and Radler's American Publishing subsidiary bought the Kirksville Daily Express and the weekly Kirksville Crier in 1990. The Kilmers owned the Crier, a shopper.

Greenspan was making a point Radler had no particular need to respond to, but he spoke up anyway. “Carol Kilmer happens to be one of the most formidable potential competitors I’ve ever known,” he told the court. “We would never have bought that paper without a noncompete payment with Carol Kilmer.” 

From the witness whom both sides of the Black trial wish us to perceive as a sleazeball, it was an odd burst of something that sounded like conviction. I called Carol Kilmer. “Weeklies aren’t supposed to beat dailies and kick their ass. I owned my market -- me and my staff," she told me. "Just the fact I had all the grocery stores and all the meat accounts showed [Radler] I knew my stuff.”

Kilmer owned the Crier with her husband, but she ran it alone while he made his money in cattle and construction. After the sale she stayed on and managed the Crier for American Publishing until 1998, when Black and Radler unloaded it in one of the big deals that eventually would get them indicted. “I got paid to play for a decade,” Kilmer said, “and I called it a college education I couldn’t have bought anywhere in the country. I was left to run the operation to the best of my ability and I was in charge of it.” The new owners gave her numbers and she met them. Once a year American Publishing hailed its “superachievers” -- managers who'd topped last year's profits by 10 percent or more. “I missed that twice in eight years,” she said.

"Nothing was ever, ever put at me sideways," Kilmer told me. Her operation was clean as a whistle and that's how American Publishing wanted it: “Like I was fond of saying -- I want every damn dime I got coming and I don’t want any damn dime I don’t have coming.” When auditors showed up they didn’t scare her. “They hired this high-powered outfit out of Saint Louis that would look through your books for a week. I told my bookkeeper, ‘You just give them everything they need.’”

Conrad Black was only a name to Kilmer, but Radler came to town from time to time. Kilmer said, “My dealings with him were straight up. He was everything corporate America should be.” 

On April 11, 1994, the Kilmers’ four-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. “The company stood with me while I had to live at Saint Louis Children’s Hospital for 105 weeks of chemo,” Kilmer said. “And that was the ultimate test for me personally with American Publishing. Under federal law they only had to hold your job 18 months. There was a meeting -- it was Caitlin’s second year of chemo -- and I’ll tell you, David came right through the pack and took a hold of my hand and said, ‘How is Caitlin? I want to hear how things are going,’ and he sat by me at lunch. I figured he knew, but he really knew, you know what I mean? He said, ‘Carol, you didn’t have to be here today. I didn’t expect you to be.’ And I said, ‘David, I’m trying to keep up with my job so I can keep my job.” 

I'd told Carol Kilmer her name came up in Black’s trial, but I hadn't said how or why. Now I filled in all the blanks and read Radler's words to her. Kilmer was floored. “David pleading guilty!” she said, absorbing the news. “That just speaks for his integrity.” Later she called Radler's lawyer in Chicago, Anton Valukas, and left her number.

Her David Radler doesn’t begin to resemble the man in the witness box. Could Radler have changed so much in a decade? Perhaps he's always been, like most of us, a person of parts. When lawyers tear someone to pieces and put him back together again in front of a jury, there are always a lot of parts left over.

The jury in the Conrad Black trial got a whiff of the essence of Conrad Black Thursday. The prosecutors projected onto a large screen for all to see one of the "musings"--that’s Black’s word--that he occasionally liked to share with other executives of Hollinger International. On this occasion in 2002 minority shareholders had begun to rumble with discontent and Black was considering something clearly disagreeable to him: the trimming of sails.    

“We have pretty well won the battle against the non-compete payments and a decent interval has passed,” Black wrote. “A conciliatory gesture should be made now that could not be construed as a sign of weakness or a confession of excess.” Excess is in the eye of the beholder, and nothing Black beheld troubled him. “These companies [Hollinger International, the holding company Hollinger Inc., and Ravelston, the private firm that controlled Hollinger Inc.] have always been run [as] proprietary businesses where the controlling shareholders take reasonable steps to ensure their comfortable enjoyment of the position they (we, in fact) have created for themselves. Care must be taken not to allow this to degenerate into decadence. . . . But nor should we allow the agitations of shareholders, amplified by certain of our colleagues discountenanced at the performance of their stock options, to force us into a hair shirt, the corporate equivalent of sackcloth and ashes. . . . We have a certain style that all these shareholders were aware of when they came in . . .” 

The musing was presented during the direct examination of David Radler, Black’s former partner, who turned against him and pleaded guilty to fraud. Held to the light one way it’s incriminating, held up another it isn’t. Black is clearly a piece of work. One juror might have decided by now he's guilty as sin while another marvels that he's far and away the most extraordinary person ever to wander into his or her humdrum, midwestern, middle-class life. But such memos--and there have been others--put the silent, brooding Black in the position of the spellbinding stranger who sits across from you at dinner and doesn’t introduce himself. Black has to testify. Otherwise the jury could decide he's guilty because it feels stiffed.

Radler's cross-examination began this week. Black's frumpy Canadian attorney, Edward Greenspan, is a little too enamored of his own legendary wiles. He immediately brought up a trial in Canada Radler had testified at. “You swore to God to tell the truth,” Greenspan said. “I swore to tell the truth,” Radler answered.

“You swore on the Bible?” Greenspan said.  “I don’t remember,” said Radler. “I can’t tell without a transcript.” Greenspan consulted the transcript and reported that it said Radler had been “duly sworn.” 

“If you have a recollection I swore with a Bible,” Radler said, “I’d be pleased to see it.”

Plowing on, Greenspan said Radler had sworn to tell the truth at the trial in Canada and the truth at this trial in Chicago and yet Greenspan had discovered an inconsistency in his testimony. Radler said he could explain the inconsistency. Greenspan didn’t give him the opportunity. He had points to make--and he would make them--about Radler being an admitted liar who could not be trusted here because his prison sentence is contingent on the effectiveness of his testimony. But did Greenspan think that by badgering Radler on the obscure point of whether he’d held a hand on a Bible when he was sworn in years ago in British Columbia he was impressing plain, God-fearing midwestern jurors? That, unfortunately, is how it sounded.

Greenspan led Radler through his 38-year career with Black. The first paper they bought was the Sherbrooke Record in Quebec. Greenspan, who above all else wants to persuade the jury that Radler and Black lived and operated in distant spheres--geographical, professional, social, and intellectual--and therefore Black is not accountable for Radler’s sins, hoped to establish that Radler operated the Record while Black handled the editorial end and conducted himself as a man of the world. He asked Radler if he recalled the piece Black wrote in 1969 on President Johnson that was so marvelous it was read into the Congressional Record.

“No, I don’t remember,” said Radler. Greenspan was astonished. “That’s a big deal, isn’t it?”

"In what sense?” asked Radler. “Are you unprepared to accept the fact this is a big deal in our country--in Canada--to have an article read into the Congressional Record?” Greenspan asked.    

“I don’t think it made a difference for the paper,” Radler said. “The paper was dependent on local revenues.”

This was the Radler that his minions at what’s now the Sun-Times Media Group had come to know and, well, despise--a guy so preoccupied with local revenues that he’s oblivious to what his papers actually publish. But Greenspan sounded out of touch with his audience, maybe the only guy in the courtroom who thinks having something read into the Congressional Record is a life-altering event. Even jurors who think it sounds neat might wonder why it would be a big deal in Sherbrooke, a town in another country.

But it was a small moment in a long cross-examination -- Radler will be back on the stand Monday to endure more pounding from Greenspan, who's clearly getting inside his head. After shying from the word at the beginning, Radler's been reduced to conceding he "lied" and "lied" when confronted by a Hollinger "special committee" and then by the U.S. attorney's office. In the world of Greenspan's dreams, Radler will soon snap and scream, "Yes, by God, I did it all myself. Conrad Black doesn't tell me what to do." Greenspan dug up a 1996 newspaper article that had Radler telling a Toronto reporter, "I am nobody's right-hand man."

Radler didn't want to go there.

"You don't know what a right-hand man is?" Greenspan marveled. "You were the publisher of the Sun-Times. You know what a right-hand man means."

He tried to provoke Radler. "It could mean a flunky, right?"

"I don't believe I'm anyone's flunky," Radler replied.

"You're nobody's flunky, right," said Greenspan.

"That doesn't mean nobody would call me that," Radler said.

A friend who used to have his offices in the Sun-Times building says David Radler, his landlord, was a shifty guy who would never look him in the eye in the elevator and never seemed to remember his name. I knew Radler only by telephone, where he always spoke loud and clear. Of course, the subject was usually the perfidy of labor unions. I didn’t ask him about noncompete fees.

Tuesday in court, assistant U.S. attorney Eric Sussman did. And in answering Sussman Radler incriminated himself -- which he’d done already when he pleaded guilty to fraud. We’ll find out when the trial ends if he also successfully incriminated Conrad Black. He talked about a “template” that “Toronto” decreed would govern the sale of Hollinger International properties: 25 percent of all noncompete fees would be kicked upstairs to Hollinger Inc., the holding company he and Black controlled. “Toronto,” he explained, was what the Chicago office that he ran called Black and the other execs headquartered there.“What reasons, if any, were you aware of for Hollinger Inc. to deserve 25 percent of the noncompete fees,” Sussman asked at one point.

“There were none,” Radler replied.

He recalled a board meeting in early 1999 when Black and he said nothing about a $2 million noncompete fee assigned to Hollinger Inc. when a Hollinger magazine was sold. Radler was uneasy. “I didn’t think the transaction -- I didn’t know if it was legal or not legal,” he said. “I didn’t like the transaction, and I regret to this day that I didn’t say anything.”

But apparently telling the board -- in particular the audit committee, headed by former governor Jim Thompson -- either nothing or too little about noncompete agreements was a habit Radler was able to get into. Sussman ran Radler through a series of sales a year or so later in which Hollinger Inc. got its 25 percent because “it was part of the template.” In no case was this slice of the pie acknowledged to the board. Why? Sussman asked. “It would have been impossible to present a noncompete which the [purchasing] company hadn’t requested,” Radler said. “I don’t think they would have approved.”

And about another sale: “It would have been very difficult to go to the audit committee and say ‘They didn’t ask for noncompetes but here are our noncompetes.'”

The government’s theory of the crime has Black and Radler using illegitimate noncompete payments (tax exempt in Canada) to channel money upward from Hollinger International to Hollinger Inc. and on to Ravelston, the private management firm controlled by Black that controlled Hollinger Inc. According to the government, a Hollinger International dollar worth 16 cents to Black was worth 46 cents to him if passed along to Hollinger Inc. and 65 cents if it reached Ravelston.

A lot’s been said and written about the tan Radler sported in court, as well as his poise and good humor. I didn’t see much of that. I saw someone who didn’t want to look Black’s way either from the stand or when he was slipping out of court during breaks. I saw someone a little nebbishy, and more of a peril to Black for it. Radler looks like a classic number two, like someone who might have seethed a long time at his partner’s arrogance and grandiosity and is now getting back. The idea of the cross-examination that’s coming is to tear him down. But I think it also will have to be to build Radler up, to make him into someone forceful enough to do bad things on his own authority, without Black’s sanction. The cross-examination alone probably won’t do it. Eventually the defense will probably want to bring on character witnesses to say what a sonuvabitch, what a little emperor Radler was in Chicago. They can be found.

If Jim Thompson, former governor of Illinois, were on trial himself in the Dirksen Building for -- let's say for failure to satisfy Hollinger International stockholders' intangible right to his honest services -- this would have been a bad week for him. Even though he's not, his three days on the witness stand couldn't have been much fun. He was trying to explain why as the chairman of the audit committee of Hollinger International he saw nothing and said nothing as Conrad Black, David Radler, and other execs allegedly got away with murder. At least one person in Judge Amy St. Eve's courtroom thought Thompson should have been indicted too. That's real estate broker Anton Kerner , whose thoughts wandered back to 1973, when Thompson, then the brash young U.S. attorney, sent Kerner's father Otto, also a former governor, to prison. Otto Kerner's crime, as argued by Thompson then, had been to acquire while governor some compromising racetrack stock, thereby denying the people of Illinois their intangible right to his honest service (as overseer of the state's tracks). Fair is fair, Anton Kerner believes, and the Hollinger shareholders deserved much better from Thompson.

No one in court was accusing Thompson of dishonesty as the board of director's fiscal watchdog, but no one was accusing him of competence either. Black and Radler were charged with pocketing millions of dollars -- in noncompete payments -- that should have gone to shareholders when Hollinger began selling off papers in the late 90s. Thompson testified that his committee often didn't approve these payments and didn't even know about them. But sometimes Thompson's committee did know, or should have known, or at the very least their noses should have twitched. Thompson said in direct testimony that he usually "skimmed" the financial documents Hollinger sent him. But Black's attorney, Edward Greenspan, later showed Thompson a Hollinger filing to the SEC in 2002 that reported that Black, Radler, and other indicted execs had received a total of $15.6 million from noncompete agreements over the previous two years. The filing was 17 pages long and Thompson had signed it. When he "skimmed" the text he'd missed the reference.

"Whether they are very, very long or very, very short," said Greenspan of the financial documents that came to Thompson, "you skimmed them. . . . Hollinger International didn't pay you $60,000 [a year] to skim financial documents."

"No," Thompson replied stiffly, "they paid me for other things."

Greenspan asked if Thompson had attended "some kind of skimming school." He baited Thompson on the nature of skimming. "So skimming doesn't mean you read quickly. . . . It means some things you don't see at all." He brought out documents that not only referred to the $15.6 million in payments but also to board approval of those payments. Somehow, Greenspan marveled, Thompson had missed 11 references in various documents to the $15.6 million in payments and to board approval of them. "From the chairman of the board [his client, Black] to the everyday shareholder, these people relied on you," he told the former governor, choosing language close enough to an invocation of the intangible right to honest service that Anton Kerner must have appreciated it.

"Do you agree it's a remarkable coincidence that you missed reading these passages 11 times?" Greenspan asked. But he wanted to leave the jury with the thought that Thompson had read the passages, had found them unexceptional, and now wanted to disassociate himself from the board's endorsement of the payments. "I am going to suggest," Greenspan said, "that you read all these things, you approved all these things -- you thought they were right -- and when there was criticism you conveniently forgot."

"That is false," said Thompson. And Greenspan sat down.

Later in the afternoon, Ron Safer, the lawyer for defendant Mark Kipnis, who was the corporate counsel, toted up some figures projected on the courtroom screen and calculated that from 1997 through 2003 Thompson's audit committee had approved more than $216 million in management fees. You didn't consult an outside adviser about all this money? Safer wondered. You didn't discuss it with Hollinger's accounting firm? You didn't ask Radler -- the COO based in Chicago whom Thompson normally dealt with -- for backup materials? No, said Thompson every time. "So without a single piece of paper in support . . . you voted for every single dollar?" Yes, said Thompson.

On redirect Thursday, federal prosecutor Eric Sussman gave Thompson a chance to assert that whatever Hollinger filings to the SEC might have said to the contrary, he didn't know about and never approved the noncompetes. But then he had to face Greenspan again, who got him to concede that, yes, he'd signed his name to financial statements containing language he hadn't read and that no doubt his signature persuaded other board members to sign them too.

But it's Lord Black of Crossharbour who's on trial (along with three smaller fish), and what good does it do Black if Thompson looks like a mope? If Thompson was putty in Black and Radler's hands, then they were schemers -- which Radler, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges and will testify for the state, probably starting Monday -- already has admitted he was. Fortunately for Black, the former governor clearly isn't putty. He looks his age, 70, and he's a little stooped, but his voice booms, he seethes impressively, and he seems impervious to embarrassment. Plus, he's Jim Thompson -- the first witness some of the jurors in this Canada-centric trial will have ever heard of, the guy the state office building a couple of blocks up Dearborn is named after. Jurors are so likely to want our guy to do well that I wonder if it was a mistake for Greenspan, a Canadian, to have cross-examined him. The jury might have warmed more to Greenspan's cocounsel, Ed Genson, an old-time Chicagoan. 

When this confusing, document-driven trial finally ends -- it began in March and St. Eve told the jury Thursday to expect to be serving at least till the end of June -- jurors casting about for a way to approach the evidence might wish they could simply put their faith in whatever Big Jim said. After this week, that won't be as easy. I think Black needs to take the stand himself and scapegoat his audit committee chairman. The living was large at Hollinger, and Black has to be able to say he trusted Thompson -- former prosecutor, former governor -- to keep Radler and the company within the law, and his watchdog let him down. It might fly. People understand "skimming." It's what you do if you're busy and you've got stuff to read that isn't interesting and isn't that important to you. Thompson told the court he's been on a dozen or so boards. While he chaired Hollinger's, he was even head of another audit committee at another company. And of course, all along his real job was running Winston & Strawn. As described in court, Hollinger sounds like it was a good gig for the fancy hotels and Concordes to London. The jury might forgive Thompson but conclude nonetheless that to Black's detriment he didn't do his job. 

After Judge St. Eve adjourned for the day Wednesday, I asked Kerner what he thought. He said he had three questions. The first was about Thompson's skimming. "Is that due diligence? Is that fiduciary duty? Is that honest service to the shareholder?" Second, "If it isn't honest service, is this selective prosecution? Why Black et al and not Thompson?" And third, "Did Thompson engage in willful blindness? Or willful indifference? If he did, that's a crime. He's the guy who invented the theory of honest service to hold against my dad. Why isn't he being held up to that standard?"  

The Internet is rich in interpretations of the Black trial. Check out Steve Sturka's blog The Crime Sheet, my pal Scott Jacobs writing in Slate, and Susan Berger's blog Blacksjustice.com. Plus there's always a rich packet of stories in Canada's Globe and Mail.

Canadian reporters in Chicago should take note: Conrad Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, is nothing we haven't seen before. Black's blunder was to take his company public, putting his vast vanity and indulgences on a short leash held by stockholders. Sam Zell is buying the Tribune Company to take it private, where goofy media moguls can do what they please. (John Kass's column Tuesday is essentially an open letter to Zell saying, "Respect us.")

When Canadian journalists asked a few weeks ago what Chicagoans thought about Black's federal corruption trial, I had to tell them most Chicagoans weren't thinking anything. I had a flash of deja vu Monday as another out-of-town reporter asked about the reaction of Chicago to the sale of the Tribune. I said that if she were asking about the sale of the Cubs then we might have something to talk about, but the proprietors of the Tribune haven't made much of a dent on the public consciousness. Colonel McCormick died half a century ago. His successors have been ciphers. What we know about Zell is that he's a fierce-looking local guy who rides motorcycles and is taking over an $8.2 billion company with about $315 million of his own money. If you work for him now and the debt's on your back, you're probably feeling a little numb. But if you don't, you probably think a deal like that makes him sound kind of cool. (Here's a piece that suggests he might not be the world's shrewdest multi-billionaire.)

Zell keeps a low profile, but he's no cipher. Freelance writer Joy Bergmann is among the people who have seen how Zell likes to spend his loose change. Bergmann lives in New York now, but in 1999 she had a place on Lawrence Avenue in Uptown, and she could see from the trucks and the work crews that a very big event was coming up at the Aragon Ballroom. The event, she found out, was Zell's birthday party. She hooked up with Redmoon Theater, which had been hired to provide strolling musicians and masked actors dressed as birds on stilts. 

I just called her and asked her to reminisce. "It's important to remember 1999 -- September 1999 -- and what a puffed-up era that was," she says. It was before the economy crashed and before 9/11, and the only thing looming on the horizon was Y2K. The night of the party cops shut down the Lawrence el platform and held back the winos so Zell's guests could arrive on chartered trains. They wore T-shirts that said "Z2K" and "Zellenium." 

Bergmann remembers "Trojan warriors at the front door and girls painted in gold body paint with vines twisted around their nipples wearing little bikini thong bottoms. They were nymphs of some sort, bodacious nymphs draped along the buffet. I don't think his guests had a very good time -- that was the big take-away for me. The theater people I was with had a really good time and ate great food and saw great entertainment, and the people who were his guests were there to make an appearance with Sam Zell. I didn't sense a feeling of celebration for this man's birthday. It was a see-and-be-seen business function."

For instance, "James Brown was the opening act. The guests ignored him. They treated him like a Holiday Inn cover band. But we performers went apeshit." Later, Aretha Franklin came on. Her closing number sticks in Bergmann's memory because for about eight minutes its lyrics consisted of one word, "Jesus." Then the 200-strong Soul Children of Chicago chorus appeared in the balcony singing:

We've got euro-dollar currencies, in our hands.

We've got ADI securities, in our hands. . .

The evening's extravagance suggests that Zell -- though he insists he's getting into media only for the money -- has a little William Randolph Hearst in him. Some will say that the only thing that can happen to a newspaper worse than being publicly held is being privately held, and that may be true, but the press lord whose ego knows no bounds is one of the great capitalist archetypes. It's a role Black played to perfection until ungrateful shareholders did him in, and Zell, with none of them to answer to, might triumph in it. And if Zell ever deigns to meet any of the working stiffs in his employ, he might like them. No journalist would ever have turned his back on the Godfather of Soul.

Meanwhile, the Black trial creeps along, before a Canadian press corps that wonders if a man of Black's stripe can get a fair trial in this grubby blue-collar town. Who knows? Bergmann recalls a supervisor telling a paramedic posted to Zell's party. "If you have to deal with any of these people, remember, kiss their asses." The paramedic wasn't buying. "Kiss their ass? Maybe you got the wrong guy for this job. Billionaire or no billionaire, I don't give a shit. Everybody looks the same in the back of an ambulance."

Black must hope that man's not on his jury.

There's a study to be made of the Canadian press as it reveals itself in the coverage of the Conrad Black trial in this most American of cities, Chicago. I won't make it -- but from time to time I will hold up for your reading pleasure outstanding passages inked by the scriveners to our north. Most have been sent my way by my sister Dixie in Vancouver, along with a note that so-and-so -- whom invariably I've never heard of and neither have you, perhaps to so-and-so's sense of cosmic injustice -- is a must-read and always fabulous.

For instance, Rex Murphy observing (subscription required) in the Globe and Mail that a new Canadian federal budget had been eclipsed by "The Great Chicago Litigation of Lord Black of Crossharbour," the prime minister having failed to compete with "Lady Black's stage-wise and shattering remarks through a closing elevator door about certain journalists as 'sluts' and 'vermin.'" Murphy went on to insist that while "Lord Black is too frequently singled out for his polemical virtuosity, the sheer exuberance and gothic luxuriousness of his diatribes, Lady Black is no slouch either. Barbara Amiel [Black's wife] has a more concentrated thrust, a more disciplined wit."

The matter of polemics is vital because the outcome of the Conrad Black trial, as it's being rendered in Canada, will be determined neither by the lawyers nor by the evidence but by Black's uncertain capacity, when he directly addresses the jurors, as everyone is certain he must, to not sound so utterly arrogant that they immediately vote 12-zip to toss him in a tumbrel and cut his head off. "Conrad Black is famous at least as much for how he speaks, as how he earns," Murphy reasoned. "He is at a trial that threatens to take all that he has earned, and one of his major worries is that jurors may very much not like how he speaks. He must mute one gift in hopes of keeping, so to speak, the other."

Unless certain Canadian writers get hold of themselves, they will soon be describing those jurors (six alternates included) as rabble rounded up under Chicago's drawbridges. At this moment they're being construed as ghastly specimens of the American petite bourgeoisie. "The lawyers tried, bless their condescending little hearts, to talk like the real Americans in the jury box," wrote Christie Blatchford (subscription required) in the Globe and Mail. "There are 18 of these, middle America in her full flower --four men and 14 women, each of whose thighs appears to weigh more than all of Barbara Amiel on a fat day, many garbed in the improbably cheerful colours (royal blue, baby blue, lime green, coral, turquoise) of this continent's big-box malls."

Blatchford went on, "On behalf of the lean young prosecutorial team, assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Cramer took the 'keep it simple, stupid' approach."

Romina Maurino, covering the trial for the Canadian Press, made the same observation. Citing as her authority a Toronto law professor, Maurino reported that "federal lawyers will bring forth numerous witnesses in an attempt to simplify the case and help the jury understand its finer points."

When a case is simplified its finer points don't get understood -- they get lost. But no matter. The point Canadian reporters keep making is that the financial matters this trial is about are incomprehensible, so the lawyers are dumbing down the issues for the jury. But maybe the Canadian press is doing its own dumbing down, for its readers. American papers can get away with covering the trial on their business pages, but in Canada it's page one. An on-going page one courtroom drama has got to be easy to follow and teem with vivid personalities.

There are numbers you toss around, numbers you think you can prove, and numbers that won't confuse a jury. Back in August 2004, an internal investigation by Hollinger International concluded that deposed execs Conrad Black, David Radler, et al had stolen about $400 million from the company. But when the federal indictment came down a year later, Black and et al (Radler turned state's evidence) were accused of swiping only about $84 million, and that, or some approximation, became the number in play in the media right up to the start of the trial. Yet when assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Cramer began his opening statement Tuesday he told the jury, "You are sitting in a room with four men who stole $60 million."

Had Black overnight become $24 million less guilty? If he could keep up the pace he'd be back in Toronto by the weekend.

The papers didn't do much of a job of explaining what was going on. The New York Times simply said the change "seemed to reflect a decision by the government to no longer challenge one of the payments made to Mr. Black." Mary Wisniewski and Natasha Korecki of the Sun-Times, which as a Hollinger paper bears the heaviest burden to get the story right, ignored what Cramer said and stuck with the $84 million.

And they should have: the prosecution was just keeping it simple. The $60 million allegedly disappeared in business deals in which all four defendants -- Black, Peter Atkinson, John Boultbee, and Mark Kipnis -- were working together. The prosecution still maintains that Black, sometimes working freelance, took a lot more. 

Underlining the meaninglessness of the $60 million figure as an actual measure of cupidity, there was Radler's settlement last weekend with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Sun-Times Media Group, which is what Hollinger International has become. To satisfy civil claims, Radler agreed to forfeit about $50 million of his own money and another $42 million belonging to three newspaper chains he controls.

If you can't get enough of Conrad Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, aka the former Hollinger International  press baron in the crosshairs in United States v. Black, there's a new blog up and running that promises all Black all the time. Blacksjustice.com was launched by freelance reporter Susan Berger, who was a Pioneer Press staffer when that suburban chain was one of the more profitable elements in Black's media empire. Berger plans to attend Black's fraud and racketeering trial, which just got under way in federal court, and she promises ongoing commentary plus links to media coverage beyond Chicago. The volume of Canadian coverage in particular is staggering, and here's a taste of it, an ingenious attempt by the Globe and Mail, Canada's foremost national newspaper, to concoct a think piece out of pretty much nothing. If you thought his lordship had nothing in common with the blue-collar rabble that will be judging him -- a notion the Canadian media  can't express often enough -- well, it seems he has nothing in common with Mies van der Rohe either! 

And also from the Globe and Mail, here's a stylish rant by a former Hollinger editor in Canada that asks, Was it really necessary to destroy the company in order to save it? Joan Crockatt begins: "Conrad Black's trial is a classic case of pride and prejudice. Even Jane Austen couldn't have written a better commentary on the excesses of U.S. society in the post-Enron, post-WorldCom, Iraq-war era. In a nutshell, Lord Black exudes a kind of British aristocratic pride that offends modern-day America. America rails at it. Prejudice grows. Charges are hurled. Blood spills."

The trial's expected to last about four months. 

UPDATE: Want to be a juror in a famous federal trial? Jurors in the pool for United States v. Black had a 45-page questionnaire to fill out before they could even be considered. Go through it yourself. See how it's skewed toward teasing out how strongly you feel that those big shots making millions in complicated corporate maneuvers are all a bunch of crooks.

As Conrad Black's trial approaches, Maclean’s isn’t the only Canadian magazine that’s produced an issue about him. Another is the satirical biweekly Frank, whose Special Tubby Trial Edition, on Canadian newsstands tomorrow, owns up to creating supportlordblack.com, a satirical Web site I marveled at on this blog. Frank quotes me, but at least I had my doubts: “There’s a whiff of parody to supportlordblack.com, but it’s hard to say: there’s always been a whiff of parody to Black himself.” Is that skeptical or what? For the record, I consider myself libeled by the Toronto Sun, which in reporting on Frank's deception numbered me among its patsies.

The meat and potatoes of the Frank issue is an exchange of correspondence between Black and “Alastair Smith” of the “Ad Hoc Committee for Conrad Black.” Smith pleads for an audience and the grateful Black yields. But he thinks twice when Smith says his delegation wishes to wear black ribbons in solidarity. “I assume this is a prank,” Black replies, canceling the meeting. “It is very clever of you, and I would enjoy it as a joke, but you will understand that it is a bit distracting right now.”

The Conrad Black trial is a pretty big deal in Chicago. It's huge in Canada, where the prospect of one of the country's most notable citizens (or ex-citizens: he renounced Canada to take a seat in Britain's House of Lords) facing charges in a foreign court that could put him in prison for the rest of his life has transfixed the press. (If you want to transfix a nation's press, it helps if you once owned roughly half its newspapers.)

Maclean's, Canada's national newsweekly, has just published a special edition on the trial, which it modestly calls the "white-collar trial of the century." As it explains, "What might have once blown over as an internal debate at Hollinger International about compensation and bonus payments, has instead blown up into one of the most captivating corporate scandals in decades. Conrad Black faces 14 charges--including mail and wire fraud, racketeering, money laundering and obstruction of justice--in a trial set to play out in a Chicago courtroom over the next few months. If convicted he could face 95 years in a federal prison, with no eligibility for parole. "Unlike other major white-collar criminal cases, such as Enron and WorldCom, this one is not about a company going bankrupt or investors being swindled out of their life savings. Rather, it is about a larger-than-life British Lord and press baron who--depending on who is to be believed--was either a fraudster corrupted by his own greed and sense of entitlement, or a businessman betrayed by his closest allies and persecuted by overzealous authorities."

From a Chicago perspective, the highlight of the trial, which begins March 14 in federal court, will probably be the cross-examination of former governor James Thompson, who chaired the audit committee of Hollinger International's board of directors and in theory should have stopped the financial irregularities Black's accused of before they occurred. Black's going to contend that his home was elsewhere and so was his mind (on the FDR biography he was writing, on Britain's affairs of state, etc), and that he left business decisions to the judgment of two men in Chicago who failed his trust--David Radler, the former Sun-Times publisher who'd been Black's business partner for decades until he turned state's evidence against him, and Thompson.

Maclean's reported in February that "despite an abundance of evidence suggesting a pattern of lax oversight at the very least," Thompson and other high-profile directors "were allowed to quietly tender their resignations and walk away from the mess." Shareholder Chris Browne, who triggered the internal investigation that brought down Black, isn't happy about that. "They got off scot-free and that's a real tragedy," he told Maclean's. "They will all claim 'we were misled.' Well you can't be misled if you don't ask any questions. They never asked. They said 'yeah, okay, whatever you want. That's fine. Can I have some more Claret? What's for lunch?' " Maclean's treatment of Black is impressively balanced and sympathetic--no surprise, I guess, given that Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, is a regular contributor. To get up to speed, click here and then search for Conrad Black.

Remember Billy Crystal as Fernando, the Latin dandy who understood it’s much more important to look good than to feel good? The Sun-Times has become the Fernando of newspapers, fabulously designed even when there’s nothing much in it to read. But layout won’t be enough for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and to carry out the all-important, highly coveted assignment of following and writing about it, the Sun-Times has chosen none other than Jennifer Hunter, the publisher’s wife.

It has to be difficult being the publisher’s wife. When you’re given a post on the editorial board and then a column – blessings previously bestowed on Hunter – mopes in the newsroom talk. They draw the obvious parallels between the high-living old regime of Conrad Black and his wife Barbara Amiel, who was some sort of editorial VP entitled to stick her nose in anywhere, and the upright new crew led by publisher John Cruickshank and Hunter, who's apparently similarly entitled. What’s changed? they ask. And when Hunter asks for and gets the Obama beat, they consider the question answered.

But then it has to be difficult being a publisher with a wife like Hunter. You’re damned at the office if you give her big opportunities, and probably damned at home if you don’t. In her favor, Hunter has a lot of experience as a journalist, and just because most of it was in Canada doesn’t mean it doesn’t count. Her first piece on Obama, February 9, was a solidly researched story on the political rise of Lincoln, whose mantle Hunter sees Obama hoping to don -- she cites