Entries associated with the tag "David Radler":

The Sun-Times wants Chicago to know the paper "is alive and well and vibrant and strong" -- in the words of publisher Cyrus Freidheim Jr. -- so it posted this story on page four of the Monday paper: "Sun-Times circulation up."

"Setting itself apart from most American newspapers," the story announced, the Sun-Times reported increases in both weekday circulation, up 0.3 percent to 313,174 copies, and Sunday circulation, up 3.4 percent to 255,906 copies.

The Sun-Times showing looked amazing. While papers everywhere were losing readers, it had gained them! On Monday the Audit Bureau of Circulations released its latest six-month circulation figures, and among the nation's dailies that report to the ABC, daily circulation was down 4.6 percent and Sunday circulation 4.9 percent.

The Tribune did even worse than that, and it can't be blamed for tucking away the news of its dismal showing inside the Tuesday business pages. The Tribune's weekday circulation dropped 7.8 percent and its Sunday circulation fell 5.8 percent.

But wait a minute . . . Along with its own figures, the Tribune reported the Sun-Times's.  The Tribune said that although Sunday Sun-Times circulation rose by 4.5 percent, weekday circulation fell by 3.9 percent. That's what the ABC reported too.

Was the Sun-Times doing some voodoo with its weekday numbers?

No, that era's over -- or so we can all hope. The Sun-Times admitted in 2003 that under David Radler, its since deposed and imprisoned publisher, it had been cooking the books for seven years, inflating its actual circulation by more than 10 percent. In 2004 the ABC censured the Sun-Times, requiring it to submit to biannual audits and to come up with a plan to clean up its circulation practices. And in the meantime, it dropped the Sun-Times from its circulation reports. 

Last March the ABC released the paper from censure status.

To celebrate, the Sun-Times decided to report the new ABC numbers in its own special way. Standard procedure is to compare average daily and Sunday circulations for the six-month period that's just ended -- in this case, April through September -- with the averages for the corresponding six months of the previous year. That's how the ABC does it, and it's how the Tribune reported it.

Instead, the Sun-Times compared the past six months with the six months just before. Spokesperson Tammy Chase says that while the paper was on censure, it was too busy cleaning up circulation to build circulation. But when it came off, "we were really able to put some planning and muscle into retaining and expanding the number of people who subscribe or buy our paper."

The paper even boasted about how it pulled off the miracle. It doubled the number of hawkers peddling the Sunday paper in certain neighborhoods, and it dropped the price of that paper from $1.50 to $1. It added a contest, Scratch2Win. And it got lucky with the Sox and Cubs both in the playoffs and Barack Obama running for president.

But now we pause for a reality check. Before weekday Sun-Times circulation went up a hair, it dropped hard for a long time. In March of 2004, the ABC reported a weekday Sun-Times circulation of 486,000. When it found out the Sun-Times was cheating, the ABC withdrew the number, and that fall publisher John Cruickshank told his staff it had been overstated by about 50,000 copies. Even so, the corrected circulation was some 120,000 copies above where the Sun-Times stands now.

Reality check II: The hundred-year-old Christian Science Monitor just announced that after 40 years of shrinking circulation, it's abandoning print (except for a Saturday magazine). Editor John Yemma promises a "much more robust Web presence" for the Monitor, which is subsidized by the Christian Science church, and no diminishment of its national and international coverage. Asked by the Monitor whether the New York Times will still be producing a print edition in ten years, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said, "The heart of the answer must be we can't care. . . . We must be where people want us for our information."

How long can Scratch2Win play Horatio at the bridge?

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.

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.

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.

The press corps at the Conrad Black trial split on whether Black should, or would, be convicted of anything. In the end the prosecution got him on 4 counts out of 13--including the biggie, obstruction of justice, which was about some boxes of papers he removed from his office in Toronto. Toronto's in another country with courts and prosecutors of its own--but whatever. The law is slapdash in its majesty. No matter how guilty you think Black was of rigging sales contracts to line his pockets, you have to think David Radler's guiltier. But because Radler was so guilty he knew it and made a deal with the prosecution, he's facing 29 months in prison and Black as much as 35 years.

The jury convicted everybody, and the shocker was Mark Kipnis, Hollinger International's in-house lawyer in Chicago. Kipnis had the best lawyer in the trial, Ron Safer, he wasn't cut in on any piece of those notorious noncompete payments that Radler and Black made millions from, and so far as the press could see, his only crime was acting like a lawyer. In a sympathetic profile of Kipnis the Tribune published during the trial Susan Chandler quoted this zinger from a prosecutor's opening statement: "If there is a document to be signed to complete this scheme, you'll see that Mark Kipnis has a pen." For that pen in his pocket, Kipnis was nailed for three counts of mail fraud.

"Everybody at this company who knew him was pulling for him," Ted Rilea told me after the verdicts were announced. Rilea is the attorney in charge of labor negotiations for Hollinger's Chicago Group, which is now the Sun-Times Media Group. Everybody? I said. Does that include everyone who thanks God the specter of an acquitted and vengeful Black will no longer ruin their sleep? (Sun-Times stock jumped 2.5 percent with the verdict.) "I mean everybody," Rilea said. "Those I'm talking about include some of the union leaders. Jerry Minkkinen would tell you the same thing." 

Minkkinen's the executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, and he got to know Kipnis when Kipnis sat in on the contract negotiations of 1998 and 2001. When Rilea and Kipnis had dinner together a couple of nights ago, Rilea gave him a message: Jerry says good luck--he's keeping his fingers crossed. Kipnis was feeling hopeful that evening because earlier in the day the jury had reported it was deadlocked on some of the charges. Kipnis let himself imagine a mistrial. But Judge Amy St. Eve told the jurors to go back and deliberate some more, and so they did.

I found Minkkinen in Toronto attending the Communication Workers of America convention, and even though the Black verdict was nonstop radio and TV up there, Minkkinen had been in meetings all day and was out of touch. Four guilty counts for Black, I said. "Whatever he got he deserves more," Minkkinen replied. 

Three counts for Kipnis.

"It just saddens me tremendously," Minkkinen said. "Whether we agreed or not, I always had a great deal of respect for Mark Kipnis. I always thought he was a straight shooter. He was one who understood you could have disagreement without unpleasantness. I respected that." He particularly admired Kipnis for conducting himself honorably while representing Radler. "It's hard for anyone to imagine the circumstances under which people worked on the management side under the Radler regime," Minkkinen said. "He would brook no dissension or compromise from his minions. Radler was clearly the driving force in all those negotiations. From my perspective, he had no interest in the newspaper except as a vehicle to make money."

I asked if he ever wondered why Kipnis and Rilea didn't quit. "Yeah, quite frankly," Minkkinen said. "It had to be a very very difficult environment." 

Rilea was on Kipnis's witness list. He expects to be called as a character witness before Kipnis is sentenced in November. "I wish you'd have known him," said Rilea, speaking of his friend as one speaks of the deceased. "You'd have liked him." 

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.

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.

It can be a heartwarming sight when the next generation steps up -- depending on what you thought of the first generation. Word comes that a string of nine small newspapers in Rhode Island is being sold to a company headed by Melanie Radler. Her father, David Radler, started out with his own little papers in Canada and wound up publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times and COO of Hollinger International, where prosecutors say he and his longtime (until recently) pal Conrad Black pocketed money hand over fist. In March Black goes on trial on corruption charges in federal court in Chicago. Radler has pleaded guilty and turned state's evidence.

Melanie Radler is a 1999 Northwestern law school grad who went to work as a litigator for Winston & Strawn, the law firm chaired at the time by Jim Thompson. Back then the former governor was on cordial terms with Radler and Black -- in fact he presided over the Hollinger board's all-important audit committee. Today that's all history Thompson would probably rather forget, and Melanie Radler has surfaced as president of RISN Operations Inc., the firm buying the Rhode Island papers. The vice president is Roland McBride, who might be described as an old crony of her dad's. He's CFO of Horizon Publications Inc., of Marion, Illinois, a small newspaper chain that Radler still controls and that Black used to own a large piece of. Horizon shows up right in the middle of the Hollinger scandal. According to the 2005 indictment, noncompete payments written into the deal when Hollinger sold some publications to Horizon for more than $43 million in 1999 meant that Black, Radler, and a third defendant "had, in essence, negotiated an agreement with themselves . . . not to compete against themselves . . . resulting in them paying themselves . . . approximately $1.2 million."

McBride was also CFO of the American Publishing Company -- a Hollinger subsidiary that by the end of 2000 had sold off virtually all its newspapers. Nevertheless, the indictment says, in 2001 four Hollinger officers were paid a total of $5.5 million (in checks backdated to 2000, with almost all the money going to Black and Radler) in return for their promises not to compete with the APC if they left Hollinger. They took the money, the indictment marvels, not to compete "with a company that was, for all intents and purposes, no longer in the newspaper business." A special committee of the Hollinger Board investigating the scandal would identify McBride as the APC officer who signed the checks and characterize the explanation he gave as "completely nonsensical."

McBride and Melanie Radler couldn't be reached to talk about their new adventure. A Rhode Island journalist tells me the outgoing owners, the Journal Register Company, "bled these newspapers down to a fraction of what they used to be." If Melanie Radler has inherited any of her dad's genius -- or if dad's lurking in the background of this deal -- she'll show them. David Radler never saw a turnip that wasn't a little plumper than it needed to be.