Entries associated with the tag "Globe and Mail":

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.

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.

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.