My life was wiped out in Chicago — at least all that mattered in it. No big
deal for a city that has wiped out many lives, I suppose, but my demise
didn’t come at the hand of some zoot-suited mobster. Mine was a judicial
murder in the Seventh Circuit US Court of Appeals.
The blunt instrument striking me down on June 25 was in fact directed at my
husband — I was only collateral damage. In the past few years, newspapers
and television producers by the truckload have asked me in vain to talk
about “it”. “It”, for them, being the delicious story of the Blacks’ rise
and fall in society and business. “It”, for me, meaning the brutal
destruction of my husband’s accomplishments, reputation and freedom as well
as our life together, his company and with it virtually all shareholders’
equity by a combination of press and judiciary merrily dancing together to
the music of the times.
So what, you ask. What does it matter if one well-off, elderly white woman
with too many pairs of expensive shoes now finds her social life largely
limited to visiting her dearly missed husband in a US federal correctional
institution? Should be interesting material for her as a writer.
But if the rich and well-connected cannot get justice, what chance for anyone
else — a question I asked in columns about the law long before I married
Conrad. What chance for the orange jump-suited, marginalised young men I saw
shuffling in front of the judge in Chicago, silent while their
court-appointed attorneys negotiated their freedom away in that tight little
legal world, where a client’s fate never disturbs the bonhomie between
lawyers.
If ostensibly privileged defendants like us can be baselessly smeared,
wrongfully deprived, falsely accused, shamelessly persecuted, innocently
convicted and grotesquely punished, it doesn’t take much to figure out what
happens to the vulnerable and the powerless: they land, finally, in the
8:45am courtroom parade that takes place all over “America the Free” — the
country that “wins” 90% of cases and imprisons more people than any other in
the world.
Every wife says her husband is innocent. Every convicted man has a tale of how
the system is rigged. I suspected some tales were true. Now I know.
My husband, Conrad Black, took 30 years to build his company, Hollinger
International, into the third-largest newspaper company in the western
world. As the 20th century drew to a close, his divestment strategy in a
rapidly changing market earned shareholders nearly $2 billion in capital
gains. Then, a large New York institutional investor saw even more profit in
wresting control of the company from Conrad to sell parts of it off for a
quick profit. The corporate rebels started planting stories in competing
newspapers with accusations of management misdeeds at the Hollinger group,
ranging from simple greed to outright corruption and thievery.
We were, it seems, a delicious target. After months of daily faxed pages from
newspapers around the world revelling in ever more grotesque tales of our
alleged extravagance at shareholders’ expense, I stopped reading about my
sex life, real or imagined, my conspicuousness in dress, true or false, and
my plastic surgery, revealed by me or made up by reporters. I hadn’t a clue
what relevance such tripe had to do with the accusations against my husband
or why it interested ostensibly serious media commentators, but this was the
process of demonisation.
In any event, were I a clothes-crazy predator and were my husband the arrogant
and pompous caricature of the books and films depicting him, what then?
Would this justify the subsequent twisting of due process by the legal
system? Would it make unnecessary the proper scrutiny by the press of public
facts and filings? Is this a sufficient reason for silence now, after the
essential emptiness of the accusations has been established? If Dreyfus had
been a loud and vulgar Jew instead of an officer and a gentleman, would his
case have been any the less important or his persecution less unjust?
In his innocence, my husband believed innocence was enough. On May 22, 2003,
in response to an activist investor, he created a special committee to
investigate allegations of unauthorised or unjustified payments. He was
confident that this committee — which hired the former head of the US
Securities and Exchange Commission Richard Breeden as counsel — wouldn’t
find any wrongful payments for the simple reason that there were none. What
my husband did not understand was that the marauders and zealots of
corporate governance had their own agenda. Once he had been accused,
evidence was unnecessary.
After a five-month investigation, the special committee reported — wrongly, as
we now know — that payments of $32.15m made to my husband and others were
not authorised by Hollinger International’s board of directors. I remember
that day, every detail, including the ashen face of my husband: every TV
channel had fictional tales about us flashing across the bottom of the
screen.
By then we knew the rats had left the ship, taking with them the last shreds
of their integrity: directors like Henry Kissinger, who had sworn eternal
loyalty only weeks earlier, the economist Marie-Josée Kravis, former US
ambassador to Germany Richard Burt, former governor James Thompson of
Illinois, all of them hoping to save themselves the inconvenience of
standing up to the threats of regulators and prosecutors. Thus began the
draining of Hollinger International and its parent company Hollinger Inc of
billions, and my husband of his lifetime of work and earning.
Conrad fought with one hand behind his back. He could get neither information
nor access to the special committee’s findings. It had presented no evidence
for its charges but he felt duty-bound to resign as CEO and pay back monies
it questioned. (He’s owed most of that money now, but the company hasn’t got
it.) Deals that Conrad arranged to buy out Hollinger Inc shareholders and
sell Hollinger International to give the shareholders a decent profit were
blocked by the courts and regulators at the urgings of the corporate
governance winners and the new management, who would have had no business to
feast on for the next four years had they sold everything. Now, shareholders
would sit helplessly and watch the value of their shares evaporate to nil or
next-to-nil.
Lawsuits for defamation followed swiftly from both sides. Conrad had no idea,
and one could not convince him, that he was in Salem, in the middle of an
American witch-hunt. There is no defence against false accusations in Salem.
In August 2004, the special committee issued the so-called “Breeden Report”,
accusing Conrad and his team of having run a $500m “corporate kleptocracy”.
By the following year, my husband’s one-time partner, former Chicago
Sun-Times publisher David Radler, a man with the backbone of a jellyfish,
had made a plea agreement with the prosecutors. Not surprising; of all the
defendants, Radler was the only one who may have done something dishonest.
As the prosecutors knew only too well, this made him the most likely to
deal.
The trial began in Chicago in March 2007. Conrad couldn’t wait. This was
America, the country he loved and admired all his life. This, he kept
telling me, was where ordinary men and women would see the truth.
Pessimistic little Jew that I am, I listened and worried. He was facing 17
criminal charges, lead prosecutor Eric Sussman having thrown everything at
him, including the kitchen sink — literally, because the charges included
the false accusation that he fraudulently stuck Hollinger International with
some of the costs of our New York apartment. The jury would eventually throw
out this charge, along with many others; but meanwhile it enabled the
prosecution to confiscate the proceeds from the sale of our former Park
Avenue residence, some $10.5m, as a result of which we were defended in
Chicago not by the lawyers we would have liked, but by the lawyers we could
afford. After a four-month trial, the jury took two weeks to reach a
verdict.
By now, I knew a lot about so-called American justice where, among many evils,
the FBI can with impunity knowingly swear incomplete affidavits, and the
prosecution can threaten defence witnesses and call up our mortgage holders
to let them know their companies will be fully investigated should they
renew our loans.
Given this, it was almost surprising that the 12 ordinary citizens of Chicago
threw out most of the charges against Conrad and, in monetary terms,
acquitted him of 90% of the prosecution’s case. Still, the witch- hunters
managed to confuse the jurors enough for them to convict him on three counts
of wire fraud involving $6.1m and one of obstruction of justice. The perky
trial judge sentenced Conrad to a draconian 6.5 years, which may not be much
for having stolen $6.1m but rather a lot for not having stolen it.
On March 3, 2008, we drove to a prison in northern Florida. He stood mute in
front of the grey-uniformed correctional officers. “My husband, Conrad
Black, is self-surrendering,” I said for him. I had explained to Conrad
earlier that he could take nothing, absolutely nothing, into prison but his
spectacles and a small sum of money that would be put into a commissary
account. I hadn’t noticed the tiny carrier bag he held, which the guard
opened on the counter. His glasses were in it but so was his half-used tube
of lip salve and the tablets he took for sleep at night. “Can’t have that,”
said the correctional officer and handed the Chapstick to me, confiscating
the tablets.
Conrad walked towards a door and disappeared. A few weeks later his clothes
arrived from the prison in a brown paper parcel. He was 58 when these
horrors began, 63 when he entered prison; we knew that unless an appeal
succeeded, he’d be nearly 70 when he emerged and I would be 73. In view of
this, we rather looked forward to June 5 this year, when the appeals court
indicated that it would hear oral arguments.
Even after the debacle of the trial, Conrad placed his hope in the appeal.
“Now,” he said to me, “we get to a serious American court.” Kangaroo court,
more like it. I’ve attended appeals in Canada and the UK but never have I
seen so shabby a performance. The three judges were led by Judge Richard
Posner. Posner, a man reputed to be a serious intellect, is certainly a
self-important one, listing virtually every publication, including book
reviews back to 1964, on his biography page. This is no crime but it does
indicate a degree of self-absorption more often seen in film stars.
My husband’s lawyer, Andrew Frey, former US deputy solicitor-general for 13
years, led off: “I want to say a few words at the beginning about
obstruction of justice. This is the weakest case I have seen in 45 years.”
Little did he know how accurate “a few words” would be. During Frey’s
10-minute opening remarks, Justice Posner made 32 interventions, 24 of which
were outright interruptions and 21 of which took place after less than two
sentences. Posner’s leitmotif was an irritating whine, “I don’t understand.”
As his unfamiliarity with the case emerged, I realised that this was
spot-on.
After 10 minutes I knew it was over. What I didn’t know was why.
Three weeks later, the appeal court denied every aspect of the appeal. The
judgment, signed by Posner, suggested that he appeared to have read not one
defence brief. Why believe the wife? You don’t have to. Do what the appeal
court could and should have done: go to the trial transcripts and defence
submissions — they’re public documents.
Posner had based his opinion on key points that were simply not factually
correct. Acquitted acts were muddled up with convictions. He got around the
sticky problem of no evidence against Conrad by redefining an already
controversial concept called “honest services”. If Posner’s ruling stands,
it is only a slight overstatement to say that the US government will be able
to charge almost any businessman with the “crime” of breaching the honest
services statute without the tiresome need for evidence, an inappropriate
act or any illegitimate gain.
Why did this happen to us? The 1980 film American Gigolo has a line when
Richard Gere is trying to find out why he has been set up for a murder. “You
were expendable,” sneers the black mobster Leon, with exquisite contempt,
“no one liked you.” Well, a lot of people didn’t like us. My husband’s
exuberant displays of intellectual prowess, plus his confidence that he was
somehow exempt from the normal rules of petty mankind — to wit, he could
call many journalists lazy without being buried by them when the first real
opportunity came — irritated enemies and even some admirers. My own
political incorrectness and penchant for peacock display was a burr under
the saddle of many. Add worldly achievement and the evident happiness of our
marriage and you have a perfect Petri dish for animus.
Conrad, too, is a man out of joint with his times, whose notion of loyalty,
superglue-strong, prevented him from taking the steps he should have with,
among others, David Radler, when his capacity for business deceit first
surfaced a few years earlier. Nor did Conrad’s entrepreneurial flair and
style sit well in the constipated corporate world of the 21st century. My
husband may simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In the early days of this awful saga, when hostile investors were
orchestrating a financial squeeze on Hollinger, we had an emergency
telephone conference call with the Hollinger Inc directors who included
myself, former Canadian high commissioner to the UK Fredrik Eaton, former TV
executive Douglas Bassett, lawyer Maureen Sabia, and a man who was the
recipient of many favours from Conrad, former Canadian ambassador to the US
Allan Gotlieb. The call was a disaster. The directors refused Conrad’s
request for more time to raise money.
When the meeting ended, Conrad quickly hung up. I did not. Nor did the other
directors who, believing both of us off the line, abandoned their serious
tone and began laughing and joking about the stew they had put Conrad in. “I
should get an Oscar for my acting,” said Gotlieb in reference to his
performance as a concerned director. “I could barely stop myself from
laughing when Barbara referred to her concern for Conrad’s reputation,” said
Fred Eaton. The woman I had recommended for the board, my old schoolmate
Maureen Sabia, sarcastically replied: “All she’s worried about is her own
reputation,” and joined happily in the dissing of us both. Here, writ
plainly, was the future. These people were among Conrad’s oldest friends.
Because his is the story of the attempted destruction of a rich Anglo
businessman, it attracts little sympathy. Our society hunts down, rightly,
the guilty individuals who ruin companies and fleece shareholders, but no
one sheds a tear for the flourishing company whose shareholders are ruined
and fleeced by the government, regulators and self-described corporate
reformers riding the Trojan horse of corporate governance. Americans sit
smugly confident in their justice system built around the plea bargain — a
system that invites intimidation by prosecutors and perjury by witnesses.
Every sophisticated American businessman we knew told us early on that,
innocent or not, Conrad hadn’t a chance. “Make a deal and plea
bargain,” they said.
These issues are larger than Conrad’s penchant for showing off his knowledge
about American politics or my buying yet another half-dozen Chanel jackets.
Where is the outrage and fury, the understanding that as the rich man is
denied justice, so much worse will be the fate of the poorer? Where is the
Zola this needs? No point in the wife writing J’Accuse — who will listen to
me?
No matter how many disclaimers I make, when you have to defend yourself or
your husband, it can only leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Writing
this is humiliating, but it needs to be said.
When Conrad was ousted, his company’s shares were fast heading towards $18;
now, five years later, they won’t fetch 50 cents. He offered to buy his
Canadian company’s shares for $7.60; the regulators stopped him. Today those
shares are worth zero. Dissident investors who balked at paying $25m a year
to those who created Hollinger International’s wealth ended up paying $45m a
year to the “reformers” — the lawyers, auditors and investigators who
dissipated it. “Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town...” The corporate
governance racketeers could teach Al Capone a lesson or two.
© Barbara Amiel 2008
