Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  The Justice Department gleefully announced the New York seizure of my assets, so it was on the Friday late-evening news in Canada when I returned home and in the Saturday morning Canadian and American newspapers. The department intended this to be a show of strength. I thought the reverse. It wasn’t so much that the law was an ass, it was that the American state had become a gangster. For almost the first time, I was more disappointed in America than angry, more contemptuous than outraged.

  By this time, I had no more faith in the Great Man theory of lawyering than the Great Man in question apparently had in my ability to pay him. Craig had the effrontery to ask me to sign a new retainer agreement before his firm would even appear on my behalf in this New York action. I signed it, but by this time, after a few days, the pep talks of moral and legal invincibility had moderated. It was a familiar pattern: lawyerly bellicosity, new retainer, new invoices, bellicosity gives way to sobriety and staying the course, and then it all fades away like the “lone and level sand” around Shelley’s monument to Ozymandias – except for the next Desert Storm of legal invoices.

  Craig wrote up a good brief. He recited the omissions in the FBI affidavit and concluded that the government was trying to “take away David’s sling-shot just as he is about to meet Goliath.” It was a good line, and it was accurate. The government should have known perfectly well that its allegations were rubbish. The prosecutor’s sole motive was to strangle me financially just as the government was going to lay its indictment. Sussman cockily took Craig’s telephone call and emitted peals of laughter at what he thought to be his surpassing cunning.

  Craig happily told me that in the indictment that was about to come, Sussman wanted me to live in my Florida house, presumably to facilitate his further harassments and oppressions (not that the Canadian authorities had been much of a breakwater against them up to this point). Craig, who had been pretty peppy about my chances in a trial, had suddenly become quite sombre and belatedly claimed to realize that the Audit Committee would be frog-marched into court in the same mendacious procession as Radler, and that it would be an “uphill fight.” He implied that I should consider Sussman’s wish that I move to Palm Beach. I dismissed the suggestion.

  The worry about money was haunting me, as my tormentors intended it to do. My homes, all of which had greatly appreciated in value, had been fortresses, as subjects of mortgages and then of sales. Now they were to be turned into a trap, illiquid because of the U.S. government’s persecution of me, in response to the antlike movements of Breeden. As Joan Maida said, “People are screaming for money,” and I was down to $500,000 in cash, which sounds like a lot but isn’t when you have legal bills and houses to maintain and staff to pay, and have great difficulty raising a fair price for any asset. “Money, Money, Money” (from the musical Cabaret) was never far from my thoughts.

  Months of work and worry and Barbara’s evacuation of our home on Park Avenue (during which she sprained her shoulder and developed a tennis elbow from the sorting and packing and unpacking) were snuffed out in a moment with the hippopotamus-walk of the two FBI agents through the closing room. Barbara was now being harassed and threatened by the IRS over her tax arrangements, undertaken on sound professional advice, and unexceptionable at that.

  On the Sunday two days after the New York theft, October 9, I was on the upstairs landing of our main staircase, adjusting my sweater before going out for a bicycle ride, when a fine Franck Muller watch Barbara had given me flipped off my wrist, bounced onto the carpet and through the narrow opening between the balusters, and fell fifteen feet to the marble floor below.

  To replicate this move, I would have had to get down on my hands and knees and feed it between the spars. It seemed to be the end of a valuable watch that I valued in the way people become sentimentally attached to timepieces. I wondered whether I could do nothing right, no matter how mundane or banal. (The watch was repaired, gratis, by a friendly and thoughtful jeweller.)

  In what I am sure he considered a generous and thoughtful gesture, Brendan Sullivan called and said I could give my entire defence to a bright young lawyer. He named Joe Califano’s son and said $2 million would do it. (Califano Sr. had been Lyndon Johnson’s chief of staff.) Brendan was clearly heading for the tall grass, where so many in this dismal cavalcade had preceded him. His terms now were that if I put up $25 million in advance, he would take the case. If I put up $8 million, I could have Greg Craig. It was like taking the ride up to the observation deck on a high building. You pay on the ground and get on the elevator. Halfway up, the elevator stops, and you can pay again or come back down without having a panoramic view. Out of financial necessity as well as irritation at their behaviour, and at the ravenous practices of American law firms, I took the second of these options and ended relations with Williams & Connolly.

  I had paid nearly $9 million for the deterrent and comforting power of Brendan Sullivan. He did not deter, his comfort did not last, and as a parting shot, Williams & Connolly told me that if I did not pay a $400,000 arrears to a data-collection business, for which I had been handsomely billed and on which the other co-defendants, including Radler, had been free-loading, the whole data base would be scrapped. It was very enervating. I retained cordial though distant relations with Brendan and Greg. They are good lawyers but weren’t really engaged with me. Greg went on to be White House counsel for President Barack Obama’s first year but departed somewhat acrimoniously, and not back to Brendan’s firm.

  IT WAS A SAD KOL NIDRE night for Barbara, who, until the FBI stole our money in New York the previous Friday, had been planning to go to London and observe the High Holy days in her synagogue. Instead, she sat with me for a time listening to a recording of the cantor, and I read from her prayer book. I promised that, within my abilities: “Next year in London,” where all her friends had been looking forward to seeing her. The previous year she had been at synagogue with Neal Kozodoy, the editor of Commentary magazine, in New York. This year she was at home with me on the Days of Awe and Atonement, when she wished to be with her people. American notions of justice denied her even this, and she finished the evening gloomily trying to retrieve records to fend off the IRS witch hunt against her.

  BILE CONTINUED TO OOZE and suppurate from some ancient, foul orifices, such as the mouth and pen of Peter C. Newman. The most obnoxious reflections of all, it seemed, were in his autobiography. He managed more than seven hundred pages, in which his principal claim for himself, and the one that was excerpted, was that he had “invented” Barbara and me. He therefore ironically confessed some responsibility for our supposedly wretched and pitiful demise as substantial people. He bought entirely into the “gutsy” Strine line and the imperishable virtue of “Dick” Breeden.

  The section about Barbara was the lowest, nastiest, most revolting piece of journalistic sewage I have read. Newman purported to be the all-seeing connoisseur of our bedroom and from his lurid and neurotic imagination explained to readers and then to interviewers that Barbara hooked me with her sexual wiles, which he purported to detail, with a ghoulishly prurient imagination. Further, Barbara had incited me, credulous dupe as I was, to unsustainable extravagance. She had always publicly given Newman credit as the editor who gave her a chance as a columnist at Maclean’s in 1977 but had no social relationship with him and had no idea that his feelings were so bitter or so twisted. Both her former husband, George Jonas, and I urged her not to read the book, and she has not.

  Barbara and I had both long since gone through the wall in terms of being much affected by such comment. But it was hard to believe that matters had sunk to such a point that a supposedly reputable writer could pen such vulgar drivel and that we should have to endure such abuse. Our condition was so strained that there was nothing to do but fight it out and rely on ultimate financial and legal vindication to resolve the public relations disaster – with the assistance of massive libel suits at the appropriate time, when they would not get in the way of more substantive litigation. I di
d eventually win a partial retraction from Newman, and in 2007 I emerged fully intact from a series of sharp exchanges with him in the National Post, where I debunked some of his more notorious statements on subjects having nothing to do with me. Later, when my imprisonment loomed, he delighted every Canadian television program, as he said, “except Bowling for Dollars” with speculation that I would be sentenced to fifteen years and would be raped in prison while Barbara would desert me and return to England in search of her fifth husband. This putrefied gossip’s preoccupation with such lurid public ruminations was apparently inexhaustible.

  It was objectively sad; in addition to his talents, he had also often been a fairly agreeable dinner companion, but had an irrational compulsion to destroy relationships. He had had his moments, including some brilliant moments as a political columnist, author, and editor, but was outrun by events: the name died before the man, and his declining years have been nasty and disturbed.

  Another champion of vicious mendacity, and without any redeeming quality or talent or mitigating excuse such as Newman’s bilious senescence, was the malodorous English pseudo-biographer Tom Bower. He was a minor pestilence who had festered and pustullated on the edges of journalism and trash books and emerged like the expectant undertaker whenever any prominent financier was under siege. His opening message in a personal email to me was not a surprise, in fact or in tenor. It was an earnest, hearty, old colleagues, jolly-hockey-sticks overture to set the record straight, at the request of unidentified people who felt that he as author and I as subject must be united.

  I naturally invited him not to attempt such a pitiful deception. It shortly emerged that he had been put up to this by the Murdoch organization, HarperCollins. I had some friends whom he did not know were particularly friendly with me, ply him with drink (not much of a challenge, apparently), record their conversations, and provide me with the evidence that his book was to be a malicious assault in which he was just going through the motions before smearing everyone related to me.

  His violent onslaught on Barbara again amazed me. He accused my father of being a chronic and almost catatonic drunkard, even during his active business career, which was exceedingly successful. I had never made a successful deal, operated an asset effectively, or written competently. This innumerate and venomous gossip claimed that for twenty-five years I had “slithered along Bay Street (Toronto’s financial district) on life support.” He could not accurately or even grammatically record that Jack and Jill went up the hill, yet he accused me of relying on too many secondary sources in my Roosevelt book. (His life’s published work possessed less genuine research than any one of my twenty-five chapters on Roosevelt.)

  I assumed that News Corporation had indemnified him or HarperCollins would not have allowed such a contemptible and defamatory volume out under its imprimatur. There were more than one hundred and fifty distinct and major libels in it. And it was so ineptly written and edited, it contained many accidental non-sentences. I wrote a very extensive summary of the libels, and we did sue in Canada for $10 million. Almost all Bower’s reviews were negative. The New York Times called it “a sad little squeak” of a book and enunciated the rule that writers who write vitriolic attacks on other writers should be able to write as well as their targets, and that Bower had failed that test, in respect of both Barbara and me, and had managed the difficult feat of making us seem boring. The press are almost always a pretty job lot, but Bower is an unrecognizable mutation even of the journalist, much less of the authentic author.

  IN MID-NOVEMBER CAME THE centenary dinner of Maclean’s magazine, which celebrated each ten years of its existence with a brief film on the decade. Barbara was one of the introducers of a decade. She looked even more beautiful than ever. At the dinner, Eddie Greenspan had the plea sure of handing Peter C. Newman a libel notice for calling me a criminal, for which we got a retraction. Three days after the dinner, I was formally accused of being a criminal. Barbara learned this from Report on Business TV in her bathroom shortly after getting up. There was no notice to us, though we had expected it any day. Peter Atkinson and the intrepid Jack Boultbee were indicted with me. We would be tried together with Mark Kipnis and Ravelston. “LORD BLACK INDICTED” was the headline on the banner of the Globe and Mail, with a fine picture of Barbara and me from the Maclean’s dinner.

  So dreadful had the tension been that I was glad to be indicted and come face to face with my mortal enemy, who had been stalking me for two years, stirring up lesser beasts of the jungle to nip and snap at me. Finally, they would have to prove something.

  With the disembarkation of Brendan Sullivan and Greg Craig, I now had no lawyer. I tried to engage a number of other American law firms, but they all seemed to have been spooked by fear that my finances were parlous and that the case was even more hopeless than most U.S. criminal defenses. Then I thought of Eddie Greenspan. Of course he was a Canadian lawyer, but I assumed the law was not that different in the United States and that he could recruit a compatible and competent American. Greenspan had been born in Niagara Falls and had told me that he had regretted that his father had not gone a little farther when he emigrated from Europe; then he might have been as famous in the United States as he was in Canada. He had a drawing of Clarence Darrow in his office and revered the bar of Chicago, where his daughter had practised.

  I asked him if he was interested. He was. At this point, the relentless Eric Sussman was calling for $60 million bail, and the U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, was threatening to extradite us. Obviously, the thought was to keep me in jail until the trial on grounds that I could not make bail and, if I did not surrender voluntarily, to label me a fugitive from justice – thus tripling any sentence I might receive. Craig had made no progress with Sussman, who would have gathered from the press, if not from Craig himself, that Craig and his boss were heading for the exit. Greenspan managed to get bond down to a still record-breaking $20 million, consisting in part of the money seized in New York, and the rest secured on a third mortgage, behind my mortgagee and the oversecured Canada Revenue, on the Palm Beach house.

  Exorbitant though the sum was, it did not involve any more cash, which I did not have at this point anyway, after the government’s Park Avenue heist. Our houseman in Palm Beach had called Joan Maida and told her that there was $20.67 in the house account there, enough to operate the house for about fifteen minutes. These grand houses were mockeries of our former status; we rattled around in them, I thought, like the Romanovs in the Alexander palace, waiting for the Bolsheviks to take us away and execute us. Yet they now secured direct financing of $20 million, plus bail of $10 million. I believe the extent of bond, which was nearly $40 million as I cleared other encumbrances off Palm Beach and the value of that property went up, was the highest in the history of the United States up to that time.

  A few days after the indictment, I went to an annual dinner of the Churchill Society, where Chris Matthews, the U.S. television commentator, gave the address. He generously referred to me, and I received a considerable ovation. There was speculation about not attorning to the jurisdiction, and Greenspan said that I could stonewall the Americans for up to six or seven years, but not longer, if I ignored the jurisdiction.

  They would seize my house in Palm Beach, and although their antics in the New York seizure of my apartment sale proceeds had scandalized some, I couldn’t do it; non-appearance would be generally interpreted as a confession of my guilt. Besides, though I knew the prosecution had the advantage and was under no illusion about Sussman’s rabid aggressivity, I knew the facts. Radler’s confession was such bunk, I thought this was the place to give battle, after being struck unforeseeably, like a blind folded man running a gauntlet, for two years.

  Greenspan recruited his daughter’s former employer, Eddie Genson, a colourful Chicago criminal lawyer, to be the co-counsel. He was large and overweight, and because of a physical disability moved with the aid of a motorized tricycle and was armed with a silver-handled cane. His bobbin
g head was covered on all sides and everywhere except his ears, forehead, nose, and just under and beside his eyes with scruffy, reddish-blond hair. He was a Damon Runyon figure, obfuscatory, stammering, almost incomprehensible in his repetitions and syntax and jangling accent – but clever. He had represented a huge number of thugs and scoundrels and celebrities, and he was a famous figure in the Chicago courthouse.

  After the straightlaced playing by the book of Sullivan & Cromwell and high-priced impersonality of Williams & Connolly, I was ready for something altogether different, and in the two Eddies, I certainly had it. For a long time, I thought I had an ideal combination, a pair of streetwise alley cats, one a great traditional barrister and the other a Chicago courthouse roué. Their great advantage in my eyes was that they had never been prosecutors and had never settled a case.

  They were both afflicted by the bug of the criminal lawyer, a misplaced reverence for, and amusement by, the hoods and low-lifes they had represented. I doubt if Genson, from his days accompanying his father as a bail bondsman, had ever represented a respectable client. Greenspan had, but they were not his specialty. He was, however, a serious lawyer, who had often appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada.

  They proved not to be quite what I had expected, but at least, thanks to Greenspan, I had surmounted the original crisis: I had counsel and a survivable bail arrangement. Sussman tried to prevent my return to Canada after I appeared in Chicago to enter a plea, but Greenspan and his immigration counsel put a stop to that. This was not the first, and far from the last, of Sussman’s pestilential interventions with very suggestible, even eagerly complicit, Canadian officials. Addicts and converts to the persecution abounded.