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Conrad Black

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Conrad Black
Born (1944-08-25) August 25, 1944 (age 80)
Canada Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Occupation(s)convicted felon, newspaper magnate, financier, historian and biographer.


Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour PC, OC, KCSG (born 25 August, 1944, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is a prominent Canadian-born British convicted felon, biographer, financier and former newspaper magnate. He is married to Barbara Amiel, a well-known journalist.

Lord Black controversially renounced Canadian citizenship in 2001 in order to become a life peer in the British House of Lords. He is currently a defendant in United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois facing thirteen counts related to criminal fraud. The jury reached a guilty verdict on four charges, including mail fraud and obstruction of justice, but acquitted him of the other nine charges, including wire fraud and racketeering, after 12 days of deliberation on Friday, July 13, 2007. He faces a potential maximum of 35 years in prison when sentenced.

Early life and career

Conrad Black was born into a wealthy Winnipeg family. His father, George Montegu Black, Jr., was the president of Canadian Breweries, an international brewing conglomerate which earlier had absorbed Winnipeg Breweries, which was founded by George Black Sr. (Canadian Breweries was an important holding of Argus Corporation.) Conrad Black's mother was the former Jean Elizabeth Riley, a daughter of Conrad Stephenson Riley (whose father founded the Great-West Life Assurance Company) and a great-granddaughter of an early co-owner of the Daily Telegraph.

Black was first educated at Upper Canada College from which, according to Tom Bower's recent biography Conrad and Lady Black, he was expelled for selling stolen exam papers. He then attended Trinity College School where he lasted less than a year, eventually graduating from a small, now defunct private school in Toronto called Thornton Hall. He continued his education at Carleton University (History, 1965). For a time, Black attended Toronto's Osgoode Hall Law School. However he dropped out during his first year of study. He eventually completed his law degree at Université Laval (Law, 1970), later completing a Master of Arts degree in history at McGill University in 1973. His thesis, later published as a biography, was on Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis.

He became involved in a number of businesses, mainly publishing newspapers, but briefly in mining. The Black family founded the Ravelston Corporation in 1969 as an investment vehicle. Together with friends David Radler and Peter G. White, Black purchased and operated the Sherbrooke Record, the small English language daily in Sherbrooke, Quebec. In 1971, the three formed Sterling Newspapers Limited, a holding company that would acquire several other small Canadian regional newspapers.

Black's first marriage was to Joanna (born Shirley) Hishon, of Montreal, by whom he has two sons, Jonathan-David Conrad and James Patrick Leonard Black, and a daughter, Alana Whitney Elizabeth Black. The couple divorced in 1992. That same year, Black married Barbara Amiel, an English-born right-wing journalist who had previously been married to David Graham, George Jonas, and Gary Smith.

Early in his business career Conrad Black was taken under the wing of John Angus "Bud" McDougald and E. P. Taylor, two prominent Canadian businessmen. Following McDougald's death in 1978, Black acquired a controlling interest in the shareholding of Argus Corporation, a mammoth Canadian holding company, through an arrangement, later controversial, with two widows, one of them McDougald's. At the time, Argus owned some of Canada's most prominent blue-chip companies such as Dominion Stores, Canada's largest supermarket chain, Massey Ferguson, Canada's large multi-national farm machinery corporation, Hollinger Mines, an important gold-mining company in Timmins, Ontario, and Norcen Energy, an energy and pipeline operation. Black resigned as Chairman of the struggling Massey Ferguson company in 1979. Argus divested its shares to the employee union. Hollinger Mines was turned into a holding company.

In 1990, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He was ranked 235th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2004, with an estimated wealth of £175m.

Becoming a press baron

Black gradually became the latest in a series of Canadian-born British press lords—his predecessors include Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook; Hugh Graham, 1st Baron Atholstan; and Roy Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet.

In 1985, Black was approached by Andrew Knight, (then the editor of The Economist), and invited to make an investment in the ailing Telegraph group. By buying into the Telegraph group, Black made his entry into the British press.

By 1990, his companies ran over 400 newspaper titles in North America. Many of these were disposed of toward the end of the 1990s with around 150 titles being sold in a single deal with CanWest Global Communications Corp.

He launched the National Post in Toronto in 1998 but sold his interest in 2001.

The peerage controversy and Canadian citizenship

Black's initial attempt to accept the British peerage offered to him by the Queen on the advice of British Prime Minister Tony Blair was thwarted by then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who referred to the 1919 Nickle Resolution, by which the Canadian House of Commons resolved that the Canadian Monarch should not confer titular honours on Canadians.

Black attempted to work around the Canadian Prime Minister by taking dual British and Canadian citizenship, claiming that he would accept the peerage from the Queen as a British citizen rather than as a Canadian citizen. After this proved unsuccessful, with Chrétien still asserting that Blair could not have the Queen give a titular honour to a Canadian, Black initiated a lawsuit against Chrétien, arguing that the Canadian Prime Minister's strict interpretation of the Nickle Resolution, which is not a law, was payback for Black's political opinions and past criticism of Chrétien.

Black lost the lawsuit on the first instance and on appeal, with the Court of Appeal for Ontario stating that the Prime Minister of Canada was within his constitutional rights to advise the Queen on the exercise of her royal prerogative. In 2001, Black gave up his Canadian citizenship and was created a life peer as Baron Black of Crossharbour in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets where he sits as a member of the British Conservative Party

Even without his Canadian citizenship, Black continues to enjoy the privileges of membership in the Queen's Privy Council for Canada which Brian Mulroney gave him in 1992 which includes the use of a special diplomatic passport.

Regaining his citizenship

On September 26, 2006, the Globe and Mail reported that Black was taking steps to regain his Canadian citizenship. Although possibly a strategic maneuver against potentially serving a sentence in the US or being prevented from crossing the border following a conviction, Lord Black, in an interview on TVOntario, on September 25, claimed that his legal problems had retarded the process by which he would reclaim his citizenship.; "I always said that I would take my citizenship back, and if it wasn't for all these legal problems, I would have done it by now." He told interviewer Steve Paikin that he was working through "normal channels."

Black would be able to retain his seat in the British House of Lords should he regain his Canadian citizenship, a process that might take several years.

Black said that he did not have an "easy sleigh ride" when he was a Canadian, but said that he has become more patriotic and something of a "demonstrative Canadian flag waver."

Financial controversies

In the 1980s, Black reclaimed $62,000,000 from the surplus of the Dominion workers' pension fund, claiming the surplus was the property of the employer. The Union challenged Black in court and he was ordered to return the money to the workers. Black appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada which upheld the lower court's decision.

On 17 November, 2003, after an internal inquiry alleged that Black had received more than $7 million in unauthorized payments of company funds, it was announced that he would resign as chief executive of Hollinger. On 17 January, 2004, Hollinger International reported that the executive committee of the board of directors had obtained Black's resignation as chairman. A special committee at Hollinger investigating the unauthorised payments filed a lawsuit in New York for the recovery of the money. Hollinger International also filed a $200 million (USD) lawsuit against Lord Black and his former top lieutenant, David Radler, as well as against the companies Black has used to control the publishing.

On 15 November, 2004, the SEC filed civil fraud lawsuits against Lord Black and several others. On 17 November, 2005, eleven criminal fraud charges were brought by U. S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald against Black and three former Hollinger executives. Eight of the criminal fraud charges were against Black, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a hearing in late 2006, his bail was raised to $21 million (USD).

On 15 December, 2005, four new federal charges were laid against Black by Fitzgerald in Chicago. The new counts included racketeering, obstruction of justice, money laundering and wire fraud. Under the racketeering count, Fitzgerald was seeking forfeiture of more than $92,000,000 (USD). The obstruction count against Black related to a video that appears to show Black illegally removing more than a dozen boxes from the Toronto office of Hollinger Inc . Black returned the boxes about a week after the video had become public.

An agency of the American government has seized the proceeds of the sale of Black's and Amiel's New York apartment. Hollinger International Inc. sued Black for $200 million (USD) in January 2006.

Trial

On July 13, 2007 a jury found Black guilty of three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. He was acquitted of wire fraud, racketeering and several other counts. Black's trial for criminal fraud had started on March 14, 2007 in Chicago. Black had been represented both by well-known Chicago counsel, Edward Genson, and respected Canadian trial lawyer Edward Greenspan. The case against Black and three of his associates depended heavily on testimony by David Radler, long described as Black's No. 2. Radler pleaded guilty to his role in the alleged scheme and agreed to a jail term of two years and five months and a fine of US$28 million. In exchange, he agreed to cooperate with the authorities and serve as a key witness for the prosecution. The prosecutors attempted to use Radler's testimony to link Black and several associates to the alleged fraudulent non-compete payments that were at the heart of the trial. On cross-examination the defendants' lawyers discredited Radler as a liar who had acted independently without Black's knowledge or inspiration.

At the end of the prosecution's case, the one charge of money-laundering against Black was dropped.

Other controversies surrounding Black

Some years ago Black made several controversial statements, including the suggestions that Canada should join the United States and abandon its universal health care system, medicare. Black also attacked journalists as a class, accusing them of being over-paid and under-supervised.

Black was also involved, albeit tangentially, in a controversy in December 2001, when the then French ambassador to the UK, Daniel Bernard, called Israel a "shitty little country" in a conversation the two had at a private dinner party. The conversation was promptly reported by Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, in her newspaper column. The resulting scandal resulted in the re-assignment of Bernard to Algeria the following year.

Books written

While CEO of Hollinger International, Conrad Black used its funds to purchase at auction a collection of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt's private papers for several million dollars (USD). With the assistance of his wife (conservative political columnist Barbara Amiel) and other conservative writers, he produced a bestselling 1,280-page biography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom (ISBN 978158648184), in 2003.

The book relies heavily upon the information in the FDR collection he owns, emphasizing small, sometimes very personal details of FDR's life.

The book maintains that FDR was neither the guileless, patrician altruist that his admirers would like to portray, nor the dupe for Stalin at Yalta that his opponents portray. Rather, FDR is portrayed as a complex individual who was able to marshall the forces that saved the United States from the Great Depression and the world from totalitarianism in World War II.

As a young man Black also wrote a thesis on Quebec's controversial longest serving premier, Maurice Duplessis, which was subsequently published as a lengthy biography. Duplessis, who died in office in 1959, had been regarded by Canadian historians and journalists as a reactionary authoritarian; Black defended him as a canny progressive force.

In 1993 Black published an autobiography titled A Life in Progress (ISBN 9781550135206)

Black's most recent book, The Invincible Quest: the Life of Richard Milhous Nixon (ISBN 978-0771011238), is a biography of US President Richard Nixon that runs 1,000 pages and was released in Canada in May 2007 near the end of his trial in Illinois. The book reportedly casts Nixon in a more sympathetic light than he is normally seen in. Black has told the Globe and Mail that his next book will be "more personal" and "about the events of the day"..

Biographies and portrayal in popular culture

  • 2004 - Documentary film Citizen Black premieres at the Montreal and Cambridge film festivals.
  • 2006 - Canadian actor Albert Schultz portrays Black in the CTV movie Shades of Black.
  • 2006 - Harper Collins publishes Tom Bower's dual biography Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge (ISBN 139780007232345). The book paints a negative picture of the couple. Black dismissed it and announced in March 2007 that he would sue Bower for libel.. Writing in the Telegraph he said: "Bower's portrayal of my youth and family was an astonishing farrago of snide falsehoods"

References

  1. Conrad Black: Timeline Last Updated March 2007 CBC News
  2. A Conrad Black timeline; Mar 11, 2007 Compiled by David Olive; Toronto Star
  3. Black v Chrétien: suing a Minister of the Crown for abuse of power, misfeasance in public office and negligence
  4. The Rise and Fall of Citizen Black November 21, 2004 Reporter :Jeff Randall, BBC Money Programme
  5. Conrad Black: Where did it all go wrong? BBC News; 2004
  6. Lord Black is charged with fraud; BBC News; 2004
  7. Conrad Black charged with racketeering and obstruction of justice; Dec 15, 2005 TARA PERKINS; CBCNews
  8. Paul Waldie (2007-03-14). "Black looking confident as trial begins". Globe and Mail. CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. Retrieved 2007-03-14. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  9. "His trial looming, Black hit the book-promo ciruit" Globe and Mail: March 24, 2007. R1.
  10. The fast lady By Tom Bower. Extract of Shades of Black. Sunday Times. October 29, 2006
  • Guardian Unlimited Special Report - Conrad Black, Hollinger and the Telegraph - Ongoing archive collection of news and analysis.
  • SEC - Breeden Report - Complete 512-page copy of the Report of Investigation by the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Hollinger International Inc.
  • - Black fired, faces $200M lawsuit. In 2004 Black faced a number of law suits from investors and others claiming highly inappropriate financial dealings as well as audit fraud concerning circulation at his papers.
  • Devin Leonard. "Black & Blue: Shareholders are beating up Hollinger CEO Conrad Black over his huge, tricky pay packages. He calls them 'governance terrorists'". Fortune. 29 September, 2003.
  • ) - News release from the Privy Council of Canada on the lawsuit filed against Jean Chrétien by Conrad Black.

External links

Racketeering Charges and Trial

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