Black's attitude could hurt during sentencing

[Free Press]

Black's attitude could hurt during sentencing
Updated Sun. Dec. 9 2007 4:02 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

Disgraced media magnate Conrad Black will likely get a seven-year prison sentence when he appears in a Chicago courtroom tomorrow, predicts one expert.

The U.S. federal prosecutors have been asking for a prison term approaching 20 years for the former CEO of newspaper company Hollinger International, convicted in July on three counts of fraud and one of obstruction of justice.

He was acquitted on nine other charges.

James Morton, a former president of the Ontario Bar Association, told CTV Newsnet that he believes Black's lack of remorse will play a role in Judge Amy St. Eve's decision.

"I do think that Mr. Black's lack of remorse may play against him a little bit, but I'm still thinking seven years is the likely number," Morton said.
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http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071209/black_sentence_071209/20071209?hub=TopStories

Conrad Black awaiting sentencing
Five months after being convicted of fraud and obstructing justice, former media tycoon Conrad Black is due in court for sentencing.

The maximum sentence for Black's crimes - whose guilty verdict the British peer is appealing - is 35 years.

But legal experts say he can expect a jail term of between five and 15 years.

Black, who has continued to profess his innocence since the trial, has said the prospect of a lengthy spell in prison was "a bore but quite endurable".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7135349.stm

Black faces ruin as well as jail
Lord Black of Crossharbour, the disgraced media baron and former Daily Telegraph proprietor, is facing not only a prison sentence but a renewed legal onslaught by the US authorities that could financially ruin him.

Tomorrow the peer goes back to court in Chicago, where he was found guilty in July of fraud and obstruction of justice. Apart from a jail term, he is likely to have a multimillion-dollar fine imposed on him, but he also faces the resurrection of a civil lawsuit to claw back millions in ill-gotten gains that could leave him with nothing.

As part of the criminal case, prosecutors are already trying to seize the Palm Beach mansion where Black has been holed up with his wife, Barbara Amiel, for the past five months. The judge, Amy St Eve, will decide in the morning whether he should forfeit the property, which the US government alleges was renovated using cash stolen from the peer's stock market-listed company, Hollinger International. Prosecutors also want $8.5m (£4.2m) in proceeds from the sale of his New York apartment. The FBI seized the cheque before it was handed to Black.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3236151.ece

[DoYouEverWonder]

I hope he likes his new life in prison.


Black at bay


Not everyone would react to the prospect of 101 years in jail by writing a biography of Nixon, but Conrad Black is not everyone. Oliver Burkeman meets the defiant ex-tycoon

Saturday May 19, 2007

<snip>

There are no court proceedings today, so Black has agreed to meet at Chicago's Four Seasons hotel to discuss his new book, a 1,100-page biography of Richard Nixon. The fact that Black has chosen this moment to publish a biography of Nixon is extraordinary but you do not need to know all that much about the former Telegraph and Spectator owner to see that it is entirely characteristic.

Nor should it come as a shock to learn that Richard Nixon: The Invincible Quest is a work of rehabilitation, portraying the disgraced president as brilliant, brave, and misunderstood. It's hard not to see the book as a straightforward act of Freudian projection - or, failing that, as a tribute from one wronged man of history to another. Look what happens, it seems to say, when scandal-hungry journalists and envious rivals try to bring down a successful maverick.

Black bristles at the comparison, partly out of deference to Nixon - and partly out of deference to himself. "I feel terribly presumptuous comparing myself to so exalted a person," he says in his Canadian baritone. On the other hand, Nixon did behave in a "terribly tawdry" manner over Watergate, even if he's far less guilty than believed. "Whereas I am, in fact, an honest man, you know. And I don't believe in lawbreaking. I don't take a cynical view of these things. I take a reasonably indulgent view of other people under terrible pressures, like he was. Reasonably but not overly indulgent. But by the end of next month, everyone will see that any allegations against me are a complete fraud."

We are sitting in leather armchairs in a dark corner of the bar, drinking coffee. Now and then, Black scoops peanuts from a bowl and chews them rapidly. "I have not made any effort to cover up anything."

<snip>

One day last week, proceedings turned to the now infamous $62,000 bill for Amiel's 60th birthday party, at the New York restaurant La Grenouille in 2000. As Amiel and her stepdaughter Alana watched from the public benches, the jury absorbed every detail of the event, projected on to a large screen: the $13,000 spent on wine; the $320 bottles of Dom Pérignon; the Beluga caviar, and the guest list featuring Donald Trump, Tina Brown, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle and, incongruously, Barry Humphries. Black, in pinstripes, turned his back to the screen. Instead, he watched the jurors, one of whom took detailed notes using a pen with a bright pink pom-pom on the end. She was chewing bubble-gum, and once or twice she looked across at Black, expressionlessly, and slowly blew a bubble until it popped.

Black is accused of illegally using money from his company, Hollinger International, to pay for most of the party, along with various private jet flights, and refurbishment of the couple's New York flat. But the meat of the trial concerns $60m that he and three co-defendants allegedly skimmed from sales of various Hollinger newspaper companies, under the guise of "non-compete" agreements. In one extreme example, Black and his co-accused shared a windfall of $400,000 for agreeing not to open a rival newspaper in an isolated North Dakota town boasting a population of 10,000 (and America's largest statue of a buffalo). The government's case is that the arrangement was fraudulent, for various reasons; and anyway, there was zero chance that Black would open a rival paper there. Genson's counter-argument seeks to turn Black's legendary self-regard into an advantage. "If you know Conrad Black's ego, and you will by the end of this case," he told the jury early on, "you will know that Conrad Black believes everybody wants a non-compete payment from him."

That said, his perceived grandiosity may also prove to be the defence's biggest challenge. If you believe Bower, the peer and his wife lived a life of lavish parties, surrounded by servants whom they treated viciously, taking £250,000 holidays in Bora-Bora and selecting their evening-wear from overstuffed designer wardrobes. In a famous photograph that seemed to crystallise the excess, the couple were photographed arriving at a fancy-dress party at Kensington Palace dressed as Cardinal Richelieu and Marie Antoinette.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday/story/0,,2083361,00.html