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COMMENTARY
June 29, 2011
Getting Black
Some sort of congratulations are in order, to the professional enemies of Conrad Black, for they managed to stitch him up with additional jail time, even after the Supreme Court of the United States had vacated most of the convictions for which he had already served a serious term.The two convictions left standing depended partly on those that were shot down. One further relies on a ridiculous imposture: that Black was "obstructing justice" by removing personal effects from an office from which he'd just been evicted. He removed these in broad daylight. He didn't pack the boxes, he didn't know exactly what was in them, and he didn't have a chance to find out before the police came by his house in Toronto to take them away again, so his prosecutors could go on a fishing expedition through that stuff, too. As gentle reader will surely know, from having been shown tape from the security camera a few dozen times in our "mainstream media," it sure makes him look guilty. A tape of anyone moving boxes makes him look guilty. Some boxes are heavier than others, and the heavier they are, the more furtive he will look. Context matters, in such a case, and the context was consistently omitted from the accounts. What else he may have done to obstruct justice is a matter of interpretation - very amateur interpretation in the case of a judge and jury lacking appropriate background, bombarded with complexly multiplied try-on charges, billowing layers of insinuation, and gratuitous phrases like "corporate kleptocracy," by a Chicagoland prosecuting team that specializes in stitching up the rich and famous. We could fill a book with the trivial details of the case. We could fill another book with the unedifying career of Patrick Fitzgerald, the chief prosecutor. We could fill book three on the "progress" of corporate law in the Banana Republic, I mean United States, where hard law in subjects like fraud is being experimentally rewritten to make almost everything a "judgment call." Indeed, this is just what the U.S. Supreme Court was flagging, when it found the whole concept of "honest services fraud" - under which Black was hung out to dry - to be impossibly vague. "Honest services" is the ideal tool for the malicious prosecutor. It replaces "reasonable doubt" with "plausible suspicion." There will always be investors who lose money: not from fraud, but from ill luck, recklessness, mindless vanity, and other forms of stupidity, including the coarsest greed. It is easy to convince such people that they are victims of a dark conspiracy, when they are more likely victims of their own inability to hear warnings from their stockbrokers. And even when they have come out ahead, it is easy to convince them that they should have received a much bigger return. Humans are like that. Putting class action suits together from such filth is child's play. What actually happened to Hollinger should be emblazoned in every observer's mind. The company did not come to pieces under Conrad Black. The company was Conrad Black, and his genius for acquiring distressed media properties and turning them around - while, incidentally, decisively raising journalistic standards - was the draw. (He had every right to collect on modest "non-compete" clauses when selling properties.) This was also the danger of Hollinger as an investment: for it lived at the riskiest end of the trade. It was therefore a risky investment. Notwithstanding, it came to pieces only when Black was disposed of. The irony here is that the investors who went along on the prosecution ride, lost everything. In the old proverb, they killed the golden goose. Alas, they took all the other investors down with them. Nothing but wreckage to show; and Black serving time not for what he did, but for what he was unable to prevent. I mentioned stockbrokers above. The good ones advise people to look beyond the standard ratios, at the business itself, before making big investments. And that is where corporate culture is unravelling, everywhere. For people en masse, and large institutions, invest increasingly by the numbers alone, without regard to underlying realities. We get stock market panics, touched off by automatic selling; we get tech bubbles and other anarchy, from people who follow numbers out the window. And now we have prosecuting teams, hunting heads for "payback." As I was reminded by the cheering when Black went back down, there is one charge on which this man can be honestly convicted. He is Conrad Black. He and his wife are utterly detested by many, especially in the media world, for reasons I could explain in another book. He is guilty as charged for being their bogeyman. And you may read their jackal comments on a hundred websites to see how well they understand the case against him. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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