Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Here’s a sampling of press coverage of Conrad Black’s sentencing in a Chicago federal court on charges of mail fraud and obstruction of justice:

Bloomberg: Black Gets 6 1/2 Years in Prison for Hollinger Fraud [Start here for a good recap of the entire affair.]

Black was charged in November 2005. On July 13, a jury found him and three former subordinates guilty of fraud stemming from $6.1 million in checks paid to three defendants in exchange for sham non-competition agreements involving Hollinger. Black was convicted of obstruction of justice for removing 13 boxes of documents sought by regulators from his Toronto office in 2005.

New York Times: Black Given Prison Term Over Fraud

Mr. Black, who once declared he would “not re-enact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility” when criticized for using shareholder money to pay for a vacation to Bora Bora, and charged a lavish birthday party for his wife at La Grenouille restaurant in New York to his company, was acquitted of charges stemming from those incidents.

FORTUNE: Conrad Black’s shabby downfall

Indeed, after all the hullabaloo surrounding Lord Black of Crossharbour’s downfall, he was ultimately convicted of stealing $6.1 million from his company and obstructing justice by lugging some boxes out of his Toronto office - in plain view of security cameras - after being warned not to do so. All of this went on at a time when, on paper at least, Black was worth close to $300 million and was leading a life among the jet-setting glitterati.

Comparisons to Richard Nixon — who would have won the 1972 election without the slightest help from his “plumbers” — are inevitable, especially since Black recently published a mammoth biography on the disgraced president. Indeed, Black is quite a writer: he produced a similarly long — and well-reviewed — biography of Franklin Roosevelt.

But his own perception of himself is a long way from the sordid realities uncovered during his trial. Possibly the most perceptive character study comes in this column from James Bone of The Times of London:

Conrad Black, the romantic hero whose dramatic plots have fizzled out

In his heyday, Lord Black of Crossharbour strutted the world stage as press baron, confidant of statesmen and biographer of American presidents.

The Canadian-born peer, as head of a global newspaper empire that included the Telegraph titles and Spectator magazine, held London in his thrall with parties for journalists, academics and politicians at his double-fronted house in Cottesmore Gardens, Kensington, with Barbara Amiel, his glamorous columnist-wife.

Yesterday the self-regarding former Telegraph chairman, who once famously dressed up as Cardinal Richelieu for a costume party at Kensington Palace (with his wife on his arm as Marie Antoinette), confronted the humiliating prospect of donning an orange prison jumpsuit instead.

“He wanted to be the hero, but for some reason he has always wanted to be the dying hero. He has this very melancholy view,” said George Tombs, the author of a new Canadian biography entitled Robber Baron: Lord Black of Crossharbour. . . .

Lord Black himself bristles at suggestions that his spectacular downfall was provoked by a fatal flaw in his character. . . .

Black peremptorily dismisses such colourful explanations for his troubles. “This theory that it’s all a great ‘rise and fall’ story or some sort of Shakespearean or Greek tragedy and that I was misled by my wife and lived to extravagance, that is all nonsense,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme last month in his only British media interview since the guilty verdict in July.

When John Humphrys described his predicament as a “fall from grace”, Black quickly contradicted him, calling it “persecution” instead.

“He is still trying to maintain that narcissistic bubble he has been in, even now. He is casting himself as a romantic hero who has been victimised by the American justice system and the overzealous missionaries of corporate justice,” Mr Tombs said.

There’s a part of me that relishes the downfall of the likes of Black, ex-Tyco chief Dennis Kozlowski, and ex-Enron chief Jeff Skilling, not because they were rich and powerful — I’m a big fan of capitalism — but becaused they wilfully abused the systems that made them rich, and then clung to their hubris even in defeat.

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Related Hoover’s records:

• Hollinger Inc.
• Sun-Times Media Group

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