Robber Baron: Lord Black of Crossharbour

by George Tombs

Overview

Robber Baronr is an unauthorized biography of Conrad Black, who built the world’s third-largest media empire and is now facing criminal charges in Chicago for alleged fraud, money laundering, and racketeering.

Robber Baron is based on rigorous research, hard-hitting interviews, original documents, and exclusive access to Black and his close family and friends, key associates, critics, and staunch enemies. Written by George Tombs, an award-winning journalist and historian, this book gives a fascinating insider’s look at a complex, driven man who is never out of the news for long.

The book will include key testimony and evidence from Black’s Chicago trial, as well as insights into his defence, strategies, hopes . . . and fears. Love him or hate him, Black is a fighter who never says die. Robber Baron tells the story of a modern-day Citizen Kane, helping readers understand why Black does what he does.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554903122
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	10/31/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	440
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

George Tombs is an award-winning journalist, and has worked for TV, radio, newsmagazines, and newspapers, in both English and French. He has reported first-hand on disappearances, refugees, hostage-takings, terrorists, aboriginal societies, desert nomads, Nobel-winning scientists, inventors, and heads of state and government. He served as editorial-writer at The Montreal Gazette, has produced several documentary series for CBC and Radio-Canada, and has a PhD in history from McGill University. He teaches journalism and history at the State University of New York and Athabasca University.

Tombs is a contributor to The Guardian about Conrad Black, and has spoken about Black on CNN, BBC, CBC, CTV, and Global News.

Read an Excerpt

Robber Baron

Lord Black of Crossharbour

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By George Tombs

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2007 George Tombs
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55490-312-2

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CHAPTER 1

ENTERING THE LABYRINTH

it was a dark, wintry day in December 2006, with sleek, black leafless trees silhouetted against low clouds and wet snow fading on the ground. Three months before the start of Conrad Black's trial in Chicago on fourteen counts of criminal fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, mail and wire fraud and racketeering, I had flown from Montreal to Toronto for the day. Black — Baron Black of Crossharbour — had given me a two-hour appointment at his Georgian mansion, in the exclusive Bridle Path area, to discuss a new edition of my book about him.

I took a cab from the airport. The closer we got to Black's house, the more excited my Sikh driver became. "Oh my goodness!" he said as the ranch bungalows on small lots gave way to the gloomy neo-Gothic and garish Mediterranean suburban palaces of Toronto's arrivistes. "So many rich people live around here. Look at these houses! There must be so many gardeners working here in the spring. Tell me, sir, what do you do for a living? You are a university professor — that is a very well-paid job. So, this is the house we are going to? Oh my goodness, we have to get out at the gate and announce through the radio intercom who we are. Is your friend also a university professor?"

Sprawling 26 Park Lane Circle is a Can.$20-million brick mansion, with a stately portico entrance and Palladian windows, standing back from the road on an eleven-acre estate. Black sometimes jokingly referred to it as his "cottage." It was his parents' home, the place where he grew up. In the 1980s, after Black inherited the place, he hired New York-based celebrity architect Thierry Despont — whose clients included Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates — and completely rebuilt the mansion, gutting whole sections and adding an indoor pool and library. Black pays more than Can. $70,000 in annual property taxes.

As we entered the gate, the driveway curved rightward down past the entrance of the house, then looped back again, in front of the main door. Even in the first week of December, ripe green apples still clung to the branches of two huge trees. We came round an enormous weeping willow, then swept in front of the entrance.

Werner, the sixty-five-year-old German butler dressed all in white, stood at the door. With his stern, obsequious manner, he ushered me to the cloak room, off to the right as we entered, where he took my leather jacket and hung it up. He then led me back through the two-storey entry hall with barrel-vaulted ceiling, where portraits of the Prince Regent (the future George IV) and Napoleon were displayed. To my left was the stairway, where Conrad Black's father, George, had fallen over the banister upstairs in 1976 and come crashing down onto the main floor. That was the day father told son, "Life is hell, most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit."

"Everything in the house has been changed," one of Conrad Black's cousins told me, "except the entrance and the stair where Uncle George fell to his death." Even Black once wrote he wasn't sure whether his father's death was voluntary. It was a touchy subject for him. For decades, George Black's depression and his sudden death had hung like a cloud over his son. Conrad had preserved the entrance and stairwell intact — it seemed a grim memorial to his father.

By the time I got there, 26 Park Lane Circle had become a gilded cage for Black. In the lead-up to his criminal trial, he had to post a $21-million bond — the highest in the history of American criminal justice. U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve set as a condition of bail that he couldn't go anywhere but Chicago, his hometown of Toronto or his $35.5-million winter ocean-front retreat in Palm Beach without first getting court approval.

Along the stairwell, I could see an enormous print of Rome from the early nineteenth century, showing St. Peter's to the left, which Black had collected as a souvenir from a landlady during his early years in London. It must have been about ten to twelve feet long. I remembered seeing it at Black's £13.1-million mansion in Cottesmore Gardens, London, when we met there in 2002 — he was forced to sell that property three years later, when his business empire had begun to disintegrate. To my right was the main living room, with a series of French doors overlooking the park. This park slopes downward onto expansive terraces, gardens and into a forest, and must be uneven terrain for garden parties, although it is a paradise for racoons.

Werner led me past a stairwell to the basement, the walls covered with handwritten correspondence in gold frames between President Franklin Roosevelt and his cousin and probable mistress Daisy Suckley. I remembered some of the letters from my 2003 visits to Black's executive suite at Hollin ger International on Fifth Avenue in New York, just before he was turfed out of his job there. There were also some framed letters signed by Abraham Lincoln.

I had entered the inner sanctum of Black's private mythology. He has the habit of fusing his personality with his political heroes, papering his walls with rich symbols of power, as if some of their magnificence would rub off on him. He has a dreamy, expansive, blistering nature — blowing a fortune on fantastic decor all around him, drawing analogies between himself and colossal, larger-than-life figures (as a way, I thought, of drowning his own deep-seated insecurity).

Werner showed me to the sitting room, with some green-and-cream-striped Empire chairs I recognized from the Cottes -more Gardens mansion. A lot of things had moved around in the last couple years. There were a few million dollars' worth of Canadian paintings on the walls, cluttered like postage stamps. One was by Jean Paul Lemieux, another was a nondescript painting by Robert Pilot showing a church in Quebec, and there was a Maurice Cullen. A painting by A. Y. Jackson showed a village chapel in Quebec's Charlevoix county in winter, with some logs floating in a river in the foreground. On a low coffee table were a few books about platinum jewels and a recent book by Barbara Amiel's former husband, George Jonas. Here I waited.

I first met Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel in June 1993 when I worked at the Southam-owned daily the Montreal Gazette. A high-school classmate of mine, Montreal financier André Desmarais, had invited me to a private gala on the summit of Mount Royal, overlooking the St. Lawrence River, Old Montreal and the nineteenth-century mansions of the Square Mile. On that golden evening, the summit had been cordoned off for a dinner André had organized on behalf of the Americas Society — David Rockefeller's network of corporate leaders and statesmen committed to establishing political, economic and cultural links among the Americas.

Several hundred people mingled, many of them balding Latin American tycoons accompanied by glittering buxom trophy women in high heels who defied gravity in more ways than one. "These trophy wives always travel in pairs of limousines," the conference organizer told me with a knowing smirk. "One so they can stretch out their long legs and one for all their Holt Renfrew shopping bags." This was a world of high rollers. I was just a spectator.

Here was André's father, the billionaire Paul Desmarais, once Conrad Black's rival in a 1970s grab for Toronto-based conglomerate Argus Corp.

Miguel Alemán Valesco, a Mexican senator and son of a former Mexican president, was also in attendance. Here was another billionaire, David Rockefeller, then chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank; Guilherme Frering, Brazilian co-owner of caemi, the world's fourth-largest iron ore producer; the controversial Argentine banker Jose Rohm; and Norman Webster, my editor-in-chief (he had previously been editor-in-chief at the Globe and Mail, where he had hired, then fired Conrad Black as a columnist in the 1980s). Here, too, was Conrado Pappalardo, the right-hand man of Paraguay's fascist dictator, General Alfredo Stroessner; Ken Taylor, Canada's ambassador to Iran who had helped rescue Americans during the 1979 storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran; and Brazilian-born Peter White, Black's old friend and first partner in the newspaper business.

Liveried waiters passed to and fro, bearing champagne on silver trays. This was the world of Conrad and Barbara. Their reputations — cultivated by their flamboyant lifestyles and deliberately provocative, caustic writings — had preceded them. Riveted to each other, they devoted a few half-interested minutes to each conversation before spotting another contact and moving on.

I introduced myself to Black as an editorial writer at the Gazette, since he had just purchased a minority shareholding in the Southam Group, which owned the Montreal newspaper. He was six feet, two inches tall, bulky and exuded power. He looked like a fighter who could tear people to pieces. He was blustery, pompous, wooden in speech, always looking to fit people into an intellectual framework but ever ready to dismantle that framework, a man who could go just as well into fast forward as into rewind, his eyes opening wide with delight and closing menacingly — an aggressive man who nonetheless wanted to be liked. As we spoke, Amiel tugged on Black's sleeve. Her sleek brown hair, tight-fitting black dress and high heels gave her a dramatic look. As she glanced left and right, lining up the next networking opportunity for Conrad, her eyes burned with a dull flame in which I read a peculiar combination of rage, bore -dom and fragility.

I had followed Black's career closely over the years. I had no sympathy for his stark neo-conservative views, I was puzzled by his withering doctrinaire Catholicism and I had often heard that he milked his media properties. I suggested that if he took over Southam, he could make the Gazette the flagship of the chain and build a network of national and international correspondents to take on the Globe and Mail. Black's response was to dump on the Globe. He took pleasure in debunking the paper's claim that it was the "national newspaper of record." But the idea of centring anything important in Montreal struck Black as an anachronism. He had other plans. After a few minutes, he and Amiel went off to speak to the Rockefellers, from whom he had rented a summer estate in Maine.

I could not have known in 1993 that within ten years Black and his long-time partner David Radler (a McGill University graduate, just like Black) would make the Gazette part of his newspaper empire, the world's third-largest, with six hundred titles in Canada, Britain, the United States, Israel and Australia. That Black would renounce his Canadian citizenship to be -come a baron and sit in the British House of Lords. And that I would become his biographer, interviewing him as well as some two hundred other people, from close family members to childhood buddies, business associates to competitors and critics — as I chronicled the dazzling rise and fall of a proud, destructive genius. Given the meltdown of Black's career and finances, starting in 2003–04, I would be the last person before his trial to conduct extensive biographical interviews with him as well as those closest around him.

As a boy, Conrad Black had regularly played chess with his father in the Park Lane Circle mansion. He had extended these skills and strategies from the chessboard to the world. He struck me as someone who treated people like rooks, bishops and knights, queens and kings on a chessboard, moving them around at will. Each person served or defeated his interests. Character, ambitions and morality provided him with useful insights, which he could articulate with stunning detachment, then use to strategize, manipulate and position things to his best advantage.

I had to be sure I didn't end up being Black's pawn. Here was a man who could snap his fingers and immediately get half of the front page of any newspaper in Canada. Quotable quotes rolled off his tongue, ready to be snatched up in an endless stream of newspaper articles. He loved to craft other people's ideas. He loved being the centre of attention. But as a result, he often appealed to the gallery, saying things for provocative effect that didn't reflect his true impulses.

It was challenging to make sense of a dark man, full of contradictions, rage and energy, who did not seem to understand himself. Black's speeches and writings were rich in allegory and allusions to historic grandeur and military prowess. In his autobiography, A Life in Progress, he compared himself to a number of historical personalities from Henry viii to Pope Alexander vi, Napoleon, the fictional media tycoon Citizen Kane, General Douglas MacArthur and German General Heinz Guderian (at least implicitly) for his Second World War blitzkrieg strategy. Further research finds Black himself — and others — comparing him to at least five Shakespearean characters: the mournful, power-obsessed King Lear; the boisterous, back-slapping, next-round-is-on-me Prince Hal; the master of dissimulation Bolingbroke, who succeeded Richard II to the throne; the Roman politician Cassius, who suggested that Brutus murder Julius Caesar; and the ever-devious "pound-of-flesh" Shylock.

Most of these characters evoked pathos, suffering, looming defeat and the unavoidable fall from grace. I wondered whether all these analogies weren't simply a form of "grandiosity by association" — exuberant, boastful camouflage designed to protect the vulnerable, uneasy person he really was, deep inside. Unless he was just lining things up so that other people would grovel in front of his colossal ego as he laughed down at them. Whenever Black talked about himself, I had the impression I was hearing the final summing up, as if the moon were beginning to inch across the sun in a total eclipse.

At the apogee of his power in 2002, Black used his majority voting control of Hollinger International Inc. — a company with more than $2 billion in assets — to control the London Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post. He was also part-owner of the upstart and modestly successful New York Sun. And until 2000 and 2001 (when he shed almost all of his Canadian assets), Black controlled 57 per cent of all daily newspaper titles in Canada. He claimed to have started with no more than a $500 investment when he and partner Peter White bought two rural newspapers in Quebec's Eastern Townships in the mid-1960s and then enlisted a third Montrealer, David Radler, as partner to buy a small daily, the Sherbrooke Record. But that was a calculated understatement. Black had inherited substantial wealth from his parents and grandparents.

On the editorial level, Black was widely admired for his ability to revive flagging newspapers, such as Britain's Daily Telegraph, and start up new ones, such as Canada's National Post.

On the financial level, his sprawling newspaper empire dazzled but left many wondering whether it was an enormous house of cards — incredibly complicated and highly leveraged. Yet he was the world's best-paid newspaper publisher. In 2002, according to Crain's Chicago Business, he received $7.1 million in salary and benefits — $1 million more than the publishers of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune combined. In addition, he received management fees of $6.6 million via the private holding company Ravelston Corp. In 2002, the London Evening Standard's "top 50 residents of Kensington & Chelsea" pegged Black's personal fortune at £194 million (Can.$405 million). The current Lord Beaverbrook told me "rich lists" such as the Evening Standard's only estimated assets, without counting liabilities. According to Beaverbrook, no matter how much money Black earned, he always seemed to spend more than he had — on parties, celebrity interior decorator David Mlinaric, artwork and jewels. His various residences alone were worth close to $100 million, which would be a drain on anybody's finances. Black saw his role as a builder of working capital — negotiating takeovers, starting up new properties and developing strategies to improve the editorial quality of Hollinger's media holdings. For this, he was richly rewarded with dollars and prestige. And he protected his gains by controlling votes within his companies and developing value for what he calls "continuing [long-term] shareholders." In his mind, there was a clear distinction between those shareholders and independent public shareholders.

Former business associate and member of the Hollinger board Hal Jackman compares Black to Napoleon, who achieved "outrageous success, and felt he could do it indefinitely, but the whole world eventually turned against him. Conrad did the same, pushing the envelope and doing one outrageous thing after the other, but now the public mood is very much against him. He's pushing the envelope. That's a death wish. You know that sooner or later, they'll get you. He doesn't think like rational people think. All these payments and houses have turned people against him."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Robber Baron by George Tombs. Copyright © 2007 George Tombs. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

CHAPTER ONE ENTERING THE LABYRINTH,
CHAPTER TWO CHICAGO LAW,
CHAPTER THREE DREAMS OF GRANDEUR,
CHAPTER FOUR THE QUEBEC YEARS,
CHAPTER FIVE MACHIAVELLIAN, BACKROOM BOY, KINGMAKER,
CHAPTER SIX PAPER CHASE,
CHAPTER SEVEN THE CROWN JEWEL,
CHAPTER EIGHT THE SUN SHALL NEVER SET,
CHAPTER NINE HIS FINEST HOUR,
CHAPTER TEN COMPLETELY OUTMANEUVERED,
CHAPTER ELEVEN CONVICTION,
NOTES,
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,