Smuggling Conrad Black over the border was always my Plan B

By Mark Steyn
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/mark-steyn-smuggling-conrad-black-over-the-border-was-always-my-plan-b?video_autoplay=true
May 17, 2019


Former press magnate Conrad Black leaves federal court in Chicago in June 2011 after being re-sentenced to three and a half years in prison.(Brian Kersey/Getty Images)

The last time I saw my old boss Conrad Black was a week ago. It was a very Conradian occasion: We ended up keeping a visiting prince (not from the House of Windsor, as it happens) waiting in the lobby, and by the time we parted on the doorstep the conversation had worked its way round to Doris Day, then still among us. When Miss Day died a few days later, almost all the broadcast tributes played a snippet of:

Que Sera Sera
Whatever will be will be
The future’s not ours to see…

That’s a little fatalistic for my tastes. Nevertheless, in just a very few areas of life the future is ours to see, with piercing clarity: For example, if you attract the attention of America’s federal justice system, you’re going down, no question. You have the “right to a fair trial,” but U.S. prosecutors win 99 per cent of the cases that go to court — a success rate that would embarrass Kim Jong Un and Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the feds win 97 per cent without ever going near court. In 2007, on the first day of Conrad Black’s trial on the 12th floor of the Mies van der Rohe skyscraper that houses Chicago’s dozens of federal courtrooms, I went looking for somewhere to make a discreet call on my cellphone. There were people everywhere — reporters, lawyers, spouses, curious deputy attorneys dropping in from neighbouring offices, a fan of mine wanting me to autograph my Broadway book to his pal John Mahoney from “Frasier”… Eventually, I pushed open a door and found myself in an empty courtroom. So I phoned from there in complete privacy. When others attending the trial discovered the room, I went to the empty courtroom further down the corridor. And, when in turn that grew popular as a handsomely paneled telephone booth, I went to the empty courtroom upstairs, or downstairs.

So many courtrooms, and no trials. Because, when the odds of not losing are one in 100, who goes to court?

Americans who know anything about the country’s evil and depraved “justice” system grasp that central fact. It’s only rubes who say “let the process play out” or “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear.” For a start, by the time the process “plays out,” you’ll be broke and scavenging from dumpsters (as Trump’s fallen National Security honcho Michael Flynn learned, shortly before copping a plea). Second, from a prosecutorial point of view, “if you haven’t done anything wrong” they can still get you on misremembering to the FBI in a matter for which there’s no underlying crime (as Martha Stewart discovered), or, alternatively, on Robert Mueller’s second-favourite process crime of hanging out with too many foreigners in alleged breach of the “Foreign Agents Registration Act,” which Trump aide George Papadopoulos told me recently Mueller had threatened him with. (I met most Aussie cabinet ministers of the John Howard years, so I’m undoubtedly guilty on that front, even before you factor in dinner with Jason Kenney and a bit of chit-chat with Maxime Bernier).

It’s a corrupt system heavily reliant on blackmail. But its crude thuggish simplicity concentrates the mind, and thus everyone gets it. Which is why, when the dismantling of Conrad Black’s business empire began 16 years ago, the rich and powerful were the first to abandon him: whatever will be will be, but one thing’s for certain — Conrad’s screwed, he’s over, cut him loose now. The U.S. government threatened to send the “independent” directors of Hollinger “Wells Notices” — that’s to say, a public warning that you may be on the hook for violating securities laws. The way to avoid getting a Wells Notice was to testify against Lord Black at trial. So former Illinois governor Jim Thompson, former ambassador Richard Burt and former vice-chair of the Royal Commission on Canada’s National Passenger Transportation Marie-Josée Kravis meekly trooped up to the witness stand to explain that, although their names appeared on all the same documents Conrad’s did, they had no idea, as mere simpleton governors, ambassadors and royal commissioners, what they were signing, and had simply “skimmed” the paperwork — “skimmed” being the agreed formulation. InMaclean’s I described them as America’s synchronized skimming team.

On the day of Jim Thompson’s testimony, a staffer approached me and said the governor wondered if I were free for lunch. I replied that I’d rather eat dog feces than dine with a dead husk of a nothing of a shell of a non-man who’d lay down his friend for his life.

And yet, although not a synchronized skimmer myself, I too fell prey to their fatalism. As I disclosed after the trial, I’d advised Lord Black to climb into the back of my pick-up, I’d throw a tarp over him and drive him across the minimally guarded Pittsburg, N.H./La Patrie, Que. border post and east to Fortune, N.L., where he could take the ferry to St. Pierre et Miquelon and a waiting twin-prop….

Nonsense, thundered Conrad. He was an innocent man, and he would be vindicated by the justice system of this great republic.

I suppressed a titter and the urge to tell him that would support an insanity plea.

And so the battle consumed vast amounts of money — and even more if you add in the cash the feds simply stole from him, like the proceeds they confiscated from the sale of his New York apartment. It cost him also lifelong friendships, as prosecutors bought up his closest business partner, David Radler, and his secretary and anyone else who helped them get closer to the big fish, and threatened those in Toronto and London willing to testify on his behalf what would happen should they choose to set foot in the U.S. to appear at his trial.

It is a sad fact that many Canadians revile Conrad Black: They loathe him for his politics and his peerage and his publications (including this one). But even so they ought to give him credit for the sheer strength of will required to push back against the onslaught of the last decade and a half. His ordeal ended with a Trump pardon I confess I had minimal hopes of, because, as the president was doubtless advised, there’s nothing in it for him.

For the record, here’s the final score:

The Government of the United States initially brought 17 charges. Everyone seems to oooh and aaaah over that, but to bring multiple charges over a single crime is, in itself, malodorous. Even with the Boston Marathon bomber, it wasn’t enough that the guy loaded up his backpack, detonated it and killed and maimed a bunch of people; it was also necessary to charge the surviving Tsarnaev brother with “unlawful interference in interstate commerce” because he used a stolen credit card to withdraw US$800 from an ATM. There’s no question the bomber is guilty of bombing, and, if I had my way, he’d have been dangling from a gibbet six weeks after, but this kind of wanker sophistry degrades the very concept of law.

So why do it? Well, it’s a way to force you to forego justice: You’re facing 47 felonies adding up to 397 years in jail. So you agree to a plea “bargain.” Because otherwise you risk a jury that wants to show how Solomonic it is by acquitting you on 44 counts but convicting on three — enough to destroy your life. The U.S. Attorney operates on the same principle as the IRA, who, after the Brighton bombing, taunted Mrs. Thatcher that they only had to be lucky once; she had to be lucky every time. Patrick Fitzgerald had to be lucky once; Conrad Black had to be lucky every time. He came close.

Of those 17 counts, four, including perjury and money laundering, were abandoned before trial, and the US$400 million he was accused of “looting” was reduced to US$60 million.

Of the 13 remaining counts, Conrad was acquitted on nine, including racketeering and tax evasion, and found guilty of stealing US$2.9 million.

The surviving four counts were appealed to the Seventh Circuit. Unfortunately, Black had the misfortune to appear before a quasi-celebrity judge smitten by his own genius. Come the big day, alas, Richard Posner was just another lazy hack who all too obviously didn’t know the case and hadn’t read the briefs and was blustering his way through with windy generalities about “pretty naked fraud,” even though “pretty naked” is not really a legal term, never mind an appellate argument.

Conrad pressed on, to the highest tribunal in the land. If you followed the Kavanaugh hearings, you’ll know that America’s hideously politicized Supreme Court has four lefties and four righties and a designated swinger who’s the Supreme Judicial Arbiter of 300 million people. Yet, on June 24th 2010, the Supremes ruled unanimously in Conrad’s favour. That’s right: The left, the right and the swinger all voted as one with Madam Justice Ginsburg’s withering opinion about Posner’s “anomalous” “judicial invention.” His judgment was vacated, Conrad was released from prison, and the four counts kicked back down to the Seventh Circuit for “further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

Of those four counts, two were overturned through gritted teeth by the Seventh Circuit, but the deeply insecure Posner could not bring himself to quash the two remaining counts, and in turn kicked them back down to the trial judge, Amy St. Eve, for “re-sentencing.” Judge Amy, just as insecure if not quite such a narcissist, decided to send Conrad back to prison for seven months on the grounds that incarceration seemed to be doing him good. She also revised down the financial penalty to US$150,000 — or (if my rough math is correct) point-oh-oh-oh-three-seven-five of what he’d originally been accused of “looting.”

Those two surviving counts were one of mail fraud and one of obstruction of justice, in which, as with Martha Stewart, there was no underlying crime left to “obstruct” other than that sole lousy count of “mail fraud,” one of those stupid catch-all non-crimes designed to provide a pretext for federal jurisdiction over almost anything that tickles their fancy. For that reason, none of those Canadians who feasted on Conrad Black’s comeuppance could actually explain, in the midst of their conga lines, what crime it is he actually committed. Because it isn’t a crime in Canada, or England, or Australia or Belize or Mauritius, Singapore, St Lucia, Tuvalu or anywhere else in the common-law world.

Recently, Conrad Black was kind enough to testify on my behalf in one of my own more modest legal proceedings down south, against a sociopathic billionaire who won’t stop suing me. We worried about how much credibility an ex-con might have before an American jurist, so we figured we might as well own it in the briefs, and described the witness thus:

“The Lord Black of Crossharbour is an eminent Canadian historian, a member of the House of Lords, a papal knight, the former Honorary Colonel of the Governor General’s Foot Guards, and in America a convicted felon.”

We took the position that, in a system run by the likes of Patrick Fitzgerald and Robert Mueller, that last distinction, like the foregoing, is just another badge of honour. It shames only a wretched and ugly system that no American should support.

The Incredible Shrinking Crime Spree of Conrad Black, after shriveling from 17 to 13 to nine to four to two counts and from 400 million to 92 million to 60 million to 2.9 million to 285,000 to 150,000 dollars, has now vanished entirely. Throughout an ordeal that consumed over a fifth of his life and more of his wealth, he staggered on, refusing to cut the deals that his pathetic deputy and his wretched worthless board did. That requires an amazing resilience few of us could muster.

There is one bit of unfinished business. In a pitiful spasm of belated Canadian me-tooism, the then governor general and the then prime minister decided, on account of those two surviving convictions, to have Conrad Black removed from the Queen’s Privy Council and the Order of Canada. A man who endured what he did can surely survive having his post-nominals cut off. Nevertheless, it was a craven and gutless move. It would be appropriate, I think, for the successor regimes on Sussex Drive to reverse those actions.

On the other hand, I’m not sure Conrad would take those baubles back. He lost almost everything, but in the end, on what mattered, he won. Last year, after CRTV/Blaze TV sued me for ten million, lost the case and were ordered to pay me four million, Conrad declared on stage that my victory was “the greatest act of accidental justice produced by the American legal system in decades.” I would return the compliment, but, in the case of Conrad Black, there was nothing “accidental” about it. He fought back against a disgusting system of unlimited resources and overwhelming power, and inch by painstaking inch he prevailed. I was wrong to offer him a ride to Miquelon under my tarpaulin. His way was better.