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The Federal Court building in Chicago is an imposing black skyscraper in the heart of downtown. In a city famed for elaborate architecture, it stands out as dark, austere and foreboding. It is a fitting place for the climax of one of the most astonishing sagas of recent times: the rise and fall of Conrad Black, billionaire, media mogul, friend to the stars, conservative icon and now accused criminal.
Here, amid Chicago's bustling crowds, Black's fate will be decided in a fraud trial beginning next week. He will either bring off the greatest escape in a life already colourful or will go to jail - possibly for the rest of his life, putting a full stop on a career in which he rose from obscurity to rule the third-largest newspaper empire in the world.
He emerged from provincial Canada to conquer the salons of London then New York. With his siren wife, the columnist Barbara Amiel, he dominated headlines from the business pages to society columns and fashion spreads in Vogue.
He cut a swaggering, high-spending figure in the top echelons of society, enjoying a central position in a court that included Elton John, Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger. Along the way he became a British lord and used his power to further his belief in the righteousness of the doctrine of neo-conservatism. Much of that has now gone and it is time for Black to make his final stand. His empire has fallen, his reputation lies in tatters. He has been abandoned by many who once courted him and betrayed by his oldest friend. Shakespeare would have been hard-pressed to craft a play to describe Black's story and no one would dare predict what will happen as the saga enters its final act.
"It's going to be the best show this city's seen in a long time," said Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago securities attorney closely following the case. "By going to court like this, Black has taken a huge gamble. He could end up dying in jail."
Conrad Moffat Black prepared his defence at his mansion in Toronto in the country of his birth, citizenship of which he very publicly renounced to take a seat in Britain's House of Lords.
His lawyer, the colourful Canadian Edward "Fast Eddie" Greenspan, says Black is fighting fit and ready to go: "There is a mood of 'let's get on with it'. We are preparing very diligently for the trial."
But, uncharacteristically, little is now heard from Black or his wife. In a poignant vignette reported in the Canadian press, Amiel was recently spotted apparently returning thousands of dollars' worth of dresses to a Toronto boutique.
For a woman who once boasted to Vogue "my extravagance knows no bounds", it must have been a painful moment. For it is the dangers and temptations of extravagance that lie at the heart of the rise and fall of Lord and Lady Black.
Their critics say they are a symbol of what happens when greed and ego run out of control. The bold facts of the case against Black allege a complex series of financial frauds by himself and others at his company, Hollinger.
But far more than just financial irregularities will be examined in Chicago. Black's lifestyle and politics are also on trial, and not just in a court of law. Much of the battle will be fought in the pages of newspapers, some of which Black once owned, such as the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. His story will trigger a media feeding frenzy the like of which Chicago has rarely seen.
Black's story panders to the modern touchstones of celebrity, garish wealth and excess. Parts of the media have turned on him. That angers members of the Black camp, who see themselves as the victims of unreasonable envy.
"There has been a lot of risible stuff written about Conrad Black. Now we have the chance to set the record straight," said Greenspan.
That battle has already begun. Last month Black launched a libel suit against the journalist Tom Bower, whose biography of Black, Dancing on the Edge, painted a picture of the lord that concluded he ended up a "criminal sociopath".
In typically florid prose, Black's legal team in the US$5 million suit termed the book "vindictive, high-handed, contemptuous, sadistic, pathologically mendacious and malicious". There is still clearly a lot of fight left in the man.
Love him or loathe him, few would disagree that Black's rise to power is a remarkable tale. He was born in Montreal to a wealthy brewing family. Controversy followed him from the beginning. He was kicked out of school for stealing exam papers and trying to sell them to fellow pupils. Then, in 1969, he and his friend and business partner, David Radler, bought the tiny Sherbrooke Record, a Canadian newspaper.
His business prospered and by 1985 Black was buying up the then ailing Telegraph group in Britain. By 1990 he ran 400 newspapers in North America alone. He launched the conservative National Post in Canada and expanded into the Middle East by snapping up the Jerusalem Post.
At the same time, Black, eventually accompanied by Amiel, began to dominate London society just as they did the media. They held endless parties at which politicians mingled with rock stars, journalists dined with actors and all listened to Black's repartee. He loved to display his remarkable photographic memory and his obsession with obscure military history.
From his ability to recount the positions of all the ships at Trafalgar to Amiel's relentless social circuit, the couple became the centre of a dazzling London scene. Top British designer David Mlinaric was hired to remodel their £3.5 million ($10 million) Kensington home. There was a swimming pool, six reception rooms big enough for 350 people, marble hallways, and even a bust of Napoleon.
The Blacks courted New York just as they had London: they spent wildly, entertained royally, bought a huge house in Florida's exclusive Palm Beach, and lived the ultimate jet-set life.
But, if the allegations against Black are true, this lifestyle was often funded on fraud. He was using Hollinger not just as the corporate vehicle for his ambitions but as his own private piggy bank, skimming away cash that should have gone to the firm's shareholders.
In the huge prosecution case against Black are many telling vignettes about his and Amiel's spending.
A trip to the idyllic Pacific Ocean resort of Bora Bora was taken on the Hollinger company jet. Half of the total £250,000 cost was billed as company expenses. Then there was Amiel's notorious birthday party at the Manhattan restaurant, La Grenouille, which cost US$54,000, of which two-thirds was paid for by Hollinger.
In one email obtained by prosecutors, Black complains to a Hollinger executive that he has run out of cash because of "extraordinary" expenses run up building and decorating his homes. The executive's reply points out that Black had received US$500,000 just eight months earlier.
It was not just the cash Black allegedly took from his company, it was also the style in which he did it. As he justified his use of the Hollinger jet for private travel, Black famously responded to demands that he give up such perks: "I'm not prepared to re-enact the French Revolution's renunciation of the rights of the nobility".
The prosecution case, and Black's actions, portray a man with no grasp on how the real world worked. His world was one of "great men" who could do no wrong. He has lambasted his critics, which now include the US judicial system, as "pygmies", envious of his talents and wealth.
"He genuinely believes he is an innocent man. He believes he is the real victim,' said Stanley Kershman, a Canadian attorney who has followed Black's career closely.
To many, Black appears to belong to an age when there was one rule for the rich and another for the person in the street. Perhaps this was shown most infamously in May 2005.
On the day he was subpoenaed in the fraud case, he entered Hollinger's Toronto HQ and removed a dozen boxes of documents. He was caught on security cameras taking them out through a back door and loading them into a car. He did not seem to think legal rules applied to him.
There is little cause for that sort of arrogance now. Many of those who once enjoyed the social scene he embodied have turned on one or both of the Blacks. Old Telegraph stalwarts have blamed it all on Amiel, portraying her as a Lady Macbeth figure, pushing her husband to destruction with her extravagant needs. Others have cut off the Blacks from their social circle or refused their requests for financial help. They have been the subject of muck-raking books; former friends and employees have queued up to put their complaints in print.
Even for those with no sympathies for the Blacks, it has been unedifying to see the people who once ate at their generous table now feasting on the couple themselves. Few have remained loyal, among them Margaret Thatcher. In a statement to Vanity Fair magazine, she said she " ... does not cut and run just because someone gets into difficulties. Conrad is innocent until proven guilty".
But such loyalty may be cold comfort against the biggest and most damaging betrayal of all. David Radler, Black's old friend and partner who has been with him since the beginning, will testify against him in Chicago. He has struck a deal with the prosecution, pleading guilty to one charge in return for his full co-operation and 29 months in jail.
Even for Black that must have come as a shock. Radler's testimony is expected to be devastating. "Flipping Radler and getting him to strike a deal was a huge blow to the defence," said Stoltmann.
The trial is one of several suits against Black, but is the core criminal case. It is here that he must make good on his boasts of victory or face a jail term that could see him die behind bars. It does not look easy.
First, there is the sheer scale of the fraud that prosecutors allege happened at Hollinger. They have painted Black and a group of cronies as looting the company of hundreds of million of dollars, often in the form of dubious "non-compete" agreements in which it is alleged that Black and his associates sold businesses then took money from their buyers in return for a promise not to launch rival companies or products. Often this was done with the approval of the company's board; sometimes, it is alleged, it was not. Instead, a coterie of directors saw the firm as little more than a source of cash, not as a publicly traded company answerable to its shareholders.
If convicted, Black will not just be guilty of fraud, he will also be guilty of failing to recognise that the world around him had changed.
White-collar crime used to be seen as not as serious as other crimes.
That is no longer true. Black is caught in the wash of an America still recovering from Enron and other huge frauds that have shaken the business world. White-collar crime is now seen as a destroyer of workers' lives, a ravager of communities, a looter of pension plans.
Men like Black and Radler, who were ruthless corporate cost-cutters even as they spent so lavishly on their own lives, are seen as villains every bit as deserving of jail time as common criminals.
But it is not just the business world that changed around Black - so did the political world. He and his newspapers were arch-proponents of neo-conservatism. Amiel's columns staunchly supporting Israel became notorious for their over-the-top, right-wing sensibilities.
His newspapers and magazines were enthusiastic proponents of the invasion of Iraq. Black counted neo-con luminaries such as Richard Perle and David Frum - the White House speech writer who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil" for George W. Bush - as close personal friends.
Yet now that neo-con establishment is also on the way out. From business to politics, Black's world view has crumbled around him and he has been left to face the music alone.
Black, 62, faces up to 95 years in jail if found guilty of all charges against him. Perhaps that explains why he is fighting this battle to the end. Unlike Radler, there is no plea bargain from his camp. It is all or nothing.
"This is going to be his Waterloo," said Kershman. That is true. Soon we shall know if Black will end up like the Duke of Wellington, trouncing his enemies as the underdog, or as Napoleon, who entered that battle as an emperor and ended it as a prisoner doomed to die a captive of his enemies.
- Observer
