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CHICAGO - Conrad Black, the brash media mogul who vacationed in Bora Bora, rode around London in a Rolls Royce and ended up convicted of swindling shareholders out of millions of dollars, is headed for prison where inmates are paid 12c an hour for such jobs as washing windows and mopping floors.
Strong willed, possessed of a powerful ego and given to dizzying flights of rhetoric, the 63-year-old British baron known as Lord Black of Crossharbour is expected to be sentenced tomorrow.
Federal prosecutors say the sentence could be as much as 24 to 30 years, though a recent court filing suggested he could get a more lenient term.
Any stay in the pen will be an inglorious next step for a man who famously brushed aside questions about his expenses as boss of the Hollinger International newspaper holding company "I will not re-enact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility," Black said when asked about his use of the corporate jet for a vacation on the South Pacific island of Bora Bora.
When grumbling about money went on, the CEO chortled that his company had become awash in "an epidemic of shareholder idiocy".
Under Black, Hollinger was a media colossus that once owned the Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post, plus hundreds of community newspapers across the US and Canada.
The Canadian-born Black, two other Canadian executives and a Chicago lawyer were convicted on July 13 of siphoning off US$6 million ($7.83 million) through a selloff of Hollinger-owned papers and related deals. They were acquitted of nine charges that the government says would have brought the total loss to US$32 million.
Black was also found guilty of trundling a dozen boxes of documents out of his Toronto offices to keep them from investigators.
Black's attorneys have already asked for a new trial. And while they beef up their ranks for an appeal, George Tombs, author of a Black biography titled Robber Baron, said Black was on a collision course with the reality of federal prison.
"He doesn't want to be learning new skills in a machine shop and wearing a prison uniform at his age," Tombs said. "And he may have a cellmate who will tell him, do this, don't do that or even to shut up."
Friends say there is another side to Black that could help him adjust to the shock of life as an inmate. Black is "quite judicious, he is extremely polite and considerate of other people", said Canadian writer George Jonas. In fact, he said, the Black he knows is exactly the opposite of the portrait that often emerges of an arrogant and dominating figure.
-AP
