KEY POINTS:
The rise and fall of the Canadian press baron Conrad Black has all the elements of lurid melodrama or even Shakespearian tragedy - power, fame, riches, dangerous infatuation, and hubris.
A Chicago jury found Black guilty of fraud and obstruction of justice. If the judge throws the book at him, he could go to jail for 35 years, which for a 62-year-old means life.
At the zenith of his fortunes, Black's company Hollinger International owned 137 newspapers with a combined circulation surpassed only by Rupert Murdoch's stable and the US Gannett chain.
Comparisons have been drawn with Charles Foster Kane, the protagonist of Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane, who was not-so-loosely based on the US newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Welles' portrayal of the megalomaniacal publisher cost him.
Terrified of crossing the ferociously vindictive Hearst, the big Hollywood studios largely shunned Welles, whose subsequent career was an anti-climactic meander featuring shoestring ventures, projects stalled or cancelled through lack of funds, and the shrivelling of a prodigious talent.
Black has also been compared to Jay Gatsby, the mysterious tycoon in F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz-age masterpiece The Great Gatsby.
Just as Gatsby's lavish parties magnetised the beautiful people of New York and Long Island, Black and his second wife Barbara Amiel became London's hosts with the most following his 1985 acquisition of the Daily Telegraph.
And just as Gatsby's infatuation with Daisy Buchanan brought about his downfall, Black's apparently hazy focus on the balance sheet and need to spend is sometimes blamed on Barbara Amiel, a self-styled North London Jew turned rich bitch.
She once proclaimed her extravagance "knew no bounds" and it wasn't an idle boast. The couple's domestic arrangements involved an estate in Toronto, two apartments in New York (one for the servants), a mansion in Palm Beach, and an 11-bedroom home in London where a team of trompe l'oeil painters spent a year hand-painting striped blue drapery, grille work, and birds on to the walls of the two-story dining room.
While Gatsby's extravagance was designed to attract Daisy's attention, for Amiel and Black it was all about celebrity and ego.
They liked surrounding themselves with the rich and famous - Margaret Thatcher, Elton John, Donald Trump - while Black, a political conservative (the Hollinger board included Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle, an architect of the Iraq war) who adored the sound of his own voice, was never happier than when addressing a captive audience on military history, specifically Napoleon.
Gatsby, in contrast, was a romantic and neither a show-off nor a bore.
As the narrator Nick Carraway tells him apropos of the sybarites and parasites who flock to his parties: "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."
Barbara and Conrad, who was accused of siphoning off $77 million of shareholders' funds, bear more resemblance to Daisy and her husband Tom: "They were careless people - they smashed up things and creatures and they retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together." In this regard, another comparison which springs to mind is that between Black and our very own Rod Petricevic.
What Gatsby and Black undoubtedly have in common is losing everything (although the latter is vowing to appeal) in the obsessive pursuit of a dream.
When he became Lord Black of Crossharbour, Black's dream of a place at the heart of the transatlantic establishment appeared fulfilled.
Now, however, he faces decades in jail contemplating the bitter irony that had he not renounced Canadian citizenship to become a peer, he could apply to serve his time in Canada where prisoners become eligible for parole much earlier than in the US.
Black prides himself on his learning and literacy so it's inconceivable that he hasn't read Fitzgerald's great, luminous novel.
I wonder if he recalls these words: "I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.
"He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."
