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His position in Fleet Street helped make his fortune and brought him a peerage but Lord Black of Crossharbour, the disgraced media mogul, has unleashed an extraordinary attack on the "braying" and "hideous" British press.
Due to stand trial in Chicago next week, the former proprietor of the Daily Telegraph faces a possible 100-year sentence on charges of fraud, racketeering, money laundering and obstructing justice.
On Monday he started a last-ditch PR offensive, using the high-society magazine Tatler as a platform from which to lash out at his tormentors in the British media. His chief target was the author and investigative journalist Tom Bower, who he is suing over his book Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge, a distinctly unflattering portrait of the peer and his wife, the former Telegraph journalist Barbara Amiel.
"The final nadir in the plunge to defile my wife and me, the last lap in bilious and oafish defamation, and the last and lowest of the animals unleashed against me by News Corporation [parent company of Bower's publishers HarperCollins and of the Times], was Bower's book. It plumbs profound depths of libel and prosaic clumsiness."
Lord Black disclosed that he intends to reveal in court the "obsequious emails" he says Bower sent him when seeking an interview for his book - and "other evidence he will find uncongenial".
Lord Black, who defended his record at the Telegraph Group, said he has been sorely hurt by the reactions to his tribulations of some of those in the London media he had considered his friends. "I am ... disappointed in the pompous self-levitations and in some cases rabid antagonism of people who obsequiously sought my favours," he wrote in the Tatler.
He is angry at the Economist and the Financial Times, which he claims have failed to understand the "vagaries of the American prosecution system", despite their large American circulations.
Lord Black, who was born in Montreal but renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001 to take up a life peerage, was praised by the Tatler, which released his article yesterday, for "putting his case with gusto".
It was Lady Black's claim that "my extravagance knows no bounds" that reportedly triggered the US investigation into her husband's company, Hollinger International.
The hundreds of millions of dollars that allegedly went missing were, according to US authorities, used to fund a fabulous lifestyle that included the use of two private jets, £300,000 ($850,000) holidays in French Polynesia and a birthday meal for Lady Black costing £30,000.
Lord Black was certainly extravagant in his language this week. Having had to sell off much of his assets to pay for his defence, he claimed to have been beset by "unheard-of numbers of bottom-feeders, hucksters and charlatans".
The tycoon went to great lengths to cast himself in the role of victim, comparing his experience to those subjected to McCarthyite persecution or "thrown to the beasts in the Colosseum".
Living in Toronto, where he said he gets a fairer press (he gave an interview saying he was relieved to have his day in court), he is exasperated by the "fetid solidarity of Fleet Street".
He told Canada's National Post he was "pretty confident" of getting a fair trial in Chicago. "I have no complaint of the judge and I will take my chances with 12 American citizens," he said. "I feel much more comfortable with them than many of the other people I've been dealing with.
"I know the facts. I actually know what happened ... All the charges are nonsense. It is, quite frankly, a scandal and nothing short of that. I am being accused of racketeering. I'm not a money launderer, either. I'm not an obstructor of justice and I'm certainly not a thief. I'm not any of it."
Lord Black is, indeed, so confident that he is already planning for life after the trial. Former colleagues may or may not be pleased to hear that the Blacks are intending to return to Britain once the formality of his acquittal, as he sees it, is achieved. "We will be readier for a quieter life. We think of our return happily at the end of each full day."
- INDEPENDENT
