Imprisoned Black looks on the sunny side

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Black arrives at federal court in Chicago. (THE CANADIAN PRESS)

A Matter of Principle

By Conrad Black

McClelland & Stewart, 581 pages, $37

After reading this elegant, entertaining but misleading autobiography, it's tough to remember that Conrad Black is a scoundrel.

Black's engaging storytelling, conveyed on magisterial paragraphs, cannot conceal the dishonesty at the book's heart: the author blames everyone but himself for his highly publicized downfall.

The closest the former media mogul comes to accepting responsibility for defrauding shareholders and obstructing justice, crimes for which he is imprisoned, is: "Perhaps my downfall was partially deserved."

A Matter of Principle is an important contribution to the genre of criminals' asserted innocence, in which the most recent Canadian book of note is Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame by convicted wife-killer Colin Thatcher, a formerly important Saskatchewan politician.

Black's book, abounding in references to history, literature and mythology, far outshines Thatcher's in literary merit.

But these accounts have much in common: the assertion that a corrupt justice system has hounded the author for years, the denunciation of former friends and the conviction that news media are conspiring against an honest man.

In many ways, A Matter of Principle is a laudable achievement. Black wrote the book while battling a host of U. S. criminal charges, most of which he eventually beat, and now publishes it as he enters a Florida prison to serve the remainder of his 2007 sentence.

Recent news media accounts have understandably focused on the prison experiences of this member of the British House of Lords, but these comprise less than 10 per cent of the book. In that section Black estimates that one-fifth of the inmates of his prison "are, like myself, not guilty of anything."

Most of the book retails the sunniest possible interpretations of the labyrinthine business deals that earned Black and wife Barbara Amiel places at the tables of the international glitterati, who in due course kicked them to the curb.

Black establishes this optimistic tone early. "All was resolved without much difficulty," he reports of the controversial late-1970s manipulations of Massey-Ferguson and Argus holdings that cultivated his wealth and created his rapacious reputation.

The tone ranges from playful -- and lustful in its references to several women, notably Marie-Josee Kravis, a former board member of Black's enterprises -- to splenetic. Naturally, the splenetic is most quotable.

Rupert Murdoch is "a Jurassic predator;" Black's former associates who should have ensured that his businesses obeyed the law suddenly suffered "a pandemic of amnesia." David Radler, Black's former business partner, who ratted him out in exchange for a slap on the wrist in a Canadian jail, is delusional -- "secure, he thought, in his shady swindling of me."

How the worm has turned since 1993, when Black crowed throughout A Life in Progress, the first volume of his autobiography, about the profits "David and I" had scored.

Part of that success flowed from multimillion-dollar "non-compete" payments they received when they sold assets. The complicated corporate structures of these deals meant that the payments ensured Black and Radler would not compete against themselves.

The legal questions centre on whether Black's cronies on his corporate boards properly approved those payments.

Black fires his heaviest ammunition at the many lawyers he engaged. Their bills grew "like steroid-bloated rodents" while their unavailing efforts on his behalf declined.

He concentrates his fire on Eddie Greenspan, the legendary Toronto lawyer who fizzled in American courts.

"The deterioration of such a man is objectively sad, and is made more so by the inelegance of his acts of denial and displacement of responsibility for his own shortcomings and aggressive paranoia."

Et tu, Conrad?

Duncan McMonagle teaches journalism at Red River College and writes the Information Tsunami blog at http://duncanmcm.blogspot.com.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 24, 2011 J8