Conrad Black

Conrad Black: Press Baron, Convict, Historian

In May 2005 a security camera at Hollinger International's Toronto headquarters recorded a member of the British House of Lords carrying thirteen boxes of documents out of his own office, in violation of a court order. The footage did more damage than any of the accounting evidence, because it was legible to anyone. Conrad Black would eventually be convicted on that act and on three counts of mail fraud, would serve his time, and would be pardoned by an American president whose biography he had written. Few careers of the last half-century compress so much achievement and so much self-inflicted wreckage.

Montreal, and an Early Expulsion

Conrad Moffat Black was born in Montreal on 25 August 1944 into money and proximity to power: his father ran Canadian Breweries Ltd and had held a government defence post during the war. In 1958 the boy was expelled from Upper Canada College, allegedly for selling stolen examination papers — an episode that biographers have never been able to leave alone, and which reads either as adolescent misbehaviour inflated by hindsight or as the first data point in a long series, depending on how the rest of the story lands.

The education that followed was serious and unusually broad. He took a BA in history and political science at Carleton in 1965, a law degree at Université Laval in 1970, and an MA in history at McGill in 1973. That thesis became a biography of the Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, published in 1977 and long regarded as the definitive work on its subject. Before he was a press baron he was, demonstrably, a historian.

Building the Empire

He entered newspapers in the late 1960s, starting small and compounding. Through the Ravelston Corporation and then Hollinger International he assembled, by the mid-1990s, the third-largest newspaper group in the world, controlling close to 250 titles. The trophies were the London *Daily Telegraph*, the *Chicago Sun-Times* and the *Jerusalem Post*. In 1997 he launched the *National Post*, a genuinely new national broadsheet built to break the *Globe and Mail*'s hold on Canadian opinion, and it succeeded in changing the country's press.

The manner throughout was combative. Along the way, in 1984, he withdrew $56 million from the pension plan of Dominion without approval and was ordered by a court to put it back — a warning, in retrospect, about the elasticity of his sense of whose money was whose.

Crossharbour

Britain offered him a peerage in the late 1990s. Canada's prime minister Jean Chrétien blocked it under the Nickle Resolution, which bars Canadians from foreign titles. Black's response was to renounce his Canadian citizenship in 1999 in order to take it, and in 2001 he was created Lord Black of Crossharbour. He had been appointed to the Order of Canada in 1990; it was taken away from him in 2014 following his conviction. The trade — a country for a title — is the most revealing single decision of his life.

The Fall

From 2003 investigations into Hollinger alleged that Black and associates had extracted millions in unauthorised fees from the company. The specific charge that went to trial concerned $6.1 million taken from Hollinger International shareholders through management fees and non-compete payments. In 2007 a Chicago jury convicted him on three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice, and he was sentenced to six and a half years.

The Law, Precisely

What happened next deserves stating exactly, because it is routinely mangled in both directions. In 2010 the US Supreme Court narrowed the "honest services" fraud statute, and on remand the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Richard Posner, reversed two of Black's fraud convictions — those relating to the APC non-compete scheme, worth $5.5 million — on the ground that the statute required proof of bribery or kickbacks and none had been proved.

Two convictions stood. One was the fraud conviction involving the Forum and Paxton non-compete agreements, worth $600,000. The other was the obstruction of justice conviction, for the thirteen boxes. He was resentenced, served roughly thirty-two months in a Florida federal prison, and was released and deported to Canada in the spring of 2012.

In 2019 Donald Trump granted him a full pardon. The White House statement praised Black's "tremendous contributions to business, as well as to political and historical thought" and cited support from figures as various as Henry Kissinger, Elton John and Rush Limbaugh. Black had published *Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other* the previous year. He has consistently called the whole prosecution "nonsense" and describes it as a sixteen-year ordeal.

The Historian

The books are not a hobby. The Duplessis is standard. *Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom* (2003) runs to some 1,280 pages and was received seriously: one reviewer called it "the most entertaining" life of Roosevelt yet written, with "both lightness of touch and some distinctive historical argument," and judged the revisions "firmly based on his own reading of documents" and therefore "balanced and fair" against a partisan literature. The same review is candid about the flaws — the book "occasionally appears both too long and too short, opening at a leisurely pace and ending in a hurried rush," and Black is "less persuasive" on New Deal economics, where he defends neither statist liberalism nor free markets and comes across "as something of a Machiavellian cynic." On Roosevelt's political triumphs of the early 1930s, though, the verdict is unambiguous: "a splendid political analysis, the best ever provided of this part of Roosevelt's career." He has since written on Nixon, on Trump, and on Canada, and continues to write columns.

Why Conrad Is Called a Genius

The defensible claim is a rare combination: a man who built one of the world's largest newspaper groups and, in the same lifetime, wrote history good enough to be taken seriously by professional historians. Almost nobody does both. The underlying faculty is a formidably retentive memory harnessed to an argumentative prose style of genuine force — orotund, Latinate, occasionally absurd, never borrowed. The FDR review identifies the real source of his advantage as a biographer: as "a Canadian, a transplanted Briton, and an incarnation of egoist ambition," he understood ambition from the inside and could write about a supremely ambitious man without awe or moralism.

The counter-case is not decorative. He was convicted by a jury of fraud and obstruction of justice, and two of those convictions survived every appeal and stood on the day he was pardoned. A pardon is executive clemency, not a finding of innocence, and this one came from a president whose flattering biography Black had published a year earlier — a fact no honest account can set aside. Nor was 2007 an isolated lapse: the 1984 pension withdrawal, and the schoolboy episode if it happened as reported, describe a recurring difficulty with the line between his interests and other people's property. His prose runs to self-justification, and the reviewer who admired his Roosevelt noted that Black's motives included burnishing his own reputation.

The fair summary is that the achievements and the convictions are both real, and that calling him a genius requires specifying which faculty is meant. The historian's is the strongest claim.

Legacy

The newspaper empire is gone. What remains is the *National Post*, which reshaped Canadian journalism and still publishes, and a shelf of substantial books — the Duplessis, the Roosevelt — that will outlast the litigation entirely. Alongside them sits the other legacy: a case study in what happens when a controlling shareholder comes to treat a public company as a personal estate. Both are his, and he disputes only one.

Achievements

• Officer of the Order of Canada