So here’s Conrad Black, the former Canadian and present British lord, in the dock in Chicago facing fraud and racketeering charges that arise from business deals and noncompete payments negotiated almost entirely with Canadians over Canadian media properties. The cover of the special Conrad Black edition of Maclean’s, their national newsweekly, puts it bluntly: “The United States vs. Conrad Black.” “He’s wacky but he’s ours,” Canadians are inclined to think, “and we’re grown-up enough to try him ourselves if we think he deserves to be tried.”
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This must come as news to Marshall Field V, who back in the 70s owned the Sun-Times, the paper Black owned more recently, and who’s hung around town to lead your classic civically useful, old-money sort of life. Whatever. The point being made in Canada is that Black will be tried by a jury that can’t possibly understand him. Don Butler of CanWest News Service wrote, in a report published across the dominion, “For Conrad Black, it comes down to this: his fate–in a very real sense, what’s left of his extraordinary, outsized life–will soon rest with 12 Chicagoans about as familiar with his own accustomed orbit of excess and privilege as Pluto is with photosynthesis.”
The other day I had the giddy experience of speaking live to Canada on the subject of the Conrad Black trial. I sat in a tiny studio facing a camera, and a CBC anchorman in Toronto asked questions through a speaker in my ear. This wasn’t the first time a Canadian reporter had interviewed me, and my material was acquiring some polish. The Conrad Black trial has none of the local impact of our last legal circus, the George Ryan trial, I explained to the nation that’s dubbed this the “trial of the century” and dispatched so many reporters to Chicago that any Canadian journalist not here must feel disgraced. The Grey Cup is awarded each fall to the Canadian Football League champion, and I said that holding the Black trial in Chicago is like playing the Grey Cup game at Soldier Field.
“And, oh yes, we drove a hard bargain with Donald Trump and sold him our real estate on the banks of the Chicago River at an excellent price. We trimmed the staff of our newspapers because they had to be trimmed, yet we continued to publish excellent newspapers. It was the Sun-Times’s Hired Truck series, was it not, that turned City Hall upside down in a way from which it has yet to recover? I assure you, had we not bought the Sun-Times, had we not assembled the Chicago Group to provide synergies and savings of scale, had we not constructed the new printing plant the Sun-Times desperately needed, had we not extracted full value from the real estate the Sun-Times stood on, Chicago would be a one-newspaper city today. And much the poorer for it.
“If I neglected corporate matters in Chicago, it was only because those running things here enjoyed my complete confidence. Mr. Radler’s abilities I didn’t question for a minute. And as the corporate watchdog, the guardian at the gate who presumably consulted with him every step of the way, there was the chairman of the board’s audit committee, James Thompson. To say I had total faith in Mr. Thompson’s judgment is to understate it. Mr. Thompson is not only a former governor of Illinois, he’s the former U.S. attorney of this jurisdiction. On his watch fiscal irresponsibility would be not only unwise but unthinkable!
For more, see Michael Miner’s blog at chicagoreader.com.
