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The jury convicted everybody, and the shocker was Mark Kipnis, Hollinger International’s in-house lawyer in Chicago. Kipnis had the best lawyer in the trial, Ron Safer, he wasn’t cut in on any piece of those notorious noncompete payments that Radler and Black made millions from, and so far as the press could see, his only crime was acting like a lawyer. In a sympathetic profile of Kipnis the Tribune published during the trial Susan Chandler quoted this zinger from a prosecutor’s opening statement: “If there is a document to be signed to complete this scheme, you’ll see that Mark Kipnis has a pen.” For that pen in his pocket, Kipnis was nailed for three counts of mail fraud.
Minkkinen’s the executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, and he got to know Kipnis when Kipnis sat in on the contract negotiations of 1998 and 2001. When Rilea and Kipnis had dinner together a couple of nights ago, Rilea gave him a message: Jerry says good luck–he’s keeping his fingers crossed. Kipnis was feeling hopeful that evening because earlier in the day the jury had reported it was deadlocked on some of the charges. Kipnis let himself imagine a mistrial. But Judge Amy St. Eve told the jurors to go back and deliberate some more, and so they did.
Rilea was on Kipnis’s witness list. He expects to be called as a character witness before Kipnis is sentenced in November. “I wish you’d have known him,” said Rilea, speaking of his friend as one speaks of the deceased. “You’d have liked him.”
