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To be a Canadian watching the Conrad Black drama play out is to have all sorts of associations: Remembering his launch of the National Post (what! Challenging The Globe & Mail!), recalling the outbreak of nationalistic indignation when he threw over his Canadian citizenship to accept British peerage; seeing photos of Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, in the paper, looking fancy; and a general awareness that this guy was a massive, massive titan. (For a Toronto kid living nearish by, there was also the memory of driving past his mansion on The Bridle Path, a fancy street with a few truly massive homes.) Black's rise to general awareness-level prominence in the U.S., though, has resulted from his legal woes, and as they've mounted since late 2003 I've had that feeling of mixed pride and ownership that comes with a well-known Canadian making it big here ("Barenaked Ladies? I remember when they played Frosh Week in the fall of '91!" "CNN's John Roberts? You mean MuchMusic VJ J.D. Roberts, circa 1983. Well I remember the mullet." "Northrop Frye? Ahem. OURS.")
So as a Canadian it's funny to observe the Canuck factor at play in this trial. First, there's Eddie Greenspan, Black's lawyer and a legal legend back home. You may have read about him in the New York Times last week, profiled by Richard Siklos, who is covering the Black trial for the Times. Siklos, another Canadian, could probably have done that and any other story in his sleep, considering he's been on the Black beat for a decade and a half as the author of Shades of Black, his 1995 biography of the media baron that became Shades of Black: Conrad Black — His Rise And Fall, the "completely revised, updated, and vastly expanded" version in November 2004. The star witness for the prosecution, too, is Canadian: David Radler, who, judging from this Maclean's profile could be a character out of a Mordecai Richler book, and who, by all accounts, Greenspan is raring to tear into on the cross, Canadian-style (and no, that doesn't mean 'nice').
The Canadian chickens are coming home to roost elsewhere, too: Conservative columnist Mark Steyn, long a staple of the Black papers in Canada, is blogging the trial for Maclean's and elucidating the issues (pretty convincingly) over here as well, and the NRO's David Frum, another Black stalwart, recently wrote about how Hollinger's expensive campaign against and ouster of Black has contributed to a precipitous drop in share price.* He's also acting as a conduit for his father-in-law, Canadian media giant Peter Worthington, who is covering the trial for the Toronto Sun.** And then there is Amiel, aka Lady Black, who knows Worthington well, considering she succeeded him as editor of the Toronto Sun in the mid-80s (and were both columnists for years). She also knows Greenspan well, quite apart from her husband: One of Greenspan's early high-profile cases was defending financier Peter Demeter in the murder of his beautiful younger wife, Christine (he was convicted of hiring a killer so he could cash in on the insurance). Following the trial, Amiel and her then-husband wrote a book about the case. Even Portfolio's (and HuffPo's!) Duff McDonald, who wrote the definitive Vanity Fair piece on Black in April 2004 (when his updated book and the Times were still a gleam in Siklos' eye) and won a Canadian National Magazine Award for another Black story in the National Post Business magazine, has gotten back in the game with an Intelligencer piece for New York last month.*** Canadians are on the beat.
So, today as the trial begins — if the trial begins, because $92 million in settlements to the Sun-Times Media Group and the SEC from the plea-bargained turncoat-partner star witness sort of smells funny, and by the way they just lost their first juror under sort of odd circumstances — and as you remind yourself never, ever to listen to anything that Richard Perle says — you can also remind yourself that Canadians are everywhere, especially in the world of Conrad Black.
Related:
The United States vs. Conrad Black [Maclean's]
Richard Siklos' Conrad Black Archive [NYT]
Paint It Black: Richard Siklos Profile [Quill & Quire, Nov. 1995]
Mark Steyn: The Pot Calling The Kettle Black [NRO]
David Frum: Think Again [NRO]
*This, by the way, is consistent with the stated rationale for the infamous non-competes — that they were for Black personally, because he was the one you didn't want competing against you, not Hollinger.
**Funny - this is how Wikipedia describes their relationship: "Worthington is the step-father of conservative writer Danielle Crittenden, and is thereby forced to be David Frum's father-in-law."
***McDonald wrote of the the "Support Lord Black" website, which turned out to be a hoax perpetuated by Frank magazine, a less, er, refined version of Spy that has called Black "Lord Tubby" for years. The hoax took in pretty much everybody, though surely in retrospect its description of "our grateful and long overdue acknowledgment of His Lordship's life's struggle to confront, with unflagging courage, the Brobdingnagian forces of Canadian small-mindedness, parochialism, mediocrity and failure" may have been a tip-off.
****I don't know enough about the evidence to make a judgment either way (unlike the New York Times in 2004!), but I do think it's odd that the star-studded directors like Perle and Henry Kissinger are getting off scot-free here, unless they updated Smith v. Van Gorkom while I wasn't looking.
