At the height of his power, Conrad Black owned the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and some 500 titles across the United States and Canada. He held the title Lord Black of Crossharbour, kept an apartment on Park Avenue and once threw a $62,000 birthday party for his wife, Barbara Amiel. The same appetite for display helped sink him.
The case
It started in 2003, when shareholders accused Black of skimming millions of dollars from his newspaper company between 1999 and 2001. He was charged alongside associates at the holding company Hollinger and eventually convicted of stealing $6.1 million. The Daily Mail put the sum he took from shareholders at £3.8 million.
At the core of the honest services charges was a strategy Black began in 1998: selling off most of the small community papers published in smaller cities in the US and Canada. Black and other executives received millions of dollars from the buyers in return for promises not to compete. Prosecutors said the executives kept that money, which belonged to shareholders, without telling Hollinger’s board.
The three-month trial drew international attention, not least for his haughty remarks. When shareholders grumbled about the cost of a trip to Bora Bora, he wrote a memo saying he was not prepared to re-enact “the French revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility.” Tom Bower’s book Conrad and Lady Black, updated to cover the trial, painted the couple as social climbers who gulled their way into the City and high society.
Sentence and appeal
Black was sentenced in 2007 to 78 months in prison. After he had served 29 months, the US Supreme Court sharply curtailed the honest services law that underpinned part of the case, and in 2010 he was released on bail while his case was re-examined. In 2011 the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago threw out two of his four convictions. It held that one fraud conviction, involving about $600,000, was straightforward theft with nothing to do with honest services, and that the obstruction of justice conviction also stood. Most of his sentence rested on obstruction, after he was said to have removed 13 boxes from his Toronto office while under investigation.
At a resentencing hearing in June 2011, several inmates wrote to the judge that Black’s lectures on writing, history and economics had changed their lives. He was sent back to prison with 13 months left to serve, and was released five months early for good behaviour. Donald Trump later gave him a full pardon.
Amiel’s account
Amiel stayed loyal throughout. She told Tatler that Black urged her to leave him before the trial, and more forcefully after his conviction. “How could I possibly leave Conrad? It’s just unthinkable,” she said, adding that she would marry him again knowing everything that followed. She visited him weekly in his Florida prison.
She has also described the social world of billionaires as a place where she often felt lost. After their wedding at Kensington and Chelsea Register Office, the couple went straight to the US ambassador’s summer lunch at Claridge’s, where the Queen Mother was guest of honour. Amiel found the occasion “absolutely ghastly” because she knew no one at the table.
