Profile / Conrad Black: He admired Napoleon and lived like a king, but the media tycoon may be about to meet his Waterloo, writes Roy Greenslade
Until a couple of years ago Conrad Black was one of the biggest beasts in the media jungle. Here was a burly six-footer with a newspaper empire that spanned three continents. Pugnacious, bombastic and supercilious, Black mixed with the great and the good, lecturing them on how better to run their countries and their businesses. He selected some of the most influential and exalted people to ornament his boards of directors.
In return, the powerful bestowed their privileges upon him. The British gave him a peerage. He was privy councillor in Canada and the director of a leading bank. In the US, he was a member of the Centre for Strategic Studies and the Nixon Centre, also serving on the steering committee of the Bilderberg conferences, the annual get-togethers of global capital's elite movers and shakers.
Black lived in a manner that befits a mogul, flitting between his four luxurious homes in private jets. He ate in the smartest of restaurants, attended the grandest balls and hosted the most glittering parties. His opulence was matched by that of his second wife, a consumer of luxury on a regal scale. As recently as 2004 he appeared in a list of the richest people in Britain, with an estimated wealth of £175 million (€256 million).
Now the man has lost almost everything and is facing the possibility of a future behind bars. He is due to appear in a Chicago court on Wednesday to face eight charges of defrauding the company he once chaired of more than $80 million (€68 million). If convicted he faces up to 40 years in jail. One of his former closest friends has turned against him and will give evidence for the prosecution. His old cronies now shun him and he is reputedly so strapped for cash he is finding it difficult to fund his defence.
For a man renowned for his arrogance and pomposity, the fall from grace at the hands of people he regards with open disdain must be unbearable. On the other hand, those who have spoken to him recently claim that he is "in denial", convinced that has done nothing wrong and therefore unable to contemplate the depth of the problems he faces. Seeing himself as a king-emperor, he scoffs at the efforts of regulators, lawyers and investors who are trying to bring him to heel.
So how did the Hon Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, first rise to worldwide eminence and then, so rapidly, lose it all? He was born in Montreal in 1944, his father was the president of a Canadian-based brewing conglomerate. He was educated at the prestigious Upper Canada College and notoriously expelled for selling stolen exam papers to other pupils. But Black was a bright student and went on to gain degrees in history and law. He was also fascinated by business and by newspapers. With two friends, David Radler and Peter White, he borrowed money to buy a small English-language daily paper in Quebec, the Sherbrooke Record, in 1969. By 1978 they had created a chain of nine dailies and nine weeklies across Canada, making a yearly profit of $5 million.
BY THEN BLACK had developed an intense interest in a range of historical heroes, such as Napoleon, Lincoln and de Gaulle. He was also engrossed by the lives of three press moguls: William Randolph Hearst, Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian who became a British newspaper baron. Black, who had a terrific memory, was able to recite whole speeches from his heroes.
Through his family connections, Black obtained a shareholding in one of Canada's largest holding companies, Argus Corporation, with some $4 billion in assets and stakes in some of Canada's finest blue-chip companies including Massey Ferguson, the respected farm machinery corporation. In a series of complex financial manoeuvres, he executed a coup against the old guard within Argus, ultimately gaining control for little more than $30 million and winning him media status as Canada's "boy wonder businessman".
The tag didn't last long because of the controversy he provoked by his complex financial engineering. Most of Canada's business experts believed his stewardship was at best unsuccessful and at worst downright disgraceful. They were particularly critical of the way in which he dealt with Massey's pensions funds and the press soon turned on Black. The self-confident Black did little to help himself. A verbose man with a wide vocabulary, he revelled in the use of flowery and arcane phrases to insult his growing army of detractors.
Black's passion for making money went hand-in-hand with his pleasure at exercising political influence, but he failed in his bid to purchase more of Canada's papers, prompting a magazine writer to comment: "In his 40th year he finds himself comfortable and rich, but surrounded by a rising chorus of voices questioning his future course and asking why he refuses to fulfil the potential for corporate greatness he once inspired among his peers".
In fact, Black was on the verge of greater corporate power than his many critics within Canada could envisage. At a Bilderberg conference in May 1985, he was told that Britain's Telegraph group of newspapers had been hit by acute financial problems.
Black agreed to act as a sort of white knight by investing £10 million in return for acquiring 14 per cent of the company. He quickly discovered that the group was in dire straits and he managed to engineer a complete takeover, paying just £30 million to obtain control. Another controversial media magnate, Robert Maxwell, observed that Black "had landed history's largest fish with history's smallest hook".
Black's deft handling of the takeover wasn't universally appreciated and he received his first taste of British press resentment. Writing in the Times, its finance editor Kenneth Fleet referred to him as "Genghis Khan".
The Daily Telegraph, despite its liquidity problems, was a very profitable paper. As the largest-selling serious paper it had unrivalled circulation and advertising revenue, making many millions a year. It yielded even greater profits once the print unions were ousted and new presses came on stream, enabling Black to assemble a global empire.
He increased his holdings in weekly papers across the USA and Canada, also buying up the Chicago Sun-Times. By 1990, his companies ran over 400 newspaper titles in North America alone. He took a stake in Australia's important Fairfax group and acquired the Jerusalem Post after outbidding Maxwell.
Once Black moved to London he attracted publicity because of his obsession with Napoleon and his lengthy diatribes, both verbal and in print, against anyone he suspected of opposing him. He took to writing letters of complaint to his own newspapers, masking the fact that he also pulled strings behind the scenes about editorial content.
He emerged as an enthusiastic supporter of Margaret Thatcher, a militant supporter of Zionism, and a trenchant opponent of the European Union.
In 1992, after the collapse of his first marriage, he also acquired a glamorous wife, Barbara Amiel. She was a Canadian-born journalist, then a columnist with the Sunday Times, whose fierce right-wing political views dovetailed with those of Black.
TOGETHER THE COUPLE built an ostentatious lifestyle. In addition to their central London house and the magnificent Toronto estate Black had acquired years before, they bought an apartment in New York and a huge oceanside mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. His London staff alone included a butler, a chef, a maid and a chauffeur to drive the couple around the city in a 1954 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. They flew only by private jet.
Amiel became famous for the amount she spent on her clothes, admitting to "an extravagance that knows no bounds".
Meanwhile, Black went on enlarging his empire, launching a new Canadian daily paper, the National Post, in 1998. It appeared to outsiders that he could do no wrong. In truth, matters were far from harmonious.
By 2001, when he was forced to renounce his Canadian citizenship in order to accept a British peerage, his companies were running into grave financial difficulties. Lord Black, as he now became, began to get rid of large swatches of his holdings. The American and Canadian papers were sold off in a series of complex deals that, a year or so later, caused raised eyebrows among investors in his main company, Hollinger International.
One leading shareholder demanded an inquiry and discovered that Hollinger was funding most of Black's lifestyle. The jets were company-owned. The Rolls was serviced on company money. Even Amiel's tips to the doorman at a New York store were paid by Hollinger. It appeared that Black had treated a public company as if it was a private fiefdom.
Further research into financial deals suggested that Black, Radler and other senior executives had benefited from personal payments that should have gone to Hollinger and, ultimately, the investors. A Securities and Exchange Commission investigation followed and it was the results of that inquiry that led to the criminal charges against Black. To compound his problems, Radler - his lifelong friend and closest confidante - has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud in the US and agreed to testify against Black.
Perhaps the man who so wanted to be remembered as one of the world's greatest media magnates is today reflecting on a maxim coined by his great hero, Napoleon: "Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism at London's City University and a Daily Telegraph columnist