Conrad Black was born choking on a silver spoon, and most of the fortune he was born with has been squandered in various vanity projects designed to build the Conrad Black brand. Mr. Black went back to jail yesterday to serve out the last 13 months of a sentence for stealing from his own company.
Not sure how that works. Sounds like getting charged for stealing your own car. Regardless, sketchy as that may seem, the crime he should have been sent to prison for happened over 25 years ago and wasn't even considered a crime at the time.
In 1984 Mr. Black helped himself to a $56 million "surplus" in the pension plan of the Dominion Store workers. He was the business visionary who realized that if the workers' pension fund had grown beyond the workers' original expectations, that the natural heir to the unexpected bonanza should be the company owner, and not the thousands of retired workers. After all, 56 million spread among thousands of retirees over many years wouldn't amount to much more than a couple hundred per month per retiree. And what's a retired grocery store clerk gonna do with a couple extra hundred a month? Piss it away on bingo and drink, no doubt.
No, Mr. Black had a grander vision for the money. While 56 million divied up amongst a bunch of retired clerks and meat-cutters didn't amount to much, when it was all pooled together into one lump sum for one great man, well, that was a different story, and Conrad Black was nothing if not a Great Man.
Not content with being born rich, Black sought to remake himself as a giant in the world of ideas, in the world of power politics. That required a bigger stage than provincial Canada. Canada was strictly small-pond stuff. Black made it his religious duty to suck up to power. He bought influential newspapers in England and Israel and America and took an active role in making sure that the editorial slant in his papers fawned over the most reactionary actors on the political scene.
The union representing those Dominion workers had other ideas. They spent years hounding the Great Man through the court system. Eventually the Ontario Supreme Court ruled that workers' pension plans belong to workers! Imagine such a thing!
Meanwhile, Black larded the board of directors of his media empire with names like Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and Richard Perle. He established his scholarly bona fides by writing serious biographies of Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. He gave up his Canadian citizenship to become a member of Britain's House of Lords. He was finally Lord Black. He had arrived!
Alas, just as he was arriving some of the junior shareholders in his media empire were wondering where all the money was going. They hired Richard Breeden, former director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to investigate. He concluded that Lord Black and a few cronies had looted over $400 million from the company. Why bother with pension plans when you can use an entire media empire as your personal piggy-bank!
That was the beginning of the end for Lord Black's empire. He spent $40 million of somebody's money defending himself, and ended up in jail anyway. And this is where I start to feel a little fondness for the old swindler. Out on parole recently while further appeals were being heard, he gave some remarkable interviews. Among the insights he gleaned in prison; " ...they (fellow-inmates) were on balance more interesting than the membership of most of the prominent clubs I am a member of in London and New York and Toronto."
Conrad, somewhere in all that pompous flim-flammery beats the heart of a mensch. I know most of your high-society friends don't take your calls anymore, but when you get out of the big house you'll always be welcome here at Falling Downs.
We'll cook up some steaks, down a few pints, and talk about what you'd do differently if you could do it all over again.
See ya soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment