Dear Lord Black,
Please forgive us. The envious, spiteful media mob was wrong, wrong, wrong about you all along. We hereby take it back. You are not a corporate kleptocrat. You are the victim of prosecutorial vigilantes and corporate-governance terrorists run amok, who railroaded an innocent man for their own self-aggrandizement. That dreadful law they used to throw you behind bars? Garbage! Every single judge on the Supreme Court said so. We’ve been insufferably smug and arrogant – labels we once applied to you. But now the schadenfreude is on the other foot.
We regret all the mean, malicious things we ever wrote about you and your lovely wife, Barbara, who, we couldn’t help but note, looked awfully sexy in those fishnet stockings she wore for your homecoming. She’s more babealicious than ever! Nobody but your most ardent supporters at the National Post ever would have dreamed that, just 28 months after Judge Amy St. Eve sent you off to the slammer, you’d be meeting up with her again to discuss your bail conditions. If things keep going the way you predicted they would, we may soon be referring to you as a de-convicted felon.
You should have seen the newsrooms the other day when you got out on bail. Senior journalists were wandering around in a daze, smacking their heads in disbelief and calling up their libel lawyers for the first time in years. We thought we’d never have anything to fear from you again. But now you’re back! And although we understand your financial circumstances are much reduced, we are also painfully aware of the satisfaction you obtain from getting even. Without a business empire to run, you’ll have lots of time for that.
So this is just to say that we apologize unreservedly for any nasty thing we may have ever thought or said about you. We were misled.
Respectfully yours, etc.
P.S. A lot of us bet that Barbara would dump you, but she didn’t. We’re sorry about that, too.
… … …
Lord Black has many battles left to fight. The IRS is on his tail, as well as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He’s got to figure out a way to get back home to Canada, the land he once derided as a “Third World dump run by raving socialists.” He’s all fired up to pursue his $800-million lawsuit against his corporate enemies – especially Richard Breeden, the former SEC chairman who got the ball and chain rolling back in 2004 when he issued a 500-page report accusing Hollinger International of being “corporate kleptocracy.”
There are other scores to settle with the media, with whom he’s been engaged in epic battle for a quarter of a century. A generation of journalists has felt the icy breath of libel chill whenever they say a word about him. So far, he has won every case. “It’s a profit centre for me,” he once said.
At the top of his hit list, I suspect, is Tom Bower, the British author of a flame-throwing book called Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Lord Black described it as “vindictive, high-handed, contemptuous, sadistic” and “pathologically mendacious,” and promptly sued the author for $11.5-million. He was especially incensed at the depiction of Barbara as “grasping, hectoring, slatternly, extravagant, shrill and a harridan.” The lawsuit has been on hiatus since his conviction, but it’s not necessarily dead. According to Eddie Greenspan, Lord Black’s former lawyer, his client plans to use the proceeds of his libel suits to pay his other legal bills.
