RATTLER RADLER
CHICAGO – The government’s star witness at Conrad Black’s fraud trial appeared to emerge from court yesterday with much of his credibility still intact, despite a promise from the dethroned press baron’s legal camp that their cross-examination would destroy him.
David Radler, undergoing a second day of questioning by Black’s lead lawyer, Edward “Fast Eddie” Greenspan, once again admitted to telling lies repeatedly to lawyers and FBI agents before he copped a plea in the case two years ago in exchange for a light sentence.
“Did you stutter when you lied?” Greenspan asked.
“Sir, I said I lied,” Radler answered.
“When you lie, do you look a certain way?” asked Greenspan.
“That’s for others to determine. I can’t view myself when I’m answering questions,” Radler responded.
Radler again insisted he was telling the truth now.
He also got plenty of his own jabs in, at one point accusing Greenspan of taking things out of context and “maneuvering all over the place.”
Radler’s bad behavior prompted an admonishment from Judge Amy St. Eve.
The testy exchanges also seemed to throw off Greenspan.
In four hours of heated questioning yesterday, the lawyer – a friend of Black’s from his native Canada – failed to undercut much of Radler’s testimony from earlier in the week.
Radler had told the jury that Black was the mastermind behind a scheme to loot millions from Hollinger International through payouts from phony agreements with buyers promising not to compete with newspapers Hollinger was selling.
Radler testified the buyers never requested the so-called “non-compete agreements,” and that the audit committee at Hollinger International was kept in the dark about them.
Greenspan seemed to regain his footing at the end of the day, when he asked Radler whether he was Black’s “right-hand man” to try to show he could have been behind the corporate skullduggery.
“The fact is you made a lot of decisions on your own, didn’t you?” Greenspan asked. “In fact, you’re not Conrad’s right-hand man.”
“I don’t know what that means,” shot back a belligerent Radler, who was the No. 2 exec to Black. “I reported to Conrad about every transaction.”
He then asked Radler if he remembered being quoted in a story in the Toronto Star in 1996 saying, “I’m nobody’s right-hand man.”
“I don’t remember telling anybody that,” Radler said.
When pressed by Greenspan, Radler again retorted he wasn’t sure what the phrase meant.
“It could mean any number of things,” Radler said. “It could mean flunky . . . It doesn’t mean I’m a flunky.”
Greenspan will get another crack at shredding the credibility of Radler and his testimony when the trial resumes on Monday.
If he fails, pressure will mount on Black to take the stand in his own defense, something his lawyers are loath to let happen because the media mogul could get ensnared in a potentially self-incriminating line of questioning by prosecutors.