From swaggering tycoon to uncommon criminal

The swaggering press baron who once famously arrived at a Kensington Palace fancy dress party as Cardinal Richelieu with his wife, the columnist Barbara Amiel, as Marie Antoinette, will have to wear a orange prison jumpsuit.

When sentenced, he faces a lengthy term in a low or medium-security US federal prison, sharing a cell or possibly even a dormitory with other prisoners in a facility ringed by razor wire.

Peter Newman, Black’s first biographer, said: “I think I know him well enough to say this: I do not think he has considered it [jail]. I think he really believes he has done nothing wrong. He will be the most surprised man in the universe to hear a guilty verdict because it will shatter his image of himself.”

During the trial, Black sought to project an aura of invincibility as his lawyers recalled his illustrious rise to becoming a press baron, and indeed a peer of the realm, starting with a $20,000 investment in a small English-language newspaper in Quebec, the Sherbrooke Record, in 1969 and continuing with his takeover of the Telegraph titles in Britain in 1985.

Prosecutors said that Black had begun to siphon off money from asset sales made by the US-based newspaper group he controlled in 1998 in order, at first, to help repay debt owed by the Canadian holding company. He later spent vast sums on jewellery and haute couture for his wife, including $4.3 million in a single week in November 2000. When in 2002 Lady Black showed off her extensive wardrobe of designer labels, including 100 pairs of handmade Manolo Blah-nik shoes, to Vogue magazine she declared: “I have an extravagance that knows no bounds.”

Black resolutely refused to acknowledge any illegality, drawing a rebuke from the judge for describing the prosecutors as “Nazis” whose case was “hanging like a toilet seat around their necks”.

Despite his bluster outside court, he refused to take the witness stand in his own defence. The only time he spoke during the 14-week trial was to tell the judge: “I decline to exercise my right to testify.”

“I see the whole thing as a tragedy,” said Mr Newman, who gave Lady Black her first column when he was editor of Maclean’s magazine in Canada. “I really respect their creativity and intelligence. He has not used them in a very creative way. He has just used them to make more money.”

Black’s grim predicament even inspired sympathy among his antagonists, including another of his biographers, Tom Bower, whose book Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge was met with a £5 million libel suit.

“I am not surprised by the verdict but I intend to write to the judge urging leniency because I feel he is a bad man but not an evil man, and at the age of 62 there should be a limit to the number of years he should serve,” Mr Bower said.

Having renounced his Canadian citizenship to join the House of Lords, Black does not qualify for transfer to an easygoing prison farm in Canada, like his former friend and longtime right-hand-man, David Radler – the prosecution’s star witness against him. In Canada, convicts are paroled after a sixth of their sentence, providing they serve a minimum six months.

Nor, as a nonAmerican, is Black eligible to serve his time at a “Club Fed” minimum-security work camp like other white-collar criminals. Instead, he will be mixed with a general prison population 54 percent of whom are drug dealers.

“I do not really see Conrad Black sharing a cell with a bad-ass from Harlem with tattoos who is trying to get heroin in to the prison and may have killed people,” said George Tombs, a journalism academic who wrote the biography Lord Black.

“I do not see Conrad Black rooting for the home team in the prison basketball league. I do not see him learning a new task in the prison, starting at 12 cents an hour.

“He may spend a lot of time with the prison chaplain.Think of what it means to have had it all and then to be in this situation.”

The conviction will strengthen the myriad civil claims against Lord Black, including multiple shareholder suits and legal action by the owner of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper he once controlled.

As well as civil claims and fines, he also faces possible forfeiture of the $2.6 million 26-carat diamond ring that he bought for his wife and a $604,435 antique pearl and diamond brooch as well as the $8.5 million proceeds from his resale of the Park Avenue flat and his Palm Beach mansion, which he values at $32 million.

But some believe that Black, who wrote a biography of President Nixon while awaiting trial, may write his memoirs in jail, driven by a desire to settle scores with those he feels have wronged him.