“COMES NOW THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” as professional jargon couches a government legal initiative, and a large swath of the legal, commercial, and media communities waited for the Supreme Court of the United States to bring down its decision before the court term ended at the close of July 2010. Ours was one of several prominent cases that would affect the lives of many, and was featured with gun control and intellectual property cases as the most closely watched and carefully awaited.
The Court announced its decisions on its website at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time, each Monday (and later Thursdays as well), scrolling through the judgments, and finishing by 10:30 a.m. I called Barbara at 10:35 on such mornings, but there was nothing for several weeks. On June 26, she took the call after half a ring, and said in a very calm voice: “Miguel [Estrada] is evaluating this; the Court has vacated all counts unanimously, but has sent them back to Posner to determine if they are the subject of harmless error. They were pretty hard on Posner in the opinion, which was written by Justice Ginsburg.” The Honest Services Statute was rewritten to require a bribe or kickback for conviction, which, the high court mentioned, was not applicable in our case. Justice Ginsburg decried “the infirmity of invented law” and the “anomalous” nature of Posner’s findings; pretty severe strictures between eminent judges. But it seemed to us perversely American that, having administered such a battering to Posner, that he would have a cranium like the skin of a golf ball, it invited him to determine the gravity of his own errors.
It was a decisive turn and a great victory. The Honest Services Statute had been struck from the hands of the prosecutors and thousands of cases had been reopened. Our informants shortly confirmed that the prosecutorial community was none too pleased with Posner for having fumbled them out of this very efficient method, which almost all had happily abused for decades, of taking down their targeted opponents. Fitzgerald had been propelled by Breeden to go after me for life imprisonment and complete impoverishment, and was now disarmed and humbled.
The press was very extensive and unambiguously generous. I gave a press statement to Theresa Tedesco of the National Post that was widely taken up: “The decision of the Supreme Court of the United States is very gratifying. It has been a very long struggle and a difficult time. Our camp is very hopeful but naturally cautious about what will come next.” It was no time for triumphalism, both because indignities would be out of place, and because the process of Posner reviewing his own errors would naturally be unpredictable.
True to form, as the sort of Comical Ali (Saddam Husssein’s notoriously mendacious press officer, constantly announcing great Iraqi victories against the U.S. and its allies) of the prosecution committee that he had departed two years before, Eric Sussman claimed a victory and said that “the Justice Department dodged a bullet today.” His interviewer, finally, was incredulous. He said I had a “five percent chance of a reduced sentence,” and almost no chance of bail. Posner’s initial pass at the case had been such a monstrosity of bigoted ignorance and he was such a notorious egomaniac that we did not think he would grant bail, but felt we must ask for it, to show we had faith in our case. We did not see how he could salvage the fraud counts, no matter how redoubled his desire to do so.
Congratulations flooded in from around the world: thousands of messages, and astoundingly supportive press comments. As fortune had fled totally, so it returned in a flood. In a mighty back-flip by Rupert Murdoch, for such an editorial could not have been written without his authority, the Wall Street Journal ran a lead opinion piece entitled “Conrad Black’s Revenge,” and apologized prominently and unequivocally for not having realized earlier the righteousness of my cause. They then ran a signed piece by my friend Seth Lipsky, former editor of the New York Sun, that was entirely laudatory. There were many similar comments, with George Jonas and Jonathan Kay in the National Post among the most gratefully appreciated.
Wonderful moment though it was, we were not clear of it all yet. My fellow residents at Coleman Low were heart-warming, even heart-rending, in their solidarity. Complete strangers arrived in droves to wish me well, and all those hundreds whom I did know were unanimous in treating my success as their own. I was invited to prayer meetings in my honour. It was deeply affecting, and inexpressibly reassuring that decency survives, even against such odds, in such battered souls, and in such an unremitting place.
Counsel thought we had won the frauds, meaning the complete collapse of the entire Breeden allegations and the swift counter-advance of my civil and libel suits. Obstruction was still a problem and if Posner was determined to give the government something, he could give them that.
I spent several weeks replying to emails, writing articles that I had previously agreed to, and concerting strategy with various counsel. Then in a new, unforeseen bombshell on Monday, July 19, I called Barbara as usual at 11:00 p.m. and she said: “Have you heard?” “I haven’t heard anything worth remembering.” “You have bail.” Without trying to puzzle out what this might mean in terms of Posner’s thinking, it was an immense relief and an event impossible to think of negatively. I offered Miguel the thought that Posner was just creating the appearance of liberality in order to cover his next outrage. Miguel thought he might have the impulse, but that he would not try it after a pasting from the Supreme Court and with the entire legal community and much of the media watching.
Judge St. Eve approved the bail terms on the morning of July 21. My dear friend Roger Hertog flew to Chicago and pledged $2 million, which I was able to guaranty without violating Mareva requirements so he was neither out of pocket nor at risk; it was an immensely gracious gesture from an extremely distinguished and valued friend in all seasons.
I shortly became the subject of respectfully formulated messages over the compound public address system, which had been the source of so much ear-splitting annoyance, almost ceaselessly from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. every day for twenty-eight months. My alien status was waived, as I was informed by my unit manager, who said that it would require me to be taken to solitary confinement. I replied that “Not one cent of bail will be pledged to send me over to the Special Housing Unit.” Off it came, as I spoke. Barbara was in Toronto, but managed to get a chartered plane to fly her to Palm Beach that night, so we could celebrate our eighteenth wedding anniversary.
She arranged for a car to collect me. The driver was besieged by the media at the gate, waiting to enter, as she watched on television. Over a hundred of my friends had asked to accompany me to the gate, but I was rushed out while the compound was generally shut down, and only one friend was able to bring back the cart on which my books and other belongings were piled up. I took just one piece of government property: the shirt bequeathed by the former don of a New York underworld family. When I declared it to an amiable correctional officer who processed me, he said he did not wish to incur the rancour of both of us, and on I went.
There were cordial farewells with as many as ten officials but I exchanged no words with the dour lieutenant present. The compound counsel had arranged for my departure via a padlocked gate, avoiding the press, and with remarkable swiftness and lack of ceremony, jovial waves and salutations, I passed back through the gates and had a very pleasant three-hour drive to my fiercely disputed home in Palm Beach. I called Barbara and Joan and Miguel, watched the nondescript Florida scenery and townscapes as we passed, and reflected on the unevenness of my blessings.
Our devoted and talented houseman, Domenico, who had previously worked for the Wrightsmans; and the Bruces, and the Annenbergs in the U.S. embassy in London, greeted me as I arrived in my track suit, past a knot of cameramen indistinguishable from those that had filmed my departure. We had a glass of wine, as I had so often dreamt of doing, overlooking the ocean. We reminisced a bit, and then he withdrew, and I breathed free in the sunny, salted breeze, and the absence of any noise except the sea.
Barbara arrived about midnight. It was one of the very most exquisite moments I have known; her constancy, resolve, and affection, and my gratitude for her is beyond words, and we were finally able to go beyond words to express them.
We returned to Chicago the next day, and to St. Eve’s court the following day. Again, St. Eve would not hear of allowing me to return to Canada. It was utter nonsense, of course, because the Canadians would admit me again without a passport, and no one would extradite me back to the U.S. after this turn of events. However, it was irrelevant because I would in no circumstances consider being a fugitive from justice. The U.S. must either release me unconvicted or compound its injustices, even if that meant St. Eve, as she clearly wished, sending me back, however briefly, to prison. Withal, it was a much more relaxed appearance, opposite the judge and the press, than previous occasions. I greeted some of the marshals cordially, and even some of the journalists, then Barbara and I departed for New York.
After two weeks in holiday mode, and many agreeable reunions, particularly with, as Barbara calls them, the cubs (Jonathan, Alana, and James), we returned to Palm Beach. There were no tropical storms, the weather was warm but not insufferable, and we had the most spontaneous and carefree days in many years with Barbara’s delightful Kuvaszok, splendid large, eccentric white Hungarian livestock-guardian (but not shepherding) dogs. There were thousands of emails for reply, this manuscript to get into shape, friends to receive, medical and dental work to be done, and generally, a world to rediscover.
The Ontario Court of Appeal threw out the Breeden group’s (from Kissinger all the way down to Healy) suddenly urgent effort to resist the inexorable approach of my libel suits. The exchange of briefs on the Circuit Court re-hearing, and the supplementary briefs, were the now traditional mismatch. The government’s feeble efforts to keep the Breeden demonology alive were now a pathetic wail to Posner to stick to his guns, without a mention of the 9-0 immolation from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The fact that the government had no argument left did not mean that justice would finally, unambiguously be done. That had never been the nature of these proceedings. In the terrible early defeats, I had yet salvaged enough to fight on and now all 17 counts had been abandoned, rejected by the jurors, or unanimously vacated by the Supreme Court, the evil spirit of injustice flourished yet. I told many prison friends as I left that I expected to be back, (though for less than my current full sentence), and was too wary of the wickedness and official advantages of my enemies to be free of that concern. Posner reviewing Posner’s own errors was a most unpromising forum.
Barbara and I, despite Miguel’s view that Posner couldn’t just ignore the Supreme Court opinion, continued to think that, contrary to our expectations, he had granted bail in order to incite, and then brutally extinguish, false hopes of an early end to the persecution. He could have rejected bail and left me in prison, as I and most observers expected, but that would have accelerated the end of my punishment. Letting me out of prison to live a half-life seemed a way to extend it, and with a touch of sadistic destruction that would please this, as he acknowledged himself (to Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker), “callous and cruel” man. He and his co-panellists could take as long as they wanted to issue their opinion.
I had done a slight bit of research on Posner, and recalled Milton Friedman telling me once that he was “a serious intelligence.” I suppose he was, once. In the famous sketch in the New Yorker in 2001, Posner was portrayed as having “a limp hand … eyes pale as a fish … the distant, omniscient, ectoplasmic air of the butler in the haunted house.” Posner on Posner: “If someone is obviously guilty, why do you have to have all this rigmarole?” So he doesn’t; he just assumes guilt and reasons backwards. “I am cold, furtive, callous, snobbish, selfish, and playful, but with a streak of cruelty … I’m like an imperfectly house-broken pet,” he explained to the interviewer with evident pride. I could see why Fitzgerald and Ruder were so cocky (in separate conversations with Miguel Estrada), that he would protect something of their false and vacated convictions, but I was at a complete loss for a theological explanation why, after all this, my fate was in the hands of such a mutation of the bench. Elsewhere in the same article, Posner acknowledged that he was neurotic because his cat, Dinah, preferred Mrs. Posner to him, not a difficult conclusion to imagine, cats being legendarily intelligent.
Posner proclaims himself a Nietzschean, and despised his parents in the infirmity of their eighties. When Larissa MacFarquhar asked him what he felt when his parents died, “he looked puzzled, as though the question didn’t make sense to him. ‘I don’t have any feeling about it,’ he said.” He had not wanted doctors to prolong the lives of his debilitated parents. “I’d like to choose my own time of exit.” I was tempted by unchristian thoughts.
He became famous for emphasizing the economic consequences of laws and urging these as criteria in determining their application. He professes to believe that he has not been elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court because he favours the legalization of marijuana. But his proposal to deal with child adoption by public auction, and his sociopathic personality, are generally thought to have more to do with it. However and why ever, I was stuck with him, a dreary, unreasoning pustule of animus, infesting my path on the way to the judicial summit of America, and on the way back down.
Miguel and David Debold again overwhelmed the government in written arguments for the Circuit Court rehearing, and atomized the four vacated counts all over again. The government again had recourse to lies and evasions, pretended that Fitzgerald’s scheme had survived the trial, that I had snuck documents out of my office, and pretended that the APC payments were not with money that had already been voted to us, and that the Forum and Paxton payments had not been voted by the Executive Committee and ratified by the directors.
They remained on autocue at the Circuit Court rehearing in October, as they had been for the last five years, as if their case had not been shot to pieces again and again. Posner was almost as argumentative, querulous, and overbearing and obnoxious as he had been with poor Andy Frey in 2008, but Estrada wasn’t having it and insisted on his right to complete a few consecutive sentences. It seemed to us, hearing the audio of the arguments, that while Posner would like to retain all four counts, he was going to have to let the APC counts go, but that obstruction was likely to remain and the Forum-Paxton count was a toss-up, not because the slightest credence could still be attached to either, but that Posner probably possessed the conceit to claim some colour of right to retain them. On the law and the facts, as always, we had won easily, but we were dealing with a judge who seemed determined to send me back to prison for as long as possible, and whose ego would accommodate almost any decision that gave effect to that wish.
Miguel Estrada knew a lot of people in and around the Seventh Circuit and heard a lot, and so did some other contacts. In the aftermath of the hearing, we thought that the other two panelists would be less sanguine about being rebuked by the Supreme Court than Posner was, and that they would probably help to resist Posner’s desire to reimpose all four vacated counts. This was what happened. On December 17, Posner produced another false and shameful judgment, allowing the APC counts to fall, but fabricating, ignoring and distorting evidence to keep the Paxton-Forum and obstruction counts.
He accomplished this end by interpreting Radler’s jokily worded advice to the rest of us that the buyers (Forum-Paxton), wanted non-compete agreements as an admission that they did not; by ignoring that the payments had been ratified and approved, and by ignoring the fact that the defendants had absolutely nothing to do with the arrangements. On obstruction, all the relevant facts were ignored, such as that I knew nothing of the contents or of any continuing SEC interest in my files, had not been accused of violating a Canadian document retention order, had spoken with the interim president of the company before acting, made sure that the removals were recorded by the security cameras so there could be no thought of trying to avoid them, and could have taken anything I wanted out at any time in brief cases or coat pockets for weeks before and after without any review or incident.
For good measure, Posner urged the trial judge to ignore, for sentencing purposes, the fall of the APC counts, and to send me back to prison for the entire original sentence. This was what Barbara and I had suspected was his game all along, but we all doubted that St. Eve was going to buy into anything so Draconian and dishonest. We were, however, quite certain that she would send me back to prison and it became a matter of trying to hold that to the lightest possible renewed sentence, and setting matters up as well as possible before I surrendered to custody. Though we were prepared for this setback, Barbara and I were still very disappointed.
Miguel Estrada’s statement on December 17 on our behalf promised a further appeal to the Supreme Court, and said that “Posner’s opinion for the panel did not accurately reflect the facts, misapplied the test for harmless error review, is inconsistent with the Sixth Amendment and did not remotely respond adequately to the Supreme Court’s instructions. Instead, the panel recounted the government’s spin on its supposed evidence, trivialized the strong defence case, and all but ignored the jury’s rejection of any proof of a real crime with the sweeping acquittals on most of the counts in the original case.” The charge of fraud alone had led to acquittals. The only convictions had Honest Services attached to them. That statute had gone, but Posner had in effect still managed to impale me on it. We asked for an en banc hearing, the whole Circuit Court sure that Posner would not be rebuked by his colleagues, and were not surprised when he even denied the right of a reply (after we had filed it). The profligate jurist was approving his own judicial expense account.
We had no practical expectation that the Supreme Court would take the case back again. It had no interest in the equity of lower court decisions, and had rewritten the Honest Services Statute to assure uniformity of interpretation throughout the country. But it only chose to be insulted by being flipped the bird by a lower court if it actually wanted to notice it. Miguel and David crafted a clever and brilliantly worded demolition of Posner’s reasoning and the tatters of the government’s case, hanging it constitutionally on Posner’s violation of the Sixth Amendment by usurping the role of the jury for himself and denying trial by jury to me, with the subtext of trying to incite what must have been a temptation by the high court to wallop this impudent and much-talking judge about his glabrous head once and for all.
The confidence of the prosecutors that I would be sent back to prison made them complacent about asking revocation of bail, as they subscribed to the Posner timetable of stretching out my time roasting on the spit for as long as possible, preferably, though they would never publicly say so, until the undertakers removed me from the prison medical facility.
A considerable race ensued to get as many things cleared up as possible and to do everything we could to eliminate or at least minimize the remaining sentence. Since the retention of any felony count would make me persona non grata in the United States, (a country that was in any case, patria non grata with me), there was no longer any argument for retaining the Palm Beach house. If I were still the owner when the Supreme Court declined to hear our appeal again, the value of it would again crash as the bottomfeeders would be out in their former numbers, avarice, and abrasiveness. After delicate negotiation with a number of people, a sale was negotiated for $25 million, not a miraculous price, but not a risible one either, and the entire contents were evacuated hastily to Toronto. The utmost discretion was maintained, with unmarked small trucks and larger vans only coming in at night, and on completion of conditions the proceeds were wired out of the country at once, to avoid any replication of the outrage that stalked and befell the New York transaction, though the circumstances now, with no prospect of further criminal proceedings, would make any such intervention much more difficult and this time we would be prepared for it.
It was time to complete the drastic deconstruction of our former lives, but now with a clear timetable, a practical certainty of financial survival, and in a planned and not desperately reactive way. At least, unlike in London and New York, I was present to help Barbara pack up the house. I had come to Palm Beach from Cuba in 1969, and was influenced by the legacy of my former senior partner, Bud McDougald, the long-serving president of the Everglades Club, and had seen Palm Beach, through the decades, as a fine monument to the appetites and attainments of American capitalism. After the economic debacle of 2008 and the humbling and collapse of Wall Street, I no longer had much respect for American capitalism, and did not feel that Barbara had been very generously supported by many of the people we knew in Palm Beach, when she was alone there. We left on April 26, and I do not expect to return. Barbara’s splendid dogs preceded us in a van to Toronto (heavy-coated Hungarian kuvaszok, they intensely disliked the heat). I flew to New York and checked into the Mark Hotel, and remained for over four months.
Now the libel suits from 2004 based on the accusations in the Special Committee report, commissioned by Breeden and signed by most of the directors, were reaching the point of depositions. I couldn’t wait to get everyone, especially Breeden, under aggressive questioning. This process was held up now only by the last fling of the libel defendants, before the Supreme Court of Canada, that I had no right or standing to sue in Canada and was merely jurisdiction-shopping, a fatuous argument that had been dismissed by the Superior and Appeal Courts in Toronto, settlement discussions now increased to ramming speed. (I was the only person in history, for a few months, to be simultaneously before the Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States.) Despite the efforts of the other side to dismiss our action as frivolous, my constant response that in that case, let us resolve the other actions that were at issue, and try the libel case, quickly brought them back to what I had always predicted: their absolute inability to face intense questioning on the allegations in the infamous Breeden Report and the shameful derelictions and financial disaster of their own administration of the assets whose control they usurped and milked for $300 million for themselves while vaporizing $2 billion of the savings of the average shareholder whose interests they were supposedly promoting.
They wobbled and jerked the line, but it was a very unconvincing negotiation. In the end, they conceded a $6-million cash payment to me in respect of the libel action, a significant part coming from their own pockets, as well as $6 million more, almost all to me, in respect of the original phony Breeden action of January 2004, the Interpleader action on division of insurance money, and the feeble effort to take back some of my indemnified legal payments. It was a rich and savoury victory.
In New York, I finally enjoyed talking face-to-face with the friends who had helped me through these very trying times, with their emails, visits, and supportive blogging and writing on my case. Among these were Roger Hertog, Seth Lipsky, the Podhoretzes, Roger Kimball, The National Review people and other writers and business people with whom I shared an enduring spirit of comradeship, whom I admired, and to whom I was grateful.
A pleasant and unexpected dividend was a very direct and rather affecting peace overture from Henry Kissinger. He invited me to dinner at his home and we went over it all, briefly and, of course, unrancorously. I told him that I thought he was largely responsible for the myth that I could have settled matters easily at the outset, a fraud of Breeden’s, and that because Breeden had the upper hand, he had rather uncritically accepted Breeden’s version of why our discussions had broken down in 2004. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to become involved and never asked him to, but I thought he owed me a better hearing, and at least benign neutrality. I understood how threatening Breeden could be, and how cautious the advice of Saunders would certainly be, and I knew from many years of observation and discussion with Richard Nixon and others that Henry’s technique in such matters was to go to a neutral corner and stay clear of the fracas, and see what could be put together later.
I volunteered that it was not my place to remonstrate with a man of his stature at his age on a modus operandi that had obviously served him well in great and world-historic matters, whatever my disappointment in this small case. And I volunteered that I did not believe the claim of the FBI that he had said that he believed me guilty as charged, because I had learned how unreliable the assertions of agents of that Bureau were apt to be. My only litmus test at this point, I told Henry Kissinger, was that if he actually believed that I had committed crimes, we would not be able to repair our relations. If he did not, and could tell me that, privately and without any request by me for a hint of explanation, much less apology; I suggested we put it all behind us and not speak of it again. This is what happened. He telephoned Barbara a few days later, who was astounded to hear from him, and had more difficulty than I did in getting over our differences. He and I soon settled back into the frequent telephone and dinner conversations of historic and international affairs of olden times.
For the rest of social New York, the habitués of the boxes at the Metropolitan Opera House and the most exalted socioeconomic echelons of the Style section of the Sunday New York Times, I met, quite cordially, in passing with many of them. There were many smiles and kisses, a few small dinners, and I was glad to see them again, but it was over. Our lack of interest is mutual, and, I think, not spiteful or antagonistic. One grows apart. I was glad to have seen them up close, and a few remain good friends, but they and I have moved on in different directions. In one case, I unguardedly got off my chest a few reflections on America that were, in the abstract, excessive, though not inaccurate, and I apologized for them. My apology was accepted, but the relationship was strained. It was the last occasion where the prolonged process of disengaging from the United States, a country I had so admired, and by which I had been so disappointed and offended, was painful. I would like to return to New York some day, and friends are already considering how to facilitate that. I will miss it, as anyone would.
In all that has happened, these are not great sorrows, just the gentle melancholy of autumn, as one prepares for another season in another place. There are only a few of these prominent New Yorkers whom I remember with any hostility, and I have been grateful to find that time heals most wounds. These will not linger long, and some brilliant friendships remain. As we prepared for the resentencing hearing in Chicago, the U.S. Probation Office produced a very supportive report that clearly raised the question of whether I had ever really been guilty of anything and strongly recommended release for time served. My friends in Coleman had provided a herneating mass of supportive letters and emails and even the correctional personnel had spoken positively. The prosecution is accustomed to the Probation Office parroting its position and was so startled by this turn of events that it extracted two affidavits from Coleman personnel, one a vocational training person and the other a unit manager, that retailed false tittle-tattle, and in one case contradicted what the affiant had said to the Probation officer. We challenged this and demanded subpoenas for these people and the relevant correspondence, and the prosecutors sped backwards like alarmed canaries, claiming that they were not trying to contradict what the inmates and personnel had said in my favour. I now knew the prosecutors and their techniques so well that I was not surprised by their small-minded attack even on my life as a prisoner, with incredible affidavits, one contradicting a signed statement from the affiant, and by their cowardly retreat when buried under a tidal wave of contradictions from the Probation Office and the inmates. Nor was I surprised that when reviewing the dubious affidavits the judge said she didn’t believe them, without rebuking the government.
Barbara and I returned to Chicago on June 23 for the final hearing in Judge St. Eve’s courtroom the next day. Given that this was the end, I considered my remarks carefully and delivered them directly to the judge at a range of about fifteen feet, from memory, in a firm and fluent, but not bombastic, voice. They are in the Appendix and were widely reprinted and commented on; essentially I repeated that I was not guilty, that the government’s case had been entirely destroyed and had only been revived at all by an unrigorous and far from disinterested act of casuistry by a perverse judge. The prosecutors’ disappointment in the shattering of their case was understandable, but I was not the rightful subject of their vindictive sentiments. I expatiated somewhat philosophically and gave a glimpse, without indiscretion or, I trust, any lapse of taste, of my religious and psychological assimilation of these unbidden events. The judge listened very attentively as I spoke for about twenty-five minutes.
She had made her decision, and it was not, as I had assumed, possible for her to abandon the pretense that I had actually been convicted of something, however, as I put it in my remarks to the court, “tortuous the process and threadbare the evidentiary basis of the convictions now are.” Though counsel (Miguel, David, and Carolyn) thought the chances of release for time served were about 50-50, Barbara and I did not think St. Eve capable of such a complete implicit abandonment of the prosecution, and it had been her practice up to this point to play it down the middle between Scylla and Charybdis and give something to both sides. I assumed that she was under some importunity, even if it were merely telepathic, from Posner and Fitzgerald to send me back to prison and try partially to validate the entire shabby process that had preceded this climax.
She had already prepared the ground in her earlier remarks by adding the enhancement of sophisticated planning to the remaining fraud count, although the evidence (uncorroborated and in fact fictitious) only was that I had telephoned Radler and asked if there would be a non-competition payment in respect of the Forum and Paxton transactions, which if true, would not have been improper, much less sophisticated planning for a crime. This enabled her then while rejecting quite emphatically the government’s attempted dismissal of my good conduct while in prison still to have enough enhancement points to send me back. She declared that I was “a better person” as a result of having been sent to prison. I took this as a somewhat self-serving comment by her, auto-felicitation for having sent me there in the first place. But I believe that it is true, and that the experience of being a prisoner conferred on me some generally welcome, increased humility and a broader appreciation of the lot of disadvantaged people. Certainly, without understanding why I had been convicted and imprisoned at all, as I had not committed a crime, I tried, as a principle of my religious beliefs, to extract something useful from the experience.
Judge St. Eve thanked me for my comments and reduced the sentence from 78 to 42 months, which after the good time reduction and crediting my 29 months already served, was a sentence of an additional seven months and three weeks. Unfortunately, Barbara thought that she was sentencing me to another 42 months, which she could have done, though it would have been very severe, and she fainted, falling sideways on the front bench of the court. I heard the commotion, but assumed that it was reporters rushing out to file that I would be returning to prison. Barbara was revived by people near her and helped from the room to the cramped holding room where we had eaten our lunch during the trial. When I arrived, some very pleasant and professional members of the Chicago Fire Department were just completing their observations that she had not suffered a coronary but only a fainting spell, due to momentary bradycardia. The judge also ordered, finally, the return to me of the $5.5 million plus interest still owing from the seizure of the proceeds of the condominium sale in New York six years before. We returned to the hotel and the next day to New York.
The judge robotically pretended that there were incontestable convictions in the case and declared that “I scratch my head that you did this,” although by now nothing could be clearer than that I had not done it. But, as with the father of the narrator in Brideshead Revisited, fixated on little fictions, the charade had to be seen out to the end. And as if relieved to be at the end, the judge stood to say “The court wishes you well, Mr. Black,” and then sped from the room. I don’t think she believed any of it at the weary end of the long case (any more than the programmed government witnesses had), but was committed to the script, and some of counsel thought she might still imagine I was guilty of something. There was a brief, concerted media attempt to pretend Barbara was medically in extremis, but, as with so much else, we overcame that.
Of course, though a disappointment, after so many, it was not a surprise and there finally was an end in sight, and my financial resources, from one source and another, were accumulating. There would be the vexatious nonsense in Campbell’s Posnerian, Red Queen court to deal with and a few other legal harassments and opportunities (including the delectable prospect of the libel suit against Bower), but after the tempests of the last eight years, these would not be too challenging. I was pushing forward with a number of business relaunch projects, and also another book, that I had long researched and began writing just before the end of 2010. This was my strategic history of the United States, almost certainly the last serious historical writing effort I will commit to this country. I will finish a draft of it before returning to custody although the bibliography will probably have to be furnished later by Internet, as most of my sources were shipped back to Toronto. The idea for the book arose from my lectures on U.S. history to rather sophisticated audiences of lawyers and former political activists in prison.
This is no place for a synopsis of it, but it starts with the genius of the colonial leaders, especially Benjamin Franklin, encouraging the British to evict the French from North America, and then persuading the French in helping to evict the British from America, and goes in fairly clear stages up to the end of the Cold War. It is a great story of a great nation, now in decline, but not necessarily or even probably irreversibly so, and fortunate, at least, that its decline coincides with the Spenglerian collapse of Western Europe, Russia, and Japan; while China and India, the fashionable coming powers, each has nearly 900 million peasants living as they did 3,000 years ago.
Even at this late stage, the imperishable animosity of frustrated officialdom abides. A security provision has been invoked to prevent me completing my sentence at Coleman Prison, because I might supposedly be a physical threat to the two correctional managers there who gave false affidavits against me. In that now so outworn Canadian branch-plant reflex, there have been challenges to my suitability as one of their honorees, because of this American pseudo-legal charade. It is often hard to believe that these cowardly ambushes will ever end.
As I conceded in Chapter Five, I had had both the commendable and sinful versions of pride at the onset of these events, have tried to retain the first, and have almost scourgingly confessed and repented the second. In the jungle of large competing beasts where I have been, what happens generally reflects the correlation of forces and sagacity of the combatants and is usually what should happen by laws of that world. I had an haughty spirit, though some of it was optimism and inexperience. I fell, and perhaps my downfall was partially deserved. But the heavy punishment I have received for crimes I did not commit was not deserved, though the chastisement has been educational. Soon it will be on to pastures new, and this terrible American midnight will swiftly fade away. I’m still here, and in all respects I still care about, I will be back, soon.
New York, New York, July 31, 2011