Sunday November 27, 2005
Beware of an overactive ego
Shakespeare missed meeting Conrad Black by about 400 years. But he got Black\’s character dead right.
Shakespeare had the ill-fated Lord Macbeth muse upon
And falls on th\’ other…
If there is a single theme threading through Conrad Black\’s life, it is his ego. At school, he described Toronto\’s prestigious Upper Canada College as a “concentration camp.” He was expelled in 1959 for stealing examination papers and selling them to other students.
As a newspaper baron (at one point, with the world\’s third-largest empire), Black indulged in sesquipedalian pontifications. He described the journalists he employed as “ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest, and inadequately supervised.”
As ermine-robed Lord Black of Crossharbour, he spent lavishly on a lifestyle designed to show that he belonged among the aristocracy.
And that, in the end, became his downfall. Like Macbeth, he was so eager to vault onto his high horse that he went right over the top and crashed on the other side.
As the biblical Book of Proverbs understood, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
Trail of destruction
He had a long way to fall. Back in 1979, Fortune magazine dubbed Black “the boy wonder of Canadian business.”
Personally, I never understood why people admired him. From what I could see, he destroyed Massey-Ferguson, looted Dominion Stores\’ pension plan, and gutted newsrooms across Canada. He left the country poorer, while inflating his own bank account.
But few people dared say so. Conrad Black may not have invented “libel chill,” but he certainly raised it to new heights. Truth has little value if you have to go broke defending it against a battalion of high-priced lawyers.
Until now it has been hard to prove criminal wrongdoing. Black\’s management style is to control a holding company that controls other holding companies that control still other holding companies, which control companies that actually do something. Tracing fraudulent payments makes the legendary Hampton Court maze look like child\’s play.
Fortunately, someone did it. Laura Jereski, a stock analyst at Tweedie Browne & Co. and a former investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, started hounding officials at Black\’s Hollinger International media empire to find out why millions of dollars in fees had gone to the executive team, instead of to the company itself.
At one point, Black himself derisively dismissed Jereski as a “rottweiler.” But after almost a year of frustration and stonewalling, Tweedie Browne had enough evidence to demand an investigation.
Indicted for fraud
The U.S. Securities Commission brought in Richard Breeden as special consultant. This summer, Breeden delivered a 513-page report which accused Lord Black and his cronies of “aggressively looting” their companies. The report described “a myriad of schemes, fiduciary abuses and fraudulent acts that were used to transfer essentially the entire earnings output of Hollinger” into personal pockets.
Black seems to have proved Honoré de Balzac\’s famous dictum — behind every great fortune, there lies a crime.
Breeden said, “Behind a constant stream of bombast regarding their accomplishments … Black and Radler [Black\'s friend and business associate for almost 40 years] made it their business to line their pockets at the expense of Hollinger almost every day, in almost every way they could devise.”
As another British Lord, Lord Acton of Aldenham, prophesied more than 100 years before: “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Black now faces 11 counts of fraud. And the chief witness against him will be his former hatchet man, David Radler. Radler himself has already pleaded guilty to fraud, receiving a reduced sentence of 29 months in jail and a $250,000 fine in return for testifying against Black.
Commentators suggest that Radler turned against Black after Black took control of the venerable London Telegraph. Black leveraged a 30 million pound investment into 50.1 per cent control of a newspaper currently valued at around 700 million pounds.
But the Telegraph offered Black something no other acquisition had – it provided access to British society\’s upper crust.
To Radler, Black now seemed more interested in spending money on his social status than in making more money.
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Black\’s “vaulting ambition” got the better of him. He began to think he belonged in the aristocracy himself. He bought his way into the House of Lords, even though it meant renouncing his Canadian citizenship.
He dismissed Canadian ties contemptuously: “For a wide range of reasons, citizenship of Canada is not now for me competitive with that of the United Kingdom.”
Even before giving up his citizenship, he had made his priorities clear: “The reputation of Canada is not particularly great amongst American investors; [it] was not doing the valuation of our stock any good.”
As Kevin Michael Grace editorialized in Chronicles magazine, “So long, suckers.”
Many people hoped to ride to wealth and glory on Conrad Black\’s coat-tails — among them, his current wife, columnist Barbara Amiel. The British magazine Observer noted, “To understand Barbara, you must first understand that she has been very keen to be very rich for a very long time.” Amiel herself apparently told Vogue, “I have an extravagance that knows no bounds.”
But Black\’s overweening arrogance made it clear from the beginning that he cared only about himself.
When he sold Dominion Stores, then Canada\’s largest retail grocery chain, he shrugged off the plight of people losing their jobs: ““It\’s sometimes difficult for me to work myself into an absolute lachrymose fit about a work force…”
What\’s the moral of this story? A simple one. Beware of anyone whose dominant personality trait is a hyperactive ego.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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