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       PREFACE

      Conrad Black’s email arrived at 1.15 a.m. on 1 April 2006, April Fool’s Day in London. Black, whom I had known since the mid-1980s, was well aware of this book’s progress, and said he had been contacted by many of his and his wife’s acquaintances, seeking his advice as to whether they should talk to me. His response was nothing if not graphic:

      Dear Tom,

       Many people have contacted Barbara and me asking if they should talk with you. Our usual response is that you have made it clear that you consider this whole matter a heart-warming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system, have been ostracised; and largely impoverished, and that I am on my way to the prison cell where I belong. It is the false rise and well-deserved downfall of crooked charlatans; a variant on your treatments of Maxwell, Fayed, and Rowland. You have expressed essentially this view many times that have been reported to me.

      He asked me to prove that I was not writing ‘a pompous, defamatory celebration of the supposed demise of people you personally dislike’. In justification of his indignation, and keen that I should understand his innocence, he continued:

       The rough facts are that I am an honest businessman; the chances of my committing an illegality are less than zero, this will be clear when my accusers have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of innocent people and not just manipulate the agencies of the US and Canadian governments to act on the pre-emptive presumption of guilt and conduct a prolonged assassination of careers and reputations.

      Conrad Black believes that he is the victim of political and personal prejudice. He has damned those seeking ‘a big scalp (mine)’, and believes his persecutors first sought his social ostracism and bankruptcy, and later destroyed his ‘fine company’. Under his ownership, he commented with some reason in his second email during the night, the two Telegraph newspapers in London were better ‘compared to what preceded and followed us’. In his opinion, the only victims of his personal and corporate downfall were the creators of a successful enterprise. Other than himself, he argued, no one lost money – shareholders, traders or pensioners. His critics and his American prosecutor contest that claim.

      Convinced of his acquittal, Black pledged himself to ‘turn the tables on our oppressors’. He would wreak vengeance upon those responsible for his demise: ‘We will bring this entire, gigantic, malicious persecution down around the ears of its authors.’ He was, he wrote later that night, proud of his robustness. Three years after the news of his predicament emerged, and one year before his trial, he observed that no one could deny that ‘despite my wildly applauded setback I am completely undaunted, and that I am not a tight-lipped source of “no comment”’. Indeed, his high-profile appearances around Toronto had become the stuff of gossip.

      In another email during that night, Conrad Black keenly anticipated the stardom that he would achieve at his trial, which was due to start in Chicago in March 2007:

       My trial will be timely; Thermidor will have dawned, and legally responsible capitalism will survive, like Talleyrand and Fouché.

      He concluded:

       I promise a spectacular trial …

       Regards, CONRAD BLACK.

      Conrad Black’s life story is not the familiar

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