Conrad Black, a Hall of Infamy inductee, was released on bond from federal prison a few weeks ago. The judge needs time to decide whether to overturn his 2007 conviction, based on a Supreme Court decision to limit the scope of the fraud law used against him.
An attorney who knows about these things told Reuters that it’s doubtful Black will end up back behind bars. For now, he can’t leave the continental U.S. and, even if he’s cleared of the fraud charges, he still faces a slew of civil suits. And then there’s the $71 million the IRS is looking to him for cough up in unpaid taxes.
If you’re wondering whether Lord Black of Crossharbour learned anything during his nearly two years of incarceration, you’re in luck. He wrote about his prison education for “National Post,” a Canadian newspaper. The first clue about his attitude is far from buried. In the first paragraph, he says he would “never dream of committing a crime in a thousand years.”
Really? Along with fraud, he was charged with obstruction of justice for trying to sneak 13 boxes of evidence out of his office. If he’s so innocent-minded that he wouldn’t even dream of wrongdoing, what exactly was in those boxes?
He goes on to describe prison life: phone calls to his wife, crossword puzzles and tutoring fellow inmates. I must admit that I was surprised by the company he kept in the low-security wing of Coleman Federal Prison in Florida. Here, Black lists out the men who came to bid him farewell:
“The Mafiosi, the Colombian drug dealers, (including a senator with whom I had a special greeting as a fellow member of a parliamentary upper house), the American drug dealers, high and low, black, white, and Hispanic; the alleged swindlers, hackers, pornographers, credit card fraudsters, bank robbers, and even an accomplished airplane thief; the rehabilitated and unregenerate, the innocent and the guilty, and in almost all cases the grossly over-sentenced…”
Black lays out the symptoms and outcomes of that gross over-sentencing. He describes racial inequity and the failures of U.S. drug policy and the public defender system. He describes prisoners as “an ostracized, voiceless legion of the walking dead; they are no one’s constituency.”
Maybe he’s found a new calling. Maybe he’ll dedicate the remainder of his days to trying to fix a broken system, or contribute his smarts and funds in some way to organizations like The Sentencing Project. I’m not sure this will happen – and I know it’s not a path he would have ever chosen or expected to find himself traveling.
But the same can be said of the post-prison lives of several of our inductees. Richard Whitney went from king of Wall Street to manager of a dairy farm. After serving time for his precocious con artistry, Barry Minkow became an evangelical minister and fraud investigator. So, Conrad Black, now what?
Black got thrown of Upper Canada College when he was 17 for selling stolen exams – he then went on to plunder a pension plan.
Send him back for “insights”.