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?
The Supreme Court last week narrowed the scope of the honest services law, which makes it fraud to “deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” The law was used to convict everyone from lobbyist Jack Abramoff (out of prison and working at a pizzeria of all places), to U.S. Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana (who hid $90,000 in his freezer of all places.)
The honest services law was also used to convict several of our inductees — including Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and Conrad Black, both of whom had their cases reviewed and sent back to the lower courts. In its ruling, the Supreme Court deemed the honest services law unconstitutionally vague and limited its scope to bribes and kickbacks. While Skilling and Black certainly used unsavory methods to line their pockets, it’s up to lower courts to decide whether some or all of their charges should be dropped.
So how will this play out? There’s been a lot of buzz about the wisdom of the court’s decision; a former U.S. attorney general described it to NPR as a “real cutback,” while an editorial in The Washington Post noted that the law was unclear and imprecise and “deserved to be struck down.”
Beyond the impact of the court’s ruling on future cases of gross misconduct (the honest-services law has been widely described as a favored tool of prosecutors), people are wondering what this means for Skilling, Black, and others.
Skilling, who was convicted on 19 counts, is unlikely to be “home free” even if his honest-services charge is dropped, noted a lawyer on a Wall Street Journal blog. As for Black, the high court agreed that his jury was given improper instructions to determine whether he was guilty of fraud. Black’s lawyer plans to seek bail, reports the Chicago Tribune. But, like Skilling, he was convicted on other charges; there’s the little matter of obstruction of justice — the 13 boxes of evidence that Black was caught on tape removing from his office.
What do you think of the ruling? Do you think it was too vague and used too freely (even to ensnare crooks)? Or do you think the Supreme Court has dealt a serious blow to the prosecution of the greedy and corrupt? Weigh in with a comment!
The twisty manipulations of a con artist can make for a great movie plot. It can be fun to watch a cinematic smooth talker reel in his victim, or scramble to keep up appearances. Like the characters in this Hall of Infamy, these con artists can be charming, extravagant, and unscrupulous. Their lies can seem so blatant to us, the audience who’s at a safe distance and watching the drama unfold. We can’t believe their victims don’t see what happening; it’s so obvious, we say (just as we sometimes do after learning of a real-life con or fraud).
What’s your favorite movie about con artists? Here are a few that came to mind — but feel free to add your favorite in the comments:
House of Games (1987): The plot of House of Games (director David Mamet’s first film) is about as twisty as they come. The tag line in the trailer says it all: “In the House of Games, there’s no one you can trust…not even yourself.”
The Sting (1973): Set in 1930s Chicago, The Sting stars a terrific pair: Paul Newman and Robert Redford. This is a classic that deserved each one of the seven Academy Awards that it earned.
Catch Me if You Can (2002): Based on the true life story of Frank Abagnale, Jr., this film follows Leonardo DiCaprio as he writes one bad check after another, passes himself off as a pilot, doctor, and a lawyer, and tries to elude the FBI agent determined to catch him.
Wall Street (1987): “Greed is good,” says the scheming stockbroker played by Michael Douglas. That character, Gordon Gekko, was a composite of several real people, including Ivan Boesky. Oliver Stone has directed a sequel about the 2008 crash, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, set for release in September 2010.
What else? Let’s grow this con artist movie list; after all, they’re better to watch on screen than to actually know….
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