Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ papers flung on the table, Monte’s offer was rejected. Twisting the screw, Anderson applied to the Cleveland court for an order preventing the bid. Black was so exposed, Anderson reasoned, that any shot was guaranteed a hit. In his claim, Black was accused of ‘fraud and racketeering’ because he and Norcen had submitted false information to the SEC.

      The counterattack surprised Black. Lawyers representing Hanna unexpectedly invaded Norcen’s headquarters. Their trawl of documents produced the board minutes of 9 September 1981, describing Black’s ‘ultimate purpose’ to take over Hanna. Anderson’s lawyers were thrilled. It was ‘like a grenade with the pin pulled’, admitted Black.²⁵ Black’s deception broke the US Securities Act and exposed him to prosecution. Hanna’s share price plummeted from $74 to $26.

      Black’s cabal had been caught red-handed. ‘Bill, you dumb idiot,’ Black screamed at Kilbourne, Norcen’s company secretary, at an emergency meeting of his fellow directors. ‘Why did you put that in the minutes?’ ‘Horseshit,’ replied Kilbourne. ‘That’s what you said at the meeting. You signed it. You should have read it.’ Black calmed down. The thrill for his partners was watching ‘such a bright guy at work’. After some thought, Black fashioned his response: ‘I’ll say, “I’m innocent. This is ridiculous. This is a misunderstanding, a technicality.”’ His audience were impressed by his apparent calm under fire. Black the performer always conjured up a mask of sublime assurance of success.

      The threat from America coincided with mixed fortunes in Canada. The shuffling of assets at Argus had not ceased. To avoid tax and to marginalise the minority shareholders, Black was constantly reorganising his companies. The complexity of the changes provoked fears among shareholders that Argus’s money was disappearing into other companies in which the group had an interest, including Hollinger, a mining company, or that Argus was heading for bankruptcy.²⁶ Those fears were compounded by Black’s self-aggrandisement. In 1982 Argus earned profits of C$7.6 million, but nearly C$2 million was spent on the directors and their expenses. The generosity to himself and his associates was part of Black’s calculated plan to ensure that everyone would ‘remain friends’.²⁷ Protestors found their voices drowned out. The company’s annual general meeting on 26 May 1982 lasted fourteen minutes – one minute longer, Black was disappointed to note, than Bud McDougald’s record.

      Inspired by Napoleon, Black’s doctrine – kill or be killed – was deployed in self-justification and self-defence. Contemptuous of his critics, he had been flattered by featuring in a television series as a member of the Canadian establishment; and by Andy Warhol’s visit to Toronto, where Black had commissioned him to paint his portrait. The decisive accolade was his coronation as Canada’s ‘Establishment Man’ by Peter Newman, the editor of the weekly Maclean’s magazine, who promoted ‘Canada’s leading capitalist’ as the personification of the Conservatives’ rebirth, with brains. Others reflected that Newman could more accurately have pronounced Black as the anti-establishment man.

      Emboldened by his glorification in Toronto, Black repelled the questions hurled by American lawyers and SEC officials with stubborn denials of any blame. ‘I relied,’ he told his questioners, ‘on Norcen’s overworked company secretary to record accurate minutes of the board meeting, and he made a complete mistake because he had wrongly surmised that a take-over was intended.’ The directors’ discussion, he continued, was ‘hypothetical’. Challenged that he signed the board minutes as accurate, Black replied, ‘I signed the minutes without reading that part of it.’²⁸ To outwit his accusers he relied on his confident mastery of English, a parade of the power of his memory and a loquacious reinterpretation of the facts. To friends, however, he expressed terror. ‘They’re out to get me,’ he railed to Peter White. Black was humiliated by what he conceded was ‘a mess’.²⁹ To his good fortune, the Americans did not interview Fred Eaton. ‘I was at the meeting,’ he told Black, ‘and the minutes were accurate.’ ‘Well,’ replied Black, ‘we’d better watch ourselves in the future.’

      In the weeks before the trial was due to begin in Cleveland, Bob Anderson’s lawyers were publicly vilifying Black, with wild allegations – which he robustly denied – that he was a criminal, a racketeer and more besides. Over four days of cross-examination in a packed court in early May 1982, he defiantly denied his accusers’ explanation of all the events. At the end of his testimony he returned to Toronto convinced that Judge John Manos would accept his interpretation. Denying the truth and rewriting history had been a tool of the world’s greatest leaders – dictators and democrats alike. To survive and succeed, Black adopted their doctrine.

      On 13 May Black was entertaining Toronto’s establishment at Hollinger’s annual dinner. Judge Manos’s judgement was still awaited. In the middle of the evening a messenger whispered to Black that Canadian police had started a criminal investigation of himself and his lawyers for conspiring to defraud Argus’s shareholders. Black knew precisely what had aroused police suspicion: Norcen’s inaccurate offer on 16 October 1980 to buy back its own shares. The circular to shareholders, signed by Black, stated that he could not envisage any new circumstances which could influence the share price. At that precise moment, he had been planning his bid for Hanna. Issuing misinformation could be a criminal offence. By the end of the dinner Black had formulated his defence. He had become, he would claim, the target of a conspiracy between his rivals, Canadian politicians and the police. He would denigrate the investigation as an ‘Orwellian drama’ and ‘a charade’, because the legal case was ‘too fatuous and preposterous’ to merit any discussion.³⁰ Finally, he would castigate the familiar motives of his critics: the police investigation, he would say, reflected ‘the destructive complex of envy at its most ignorant and visceral’; his enemies were ‘manipulating’ the system by ‘a smear job’. Creating an aura of aloofness, he walked from the dinner telling those enquiring about his fate, ‘There is no evidence. There is absolutely nothing.’ His forceful indignation was intended to suffocate doubters and to confirm his admirers in their belief of his innocence. His last word, he persuaded himself, had silenced his questioners.

      Unlike in America, Black personally knew those involved in the investigations in Toronto, and understood the regulators’ frailties. ‘I’ll talk to the Attorney General,’ he announced. Just hours after the dinner he was sitting in the office of Roy McMurtry, Ontario’s Attorney General. The politician met Black without any officials, even those directing the investigation. In his quiet, mellifluous manner, Black cast blame on a range of people, including even the future Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, at that time a rising politician in Ottawa and a director of Hanna. ‘The powder trail from this trumped-up charade of an investigation leads straight to Brian’s door,’ Black told the Attorney General.³¹ ‘He was far enough along in the chain that generated the Norcen investigation that his fingerprints wouldn’t be on the knife.’³² In his quiet tirade, Black made a series of allegations against politicians, law officers and the police – which they in turn would describe as figments of his fertile imagination. Over the next days, McMurtry and the police resisted Black’s pressure to stop the investigation.

      The reality check was Judge Manos’s decision. On 11 June 1982 he found against Black, declaring that Norcen had committed ‘manipulative violations’. ‘[Black’s] construction of the record,’ declared the judge, ‘is strained and unpersuasive.’ The evidence, he continued, ‘established conclusively’ that the take-over had been contemplated at the board meeting on 9 September 1981, ‘if not earlier’. Black was tarred as unreliable. Inevitably, he was terrified. There could be severe repercussions in Canada, including a photograph of him being arrested in handcuffs. He regularly called his lawyer Peter Atkinson СКАЧАТЬ