Legal News

Conrad Black?s Notes from the Underground

By Nathan Koppel

Former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black enters the Chicago federal courthouse, June 30, 2006 (Credit: Associated Press/Spencer Green)

Not long ago, we posted on an interview given by Dennis Kozlowski, he of Tyco fame, from his prison.

Perhaps Koz’s remarks inspired fallen media baron Conrad Black. Remember him? He and three other former Hollinger International executives — Peter Atkinson, John Boultbee and Mark Kipnis — were found guilty last year of defrauding the newspaper company out of millions of dollars. The defendants allegedly caused Hollinger, which now goes by Sun-Times Media Group, to make false filings with the SEC for “private gain.”

On Sunday, Black surfaced, sort of, in a letter from jail published in London’s The Sunday Times. (HT: White Collar Crime Prof Blog.)

Mr. Black is doing time at the Coleman Federal Correction Complex, a low security facility about 50 miles northwest of Orlando. (If any readers are looking for a job in federal government, Coleman evidently is in “urgent need of correctional officers to fill vacant positions.”)

Black’s letter begins:

I write to you from a US federal prison. It is far from a country club or even a regimental health spa. I work quite hard but fulfillingly, teaching English and the history of the United States to some of my co-residents. There is practically unlimited access to e-mails and the media and plenty of time for visitors.

Many of the other co-residents are quite interesting and affable, often in a Damon Runyon way, and the regime is not uncivilised. In eight months here there has not been the slightest unpleasantness with anyone. It is a little like going back to boarding school, which I somewhat enjoyed nearly 50 years ago (before being expelled for insubordination).

Coleman Federal doesn’t sound half bad, but, in the rest of the letter, Conrad doesn’t do much to ingratiate himself with his captors.

US federal prosecutors, almost all of whom would be disbarred for their antics if they were in Britain or Canada, win more than 90% of their cases thanks to the withering of the constitutional guarantees of due process – that is, the grand jury as an assurance against capricious prosecution . . .

The US is now a carceral state that imprisons eight to 12 times more people (2.5m) per capita than the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Japan. US justice has become a command economy based on the avarice of private prison companies, a gigantic prison service industry and politically influential correctional officers’ unions that agitate for an unlimited increase in the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences.

There is no parole in the federal system, so maybe Black doesn’t have much to lose. Still, if the Law Blog were to ever serve time ─ perish the thought ─ we think we’d be more inclined to keep our head down as far as possible.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 24, 2008 (boomark / email).