Q. What do the Plame CIA Outing case and the Conrad Black/Hollinger International looting case happen to share in common? (Besides a cited bevy of Baker Botts civil lawyers defending the defendents, you mean?)
A. A special US Attoney and well-known prosecutor prosecuting, named Patrick Fitzgerald.
But for more about that, see the
next hurrah blurb at the last link.
The
Conrad Black story is back in the news, or more accurately, back on the law blogs this weekend, but it all may quickly get a lot more interesting for the US Prosecutor Team's case in the next few months.
The roving spy camera wants to know:
What could be in those 13 boxes, Lord Black? I bet Richard Perle (see below) might, for reasons all his own, love a memory refresher, as well.
Over at the
WSJ law blog: March 31, 2006, 8:30 am
Conrad Black Update: Prosecutors Win Spat Over DocumentsPosted by Peter Lattman
(....)
Black, the former chairman of newspaper company Hollinger International, was indicted last year on fraud and racketeering charges. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is scheduled to face trial in March 2007.
(....)
Federal prosecutors’ efforts to subpoena documents in Black’s Toronto office were held up by a joint U.S.-Canadian agreement that makes it difficult to exercise a U.S. subpoena in Canada. But once the prosecutors learned that Black’s civil lawyers — Baker Botts — had shipped copies of the Toronto papers to their Washington, D.C., office, they issued a subpoena for those documents, which Judge St. Eve approved yesterday.
more:
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2006/03/31/conrad-black-update-prosecutors-win-spat-over-documents/And at
White Collar Crime: April 1, 2006
Lord Black Learns the Hard Way that Documents Don't Get Much ProtectionLord Conrad Black lost his fight to keep a set of documents from being subpoenaed by federal prosecutors, and the decision provides a lesson that great care must be taken with such materials if you don't want the government to get its hands on them. Before his indictment on fraud and RICO charges related to allegations of looting Hollinger International, the media company he controlled while serving as chairman and CEO, the SEC issued a subpoena for documents for the records of Ravelston Corp., Black's holding company in Toronto.
After receiving the subpoena, a surveillance camera caught Black taking thirteen boxes of documents from the company's offices, and a Canadian court ordered that they be returned. The SEC has been unsuccessful in enforcing its subpoena for the documents in Canada, but federal prosecutors had more luck when they learned that a copy of the documents were sent to one of Black's law firms in the United States.
(snip)
If the documents are incriminating, and Black's attempt to remove them indicates that they may be, then providing them to U.S. counsel may have been a strategic mistake. (ph)
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/whitecollarcrime_blog/2006/04/lord_black_lear.htmlThe recent backround (nov/dec 2005):
You can read the indictment here (pdf 75 pages):
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
EASTERN DIVISION UNITED STATES OF AMERICA No. 05 CR 727
v.
CONRAD M. BLACK,
JOHN A. BOULTBEE,
PETER Y. ATKINSON,
MARK S. KIPNIS and
THE RAVELSTON
CORPORATION LIMITED
SECOND SUPERSEDING INDICTMENT
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/indict/2005/us_v_black2.pdf (75 pages)
Here's a shorter (6 page pdf) press release of the 15 counts of indictment so far
Racketeering, obstruction of justice, money laundering, wire fraud and mail fraud.more documents at Fitzgerald's Illinois website
BUT...From (earlier) 2005, it gets better.....
Perle, Ex-Pentagon Aide, May Face SEC Suit Over Hollinger RoleMarch 23 2005 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has warned former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle that it may sue him for his role in the alleged looting of Hollinger International Inc., the Chicago-based media company once controlled by Conrad Black.
(snip)
If the SEC takes action, it would be a ``significant stigma'' for someone who has built his post-government career on a wide network of business interests, said John Coffee, a securities law professor at Columbia University School of Law in New York. The SEC, which has sharpened its scrutiny of director behavior since the 2001 collapse of the energy trader Enron Corp., could seek to bar Perle from serving as an officer or director of any public company, Coffee said.
The board at Hollinger International, publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, ousted Black in January 2004. The company later sued Black, saying in a
513-page report issued in August that he and other top executives looted the company of more than $400 million over seven years. The SEC in November sued Black, Radler and Hollinger Inc., the Toronto-based company Black used to control Hollinger International, for fraud.
(snip-- read more within all this about Perle's Trireme Partners LP (homeland-security technology venture-capital fund scheme) and how it relates to Perle's dealings on the Defense Policy Board and with the Pentagon.)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aY248MKyPfdM&refer=us If it's still not all fully coming back to you (let's just attribute it to extreme BA/Corporate Scandal Sensory Overload-- especially at this point in 2006), there was a rather incisive (dark and scathing) background piece in The Slate way back in 2004:
The Curse of Black's PerleAccording to the Hollinger report, Conrad Black and Richard Perle richly deserved each other.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, Sept. 2, 2004
Perle's dark historyThe massive report on how newspaper baron Conrad Black and his cronies destroyed Hollinger International is unusually rich and entertaining. Too bad summer is over—it's practically beach reading! Who knew that Richard Breeden, the former Securities and Exchange Commission head who headed a special investigation of Black's activities, was such an acid prose stylist? (Sample section heading: "A Corporate Kleptocracy.")
(read all)
http://www.slate.com/id/2106175/ If you'd rather read all the klepto-corporate dirt for yourself first-hand (including the section on Perle) here it is- 512 pages:
REPORT OF INVESTIGATION BY THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE
OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF HOLLINGER INTERNATIONAL INC
The rich really hate being stolen from.
I can't resist clipping just a few terse excerpts...
(....)
At the outset, the energies of many people went into building Hollinger into a major publishing enterprise. Over time, however, Hollinger went from being an expanding business to becoming a company whose sole preoccupation was generating current cash for the controlling shareholders, with no concern for building future enterprise value or wealth for all shareholders. Behind a constant stream of bombast regarding their accomplishments as self-described “proprietors,” Black and Radler made it their business to line their pockets at the expense of Hollinger almost every day, in almost every way they could devise. The Special Committee knows of few parallels to Black and Radler’s brand of self-righteous, and aggressive looting of Hollinger to the exclusion of all other concerns or interests, and irrespective of whether their actions were remotely fair to shareholders.
The Special Committee believes that the events at Hollinger were driven in large part by insatiable pressure from Black for fee income from Hollinger to prop up the highly levered corporate structure of Ravelston and HLG, and to satisfy the liquidity needs he had arising from the personal lifestyle Black and his wife had chosen to lead. The intensity of the pressure for tens of millions in cash payments to Black, irrespective of corporate performance or the fairness of transactions to shareholders, led to a series of abusive transactions in which Hollinger was a victim of Black and Radler’s ravenous appetite for cash.
(....)
Hollinger was used as a piggy bank for the Blacks, with shareholders paying for large and small expenses that would not typically be considered eligible for corporate reimbursement. As described in the Report, Hollinger bought a Challenger aircraft ($11.6 million) for Radler, and leased a Gulfstream IV (at a cost of $3 — $4 million per year) for the Blacks. Operating both of these aircraft cost the Company over $23 million from 2000 – 2003, an expensive fleet for a Company as small and poorly performing as Hollinger in those years. The jets were used for some business activities, but they were also used indiscriminately to fly the pair to and from their collections of homes without any plausible business connection.
(see all)
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/868512/000095012304010413/y01437exv99w2.htmIs Bill Jeffress in the Business of Legal Defense ... Or Telephone?
by emptywheel
I was not alone in raising an eyebrow when Scooter Libby's new defense team was announced. Ted Wells makes a lot of sense, as he is reputed to be the very very best there is. And while Jeffress is also supposed to be a top lawyer for white collar crooks, I was more interested in how small a world it is. Jeffress, of course, is Bush family consigliere James Baker's law partner at
Baker Botts. How convenient, I thought, that the Bush family mafia would have an unethical but somewhat legally protected source on Libby's defense team.
Well, it turns out that it's an even smaller world than all that.
(too see what he means- read on)
http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/11/is_bill_jeffres.html(bold and italic formatting mine)
PS- I just passed my 100 post mark. Yay...:-)
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