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ican justice.”Nor does the “legal cartel,” which encompasses counsel on both sides of the case, avoid Black’s fiery polemics: “The law is a medieval guild and the clients are the material the guild works with, like shoemakers’ leather, and usually with almost as much impersonality.” Picking back up the narrative, we find Lord Black laid low but not out of it. Intrigues against him within the corporate structure of his print empire have unseated him in America. The conspirators have U.S. government support. His redoubt in Canada is menaced. The Telegraph has been sold (at a profit). His lawyers confidently doubt any possible U.S. federal indictment. He has one last card to play. Lord Black has lined up financing to take his senior Canadian holding company private. This would leave American factions, including the antagonists, without ground to stand on. He still has a chance to get the original shareholders out with a major portion of their investment. He is assured by staffers at the Canadian regulator’s office that the negotiated sale will go through. It does not. Doomsday. Then the indictment, the trial, the conviction, the sentence. He served over 40 months in prison.
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lack, even in extremity, managed to position his public firm to at least retain for its shareholders a solid chunk of capital. Private equity would have returned a billion and half to public equity; receivership afterward, and the dismemberment in the name of the shareholders, returned close to nothing. The legal nightmare into which the struggle for corporate governance hurled the author of A Matter of Principle is engrossing, affective, and disquieting. He lays it all out brilliantly, his fiery polemics punctuated by memorable literary allusions and historical parallels. The courtroom drama is capably written, the strategies and foibles of the lawyers memorably examined. The narrative portions relating to prison round out a rather bleak estimate of American justice. The alert reader may sense some instinct for exaggeration and calibrate his own outrage accordingly. But the alert reader will also recognize that he’s read a great story.
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