Conrad Black by A Matter of Principle

Author:A Matter of Principle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781551993164
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2011-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

[CHAPTER TEN]

THE FACT THAT DAVID RADLER’S counsel had withdrawn from the joint defence group indicated that Anton Valukas, his lawyer, thought he could really do something with Radler in Chicago as Queen for a Day – the colloquial term for the procedure of exploring what deal a target might make with the prosecutors. I was disgusted and filled with revulsion that I had spent as long as I had in business with Radler. It was obvious that I could not trust him after the Todd Vogt affair. I should have been more suspicious of his endless grabbing for money and his disparagement of public companies. Once I had seen this, my plan was to let the private newspaper companies he had spun out of Hollinger International ripen and then trade some of my shareholdings in them for Radler’s Ravelston shares. I didn’t have the means to buy him out earlier without taking on debt I preferred to avoid. This was a mistake. Time had run out on that plan, as on much else.

Radler thought he was the sole architect of our financial success and the only one of us who had any idea how to run a business. He told anyone who would listen that I was the social face of our business while he was the real business brains. His fear, exposed by the ordeal of the legal crisis, for which he was largely responsible as head of the division where they originated, seemed to have produced a bitter and galling response that he smarmily concealed in discussion between us. I still doubted that he could promise the U.S. attorney anything useful and thought he would be back to us eventually, pretending that he had only been exploring alternatives, as Atkinson and Kipnis had. I would have to consider how to partition the private companies, disentangle our interests from his, and end the association.

WHEN WE RETURNED TO TORONTO in August 2005, David Radler’s lawyer had just given formal notice of his settlement talks with the U.S. attorney. I still couldn’t believe Radler would take the plunge, though I was well familiar with his pessimism, and nervosity. He had shown in 1986 at Dominion Stores (a derelict Argus Corporation supermarket company) that he had no staying power. Even though he had certainly not created the mess there, and had, in fact, helped to resolve it, he scurried out to Vancouver, leaving Peter White and me, on one day’s notice, to clean it up. His nerves could not take the pressure.

Having previously disparaged religion and occasionally expressed skepticism (though not in my presence; direct confrontations with me were not his métier) about my conversion to and practice of Roman Catholicism, he had become a Lubavitcher Jew. He had met the late Rabbi Schneerson in Brooklyn, the practising Lubavitcher leader. Radler shooed the press away from his office at times, claiming a prayer meeting was in progress, and told an interviewer that he considered the whole attack on us to be “Go for the Jewish guy.

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