Friends and Enemies by Barbara Amiel

Author:Barbara Amiel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

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In the first couple of weeks of November, there was an eerie lacuna of uncertainty. On the sixteenth, Conrad set out from our apartment for Hollinger’s offices on Fifth Avenue to discuss “a way forward.” Hot coals or ground glass must have been something akin to the emotional pain he felt walking across the marble-floored lobby of the offices he had leased at a knockdown price from Alfred Taubman. On arrival, he went into his office—just days before his desk was expropriated.

The way forward turned out to be a greased chute to a pit full of snakes. Rather than the expected informal meeting, Conrad faced a well-rehearsed special committee attended by their counsel Richard Breeden. This was the very first time Conrad had met him. Conrad sat, nominally, as chairman at the head of the table, as Breeden coached what essentially was the committee of public safety to sentence Conrad to the guillotine. When the meeting was over—after continuing the next day—Conrad had been forced to “temporarily” resign. He should have gone into that meeting as any American business executive in the aftermath of the formation of a special committee would have: with a legal team of his own and possibly two fully armed security men.

“What’s Breeden like?” I asked Conrad.

“He looks like one of Beria’s men,” he said, referring to the chief of Stalin’s secret police.

“Dead face? No twitch as they sentenced you?”

“I think we can make a deal,” said my ever-optimistic husband.

Over, I thought, we’re toast—not because I was a bloody Cassandra doomed to be right and never heard, but when you’re standing back watching and not sweating over the heavy lifting, you see patterns.

My husband is not a stupid man. But the ambush was so unexpected that he didn’t grasp Breeden’s intentions. I shudder to say it—Anne Frank, forgive me—but Conrad still believed that human beings were good at heart, or if not quite that, certainly with a measure of decency. With no proper lawyer, he signed an agreement thinking it would protect both the ordinary shareholders and his rights as chief executive and controlling shareholder of the company he had built. I watched as, within a week, six of the eight points protecting him were violated, ashes in our eyes and mouth.

Conrad’s “temporary” resignation was met with crescendos of jubilation. Glorious financial times ahead for Hollinger were predicted. Conrad’s surname became a running metaphor: “Black Days at Hollinger,” “Blackouts at Hollinger,” “Conrad’s Black Eye,” “A Black in the Red.” Since there is effectively no libel law in America, anything could be and was said about us. Time magazine, on December 1, 2003, reported that “Hollinger announced last week that an internal inquiry had uncovered $32 million in questionable payments, including $7.2 million directly to Black and $16.55 million to Hollinger’s Canadian parent company. None of these payments were authorized by the board or the relevant committees.”

On the night Conrad’s resignation was made public, I watched a BBC reporter on CNN stand outside Hollinger’s offices

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