Conrad Black: 'I will be back'
By Leah McBride Mensching, Friday 30 November 2007 at 23:20 :: General :: #937 :: rss
Although Conrad Black is scheduled to be sentenced on federal fraud charges in Chicago in 10 days, that doesn't mean the world has seen the last of him, he told a British radio talk show Friday.
“This isn't a fall from grace and this isn't the end,” Black told Today, a BBC Radio 4 programme. “Even in the worst case I will be back.”
According to reports in the Daily Telegraph and The Times of London, Black said of his background in publishing and finance, “I think I could return to finance. I mean, this is not a difficult area to make money in.”
On the programme, Black hinted that his conviction came as a total shock. And if he goes to prison, he is “merely participating in compounding the injustice which will be the accepted fact of this case before long,” he said, according to an Editor & Publisher article. Black said that during his trial, he did not take the stand to defend himself because “it was not conceivable to any of the defendants or their counsel that we had not established well beyond reasonable doubt what we needed to achieve acquittals on every count.”
Black attacked press coverage of his trial, especially in the British media, which he described as a “false bourgeois piety and priggishness that assumes whatever an American prosecutor says is true,” according to E&P. “At least in the United States people know how their system operates and there's a degree of cynicism about this kind of thing ... This theory that it's a great rise and fall story, or some sort of Shakespearean or Greek tragedy and that I was misled by my wife and lived to extravagance – it's all nonsense.”
Black is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 10. Prosecutors have suggested they will seek a sentence between 20 and 30 years.
He was convicted in July of one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of fraud for funnelling $30 million from the parent company of the Chicago Sun-Times. Black's attorneys have filed a document stating the sentence should be for no longer than the 29 months his former lieutenant F. David Radler is expected to receive Dec. 17 during his own sentencing.




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