In this article: Latest developments | Recap | Notebook

Latest developments:

Prosecutor Julie Ruder mounted a spirited attack on Conrad Black in Chicago on Monday, telling the jury in closing arguments that the accused had conspired to “take a slice of their company’s profits,” creating “a phony paper trail to make their actions appear legitimate.”

"We are not here because somebody made a mistake," Ruder said. "We are not here because someone forgot to dot i's or cross t's. We are not here because someone was late with a disclosure.

"We are here because five men - these four defendants and David Radler - systematically stole $60-million. They checked their fiduciary duty at the door."

Ruder stressed the fact that the defendants received individual non-compete payments that had not been requested by the buyers of Hollinger International’s newspapers

"There is no justification for taking that money away from the shareholders and giving it to the Hollinger executives," she said. "It is your job to expose the cover story for what it is."

Black reportedly showed no emotion as Ruder charged that he and Radler had worked together closely in their plan to defraud shareholders. "Mr. Black and Mr. Radler worked together on everything," she said. "You will review memos upon memos upon memos that will corroborate everything [Radler] said."

A juror noted for her diligent note-taking was absent from Monday’s proceedings for reasons unknown, leaving 12 jurors and three alternates.

Recap:

The prosecution will begin making its closing arguments today in the Chicago trial of Conrad Black and three other former Hollinger International executives.

Julie Ruder, a young attorney who has proven to be one of the most effective lawyers on the prosecution team, will lead closing arguments. She is expected to stress to jurors that the non-compete payments to Black and his co-defendants central to the government’s case were inserted into the agreements between Hollinger International and the buyers of Hollinger newspapers against the wishes of the buyers.

Black and Peter Atkinson, Jack Boultbee and former Hollinger general counsel Mark Kipnis are charged with fraud, racketeering and tax evasion.

Black is also charged with obstruction of justice.

The defence is expected to take aim at the prosecution’s opening statements, which promised to paint the defendants as criminals in a way most observers agree the government has failed to do.

Defence lawyers will likely also take issue with the notion that there is anything untoward about non-compete payments, which are common in the media industry, and will focus on the unreliability of the prosecution’s star witness, David Radler. Observers note that much of Radler’s testimony is uncorroborated.

The prosecution is expected to complete its arguments today, with lawyers for each of the four defendants expected to take the rest of the week to sum up their case to jurors.

Notebook:

• “A spokeswoman for Sun-Times Media Group declined to comment on the prospect that Black might return,” the Chicago Tribune dryly reports. Higher-ups are apparently commenting plenty behind the scenes, however, especially since Black himself has indicated his interest - if only out of spite - in regaining control of the company that was Hollinger International.
  
  “[W]ithout our judicial success there is no hope that the shareholders, who have been so severely damaged since we left, will not see their interests exterminated completely," he wrote in a prototypical e-mail(and we believe he means it).
  
  "The company is so negative against him, it would be quite a fight," says Wayne State University law professor Peter Henning. Well, precisely.

• The Globe and Mail’s Paul Waldie profiles prosecutor Julie Ruder, who is leading the government’s closing arguments despite having “barely four years experience as a prosecutor and [being] about half Lord Black's age.”
  
  "The way I've described it is that I try to help and make things safer for him, and there are people who do bad things," Ruder said in a recent interview, describing how she explains her job to her young son. "So my job is to find out who did the bad thing and go to court."(Thanks to Ms. Ruder, the streets of Gotham may soon be safe from the villainous Press Baron!)

• Also in the Globe, Judith Timson claims she’s “been trying to figure [Barbara Amiel] out for more than 25 years.” She suggests Amiel is still attracting “new fans, who marvelled pretrial at the couple's concerted(and choreographed)efforts to appear serenely in Toronto society as the maelstrom approached. They now think she has been brave, loving and loyal, that she has held her head high during her husband's trial.”

• Still in the organ of record, Deirdre Kelly provides a fulsome account of Gore Vidal’s recent appearance at North Toronto restaurant Grano’s speakers series, and the “extempore diatribe [he] hurled at Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel.” While many high-society types - with names like Thorsell and Frum - “squirmed,” Kelly took note of several others chortling at the Blacks’ expense: David Peterson, John Polanyi, Moses Znaimer and Margaret MacMillan, among others.

• Rounding out the Globe's weekend Blackstravaganza, Ian Brown laments the whittling away of the national vocabulary, casting Black as a sort of throwback to a time when everyone presumably knew what “dubiety” and “gasconading” meant.
  
  "There may be two Blacks," says University of Toronto psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff. "There's obviously the businessman. And then there's the other guy, who is genuinely excited by history and by words and by facts. Oddly, I think the businessman would like most to be admired as the writer and thinker he is."
  
  “That would explain the endless e-mails,” quips Brown. May they never end.

• The Prince George Citizen’s Rodney Venis chips in with a rather entertaining précis of proceedings thus far. He’s calling it for the defence at this point, but says “[e]ven if he's convicted, he'll be the corporate elite's very own martyr, the innocent noble who was led to the guillotine by the jabbering envy of the shrieking proletariat. If he's acquitted, vindicated - oh Lord, no one will ever hear the end of it.”

• The Toronto Sun’s Peter Worthington thinks it improbable that Black won’t be convicted of something, but can’t for the life of him figure out what. “[T]he question begs why the U.S. government was so insistent on pursuing Conrad Black in a vindictive way that invoked comparisons with a vendetta,” he writes. “Can the answer be as simple as envy, or resentment, or that he's deemed arrogant, or is a British Lord, or that he uses exotic words and dares to write long books about U.S. presidents?

• On her blog, Diane Francis deems it “very likely” that Black will end up in an orange jumpsuit, thanks in most part to Judge Amy St. Eve. “By far her most important function will be her instruction to the jury before they retire to decided Lord Black’s fate, along with the other accused executives,” she writes. Whatever happens, Francis insists that Black “will have gotten a fair trial from jurors schooled by the tough cookie on the bench.”

• “I say not guilty for all defendants on all counts,” a “shy and diffident” attorney and analyst named Steven Skurka declares.

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