"Mr. Black, you have committed very serious crimes," began Judge Amy St. Eve. "Mr. Black, you have violated your duty to Hollinger International and its shareholders . . . In the United States, Mr. Black, there is equal justice under the law . . ."

"Mr. Black" this, "Mr. Black" that. I don't recall quite such ostentatious mistering when Her Honour, later that afternoon, sentenced the star perp's three co-conspirators. But for the Rt. Hon. the Lord Black of Crossharbour, OC, PC, standing before her like any other prisoner, Judge St. Eve seemed at pains to emphasize that foreign baubles from distant potentates counted for naught in the Northern District of Illinois — except insofar as their irrelevance underlined how far he'd fallen. "I frankly cannot understand," she told him, "how somebody of your stature — on top of the media empire that you were on top of — could engage in the conduct that you engaged in, and put everything at risk, including your reputation and your integrity."

For the Count of Monte Cristo, the cell door slammed instantly. For the Baron of Crossharbour, confinement has been gradual but remorseless. First came the sale of the Park Avenue apartment, then the abandonment of his beloved London, the retreat to Toronto, his trial in Chicago, a period under "resort arrest" (as a friend of mine put it) in Palm Beach, and beginning on March 3 six years in federal prison in Coleman, Fla. For his enemies, the shrivelling of his life is almost complete. Way back at the end of last winter, when the trial began, a few of us looked at the big guy in the nondescript windowless room on the 12th floor of the Everett Dirksen federal building and remarked that simply appearing in court diminishes a man. For the sentencing, with the snows of a new winter already on the ground, Conrad Black seemed even more cut off from the world he knew. His latest lawyer, Jeffrey Steinback, read out virtually the entire transcript from both Conrad's appearance on the CBC's The Rick Mercer Report and a less congenial quizzing by the BBC's John Humphrys, and submitted letters on his client's behalf from Elton John, Rush Limbaugh and Brian Mulroney. But, exotic as these turns were to the court stenographer, they rang like testimonials from members of a club you'll never again belong to. In his syndicated column, William F. Buckley, Jr., Conrad's old pal and my boss at America's National Review, wrote that, along with hundreds of others, he'd been asked by the defence team to pen a few words in mitigation of the convicted man's sentence, and that this had been "a painful commission for friends of Conrad Black." For many south of the border, it seemed less "painful" than distasteful: a ruined man who doesn't have the good grace to cease tugging at your sleeve and bugger off into obscurity.

Yet, if Conrad is smaller, so too is the crime. The usurper management at Hollinger had told shareholders they were demanding one-and-a-quarter billion dollars back from Black's "corporate kleptocracy." When the court threw out the racketeering claim, that came down to half-a-billion. By the time the criminal charges were filed, the Justice Department was alleging a heist of a mere $84 million. By the opening day of the trial, the government had reduced it to $60 million. And on Dec. 10, Conrad Black was sentenced for stealing $6.1 million — or about half-a-per-cent of what Hollinger's "special committee" was claiming at the height of its anti-Black hysteria. Hold that thought: a $6.1-million "theft" on asset sales of over three billion. If you were a realtor or car salesman, that "crime" would be called a one per cent sales commission. Instead, Black's ill-gotten booty represents about 10 per cent of what he's spent on lawyers. And God knows what percentage of what the U.S. government has spent hounding him. Or about two per cent of what his successors at Hollinger have spent investigating him.

As their case shrunk around them, the U.S. attorney's office called ever more vehemently for a long, long, loooooooong sentence. Okay, maybe the original quarter of a millennium or whatever the original charges stacked up to was no longer viable, the accused having been acquitted on three-quarters of the counts. But Eric Sussman, for the United States government, still insisted to the end that justice required Conrad Black to die in prison. At the dawn of Sentencing Day, he was relentless in his demand for the judge to throw the book at Black — preferably a really big one, like the defendant's biography of Duplessis. Why, the convicted felon had shown no remorse whatsoever for his crimes; he had demonstrated "contempt" and "disdain" for the process; and furthermore, he had had the effrontery to call the prosecutors "Nazis." Even more outrageous to prosecutor Sussman, the criminal Black, asked for his thoughts on his impending incarceration, had replied in a tone of amused ennui that frankly prison would be a bit of a bore. Reaching the heights of his peroration, the government's lead attorney began querying Conrad's alleged friendship with Sir Elton — or "Sir John," as he referred to him. "Ask yourself," he urged the judge, "does Elton John really know Conrad Black?" With so much of the mail fraud and wire fraud having gone belly up, Mr. Sussman was now reduced to gay fraud, the new federal offence of falsely claiming friendship with elderly rock knights.

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