Fallen media mogul Conrad Black was today sentenced to serve between 6.5 and 8 years years in a US jail, following his conviction earlier this year for embezzeling millions of dollars from his Hollinger media empire.
The disgraced peer, who could have faced 24 years in prison, is expected to appeal the sentence.
Chicago judge Amy St Eve had come under pressure to impose a longer term in the light of Black’s lack of remorse and his repeated attacks on the US judicial system.
The fallen media tycoon has repeatedly denied his guilt, dismissing the US government’s case against him as “rubbish”.
A.
Five gets you ten he tries to petition the Canadian government to do a deal where he serves his time in a Canadian jail. If so, I’d give you even odds that Stephen Effing Harper reads the way the wind is blowing here and tells him something along the lines of, “You aren’t a citizen anymore, bub, sucks to be you.”
That Canadian citizenship he had was something to be spat on when it was an obstacle to getting that pocket-borough peerage he wanted, but since then, every time getting his Canadian passport back has looked like a win for him, he’s been whining to the government about how much hewaaaants it, daddy… You can perfectly understand Black’s mentality if you picture him as a spoiled-rotten three year-old howling his outrage at his parents because his ice cream is in the dirt. If he were any more self-centred, he’d become the world’s first human neutron star.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Terrible cliche, but it fits in this case. Anyway, it will give him lots of time to work on his next book.
What makes me crazy is he goes to prison for swindling the shareholders. But there a lot of “victims” who likely feel very little sense of justice: the reporters and others at his papers who were laid off so shareholders could keep making more money, as well as the employees left behind to pick up the slack.