The bigger they are, the harder they fall. And few businessmen have fallen harder than Canadian newspaper magnate Conrad Black, alias Lord Black of Crossharbour, founder and ex-chairman of Hollinger International Inc, publishers of the London Daily Telegraph, the Jerusalem Post, the Chicago Sun-Times and many lesser titles.
From hobnobbing with the queen, Margaret Thatcher, David Rockefeller and others rich and famous, Black has become - in his own words - "a social leper", shunned by people whom he used to entertain lavishly and who were once eager to be his friends.
Wrong Way does not purport to be a biography of Black: it is a riveting account by two experienced business journalists - drawn largely from court papers and the report of a special committee appointed by Hollinger Inc - of how Black's world crumbled once US shareholders began questioning the huge fees paid to his private holding company Ravelston to fund his extravagant lifestyle.
With luxuriously redecorated mansions in Toronto, London, New York and Palm Beach and access to corporate jets, chauffeur-driven luxury cars, assorted butlers, cooks and bottle-washers, Black and his free-spending second wife, the outspoken columnist Barbara Amiel, glad-handed the movers and shakers in British and American society. Some of them, such as Lord Weidenfeld, Henry Kissinger, Alfred Taubman of Sotheby's, and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, were appointed to the Hollinger board.
Black should not be regarded simply as a sybaritic press baron, however. He is also a would-be historian whose recently published biography of Franklin D Roosevelt was widely admired - until it became known that its author had spent US$8m of shareholders' money on research and the purchase of Rooseveltian memorabilia.
A charitable view of this aggressive and domineering character of unashamedly right-wing views - who nonetheless respected the independence of his editors - is that he was one more imperious founder who regarded his company as his own and failed to distinguish between his own interests and those of outside shareholders. He also ran up against asset managers on the lookout for executive excesses in the aftermath of the Tyco, WorldCom and Enron scandals.
But sympathy for Black evaporates once the manner and scale of his plundering become apparent. The special committee, headed by former US Securities & Exchange chairman Richard Breeden and appointed by Black himself to address shareholder concerns, found that he, his partner David Radler and a few fellow executives had received, between 1997 and 2003, some $400m in unjustified compensation, fees, perks and other payments - more than 95% of Hollinger International's restated net income.
Little wonder that US investors, who held 70% of the company's shares, were outraged and even widely respected figures such as Raymond Seitz, former US ambassador to Britain, Breeden and Kissinger turned against Black and supported his removal as chairman.
Black might not have been so widely pilloried had he shown the slightest hint of contrition - or respect for the findings of the court in Delaware, the seat of US corporate jurisprudence. Instead, he ignored the court's order not to attempt to sell the Telegraph and thereby further prejudice shareholders, and launched a broadside against Breeden and his "fascists" on the committee, calling them "truly evil people who are a menace to capitalism as any sane and civilised person would define it".
Black's rise and fall is a salutary tale of a flamboyant and overconfident tycoon who could not adjust to a climate of shareholder activism, and of a board of directors and audit committee of experienced business people who failed utterly in their duty to protect shareholders.
Yet any book on Black must necessarily be a work in progress. With multimillion-dollar claims and counterclaims for defamation awaiting adjudication, Radler having pleaded guilty to fraud and Black himself under indictment, this Citizen Kane-like story is far from over.
* This book may be ordered from Amazon.com at a discounted price.
