By Richard Siklos
International Herald Tribune
NEW YORK — As the judge in the trial of Conrad Black began reading through the verdict in the criminal fraud prosecution against him Friday — finding Black guilty on four counts — Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, was observed scribbling a note and passing it to her husband.
It is not known what the note said, but someday it could be. Some Canadian publishing executives said they believe that Amiel might be willing to write a book dealing with the experience of being by her husband's side during the unraveling of his storied career as a newspaper magnate.
Unlike spouses in other corporate fraud trials who have largely stood quietly by their partners, Amiel was a notable presence in the courtroom and during testimony. Now 65, she was an accomplished journalist in Britain and Canada before meeting Black, and she has written sporadically but sometimes intimately in the Canadian magazine Maclean's about the experience of watching him on trial.
She married Black in 1992 at a time when his career as owner of the largest quality newspaper in Britain, The Daily Telegraph, as well as scores of other papers around the world, was ascendant. It was his second marriage, her fourth, and has been a subject of gossip and speculation ever since — in part because Amiel can be as theatrical, erudite and bombastic as her husband.
"She's beautiful," one of the jurors, Monica Prince, told The Toronto Star. "He has a very dedicated family," singling out Amiel and Black's daughter from a first marriage, Alana, who accompanied him to court each day.
Their marriage was also at issue during the 15-week trial as days of testimony focused on a vacation the Blacks took to Bora Bora and Seattle on the company plane as well as a surprise birthday party he held for her at La Grenouille in New York in December 2000 for her 60th birthday. The seating chart for the event, showing the proximity of A-listers to the Blacks, was among the exhibits entered as evidence.
Black was found not guilty of abusing these and other company perks at the trial, and in all cleared of nine counts. But he was found guilty on three counts of mail fraud as well as obstruction of justice. Black, who is a Canadian-born British lord, plans to appeal.
Implicit in showcasing the Blacks' lifestyle for the jury was the question of whether Amiel was in any way responsible for encouraging Black's desire to adopt an ever-grander lifestyle.
In an article in Vogue magazine in 2002 during which she gave a writer a tour of her vast haute couture wardrobe, she declared — jokingly, she later insisted — "I have an extravagance that knows no bounds." At that time, shareholders were complaining about payments to Black and other senior executives and shell companies at Hollinger International, the Chicago-based publishing company he founded and led as chairman and chief executive.
But in an interview in 2004, after his ouster from the company, Black said of his wife: "The attempt to portray her as a Marie Antoinette and me as a supine love-struck spouse, like most comment on the subject, is a complete fiction."
Black had placed his wife, who wrote columns for The Telegraph, on the company board and appointed her vice president of editorial for the company. The subsequent internal investigation into the company's finances that led to Black's ouster and escalating legal troubles described her executive duties as "nothing more than euphemisms for ordinary activities such as reading the newspaper, having lunch, and chatting with her husband about current events."
Like her husband, Amiel has had detractors over the years and has shown little interest publicly in portraying herself as a sympathetic character. Mark Steyn, a former columnist for Black's newspapers and his staunch defender, noted in a recent blog entry that Amiel wondered out loud to him about the jury: "Do they all hate us?"
And like her husband, she seems to have little sympathy for journalists, despite having been around them her entire career. On the second day of the trial, Amiel made headlines in Canada and Britain when she lost her cool with a couple of journalists in an elevator, calling them "vermin" and one of them "a slut."
In her writing, she struck a grander tone. In a May column she wrote, "what we are living through is not especially noteworthy on any scale of nightmares. I suppose it's the process of being singled out that is often more frightening than the thing itself. A Holocaust survivor once explained to me that when Jews were being rounded up it was awful, but you were not in it alone."
In her last column written before the verdict, Amiel wrote about her pending move out of her temporary Chicago home — a five-room suite at the Ritz—Carlton Hotel. She noted that her husband was already well into a manuscript for a new book, having just published a biography of President Richard Nixon, but that she had not used her spare time during the four-month trial productively.
"Give him another four months — and fewer nights of love — and he'll have two finished manuscripts," she noted.
Regardless of what happens to Black's appeal, Amiel still faces, as a former company director, civil litigation stemming from the Hollinger International scandal. And in identifying various assets of Black's for potential forfeiture, prosecutors have already focused on a $2.6 million ring and other gifts Black bought his wife, claiming that he transferred assets to her as the trial approached.
Meanwhile, the chattering over their future has only intensified in reports in Canada, where the two began their careers, and in Britain, where they were known as Lord and Lady Black. Among the best remembered of her thousands of articles over her career was a magazine feature titled "Why Women Marry Up," which noted, "power is sexy."
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