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First up was Black himself. In a jammed 12th-floor courtroom, with banks of TV cameras in the Dirksen Building lobby below awaiting his descent, St. Eve sentenced Black to six and a half years in prison for ripping off Hollinger International shareholders of millions of dollars in phony noncompete payments as he and his partner, David Radler, sold off the company. (Radler pleaded guilty and testified for the state in return for 29 months in a Canadian prison.) In a splendid demonstration of sangfroid, Black autographed copies of his new biography, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, during a recess. Unless the appeals process works a miracle for him he’ll be reporting to a minimum security federal “camp” in Florida in March — a shame, really, in that I suspect Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, believes as I do that the only prison on earth worthy of him is the Tower of London.
Then two lesser Hollinger execs, Peter Atkinson and Jack Boultbee, who profited from the noncompetes at a vastly lower level than Black and Radler, stood before St. Eve in a half-empty courtroom looking miserable and were sentenced to 24 months and 27 months in prison respectively. It was 5:30 by then, and if Kipnis had wanted to, he could have come back in the morning. But he chose to get on with it. His family and supporters were waiting out in the hallway, and when they came in they filled the courtroom. “There’s the difference,” Skurka told me as they found seats. When Kipnis — who of course is a Chicagoan, while the other defendants are from Canada — stood before St. Eve he also stood before a lot of people who actually cared.
And then Kipnis himself spoke. He said he’d joined Hollinger because he wanted to learn the newspaper business. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I believe I was competent,” he said. “It was that one percent . . .” Yet “I never for a moment believed those noncompete agreements were illegal,” he swore, suggesting that his mistake had been to assume there were other honest people around him who would tell him if they were. He said he’d been a lawyer for 30 years and despite the jokes was proud to be a lawyer, and now that life was gone. He and his wife had bought a little sign company and were struggling to make it go, and in the meantime the Sun-Times was struggling to survive “and it breaks my heart.” He said, “My son should not have to put his life on hold. He should not have to stand before you today. My house should not have to be sold. My family should not have to be here today to hold me up.”
