Media Roundup: Fade from Radler

The media reports on the Conrad Black trial are beginning to diminish now that the trial has gone into weekend break:

1. From the Chicago Tribune, a report on yesterday's cross-examination, with some of Mr. Radler's testimony under direct examination added for perspective. The bulk of it deals with Eddie Greenspan pounding away at David Radler's previous lies.

2. The New York Times has a briefer report than yesterday's. It mentions that the "haggling" over the exact meaning of the term "right hand-man," at the end of yesterday's session, drew "muffling laughs" from the jury. The article left Csr. Greenspan the last word on the subject: "'It probably looks like you’ll have until at least next Monday' to think up an adequate definition, Mr. Greenspan remarked."

3. Peter Worthington's latest column, webbed by the Toronto Sun, is another analysis of the testimony. He concurs with the consensus evaluation that Mr. Radler has yet to be hung by Csr. Greenspan, even though the latter succeeded in getting a laugh out of the jury at the former's expense. One of the tid-bits in it is the name and date of the media outlet that Mr. Radler told, in an interview, that he was nobody's right-hand man: the Toronto Star, Aug. 31, 1996 issue.

4. From Bloomberg's Ann Wollner, a piece that recaps the entire week of Mr. Radler's testimony, with this assessment of the cross so far: "Radler is so far holding up in cross-examination. One of Black's pugnacious lawyers, Canadian Eddie Greenspan, keeps taking swings at him, but mostly they miss."

5. The Daily Herald has a brief Associated Press summary report, entitled "Black trial done for the week."

6. The latest from Andrew Clark of the Guardian begins with, "Conrad Black's lawyers have accused the former Telegraph owner's longstanding second-in-command of being a disloyal lieutenant who routinely took major business decisions behind his boss's back." It also mentions Conrad Black "occasionally raising his eyes to the courtroom ceiling in apparent disbelief."

7. The fate of Mr. Black if found guilty is mentioned in a Bloomberg report on a guilty verdict for Richard Scrushy, who got convicted for bribery long after escaping more more serious corporate-fraud charges.

8. The Edmonton Journal has webbed a brief Canadian Press summary, entitled "David Radler wraps up week of testimony without knock-out punches."

9. From the Globe and Mail's Paul Waldie, details a split in the unified approach the defense team has been following so far: "when Mr. Greenspan questioned Mr. Radler on behalf of Lord Black, he faced objections from two defence tables. Ronald Safer, who represents Mr. Kipnis, objected to a question Mr. Greenspan posed and blocked his attempt to introduce a document as evidence. Gus Newman, a lawyer for Mr. Boultbee took issue with another document. In each case, Mr. Greenspan had to change his questioning." (Perhaps there was a little more to the split than Csr. Greenspan's repetitiveness after all.)

10. Janet Whitman's latest report, in the New York Post, also concludes that Mr. Radler's credibility is "largely intact" so far. It contains the note that "[t]he testy exchanges also seemed to throw off Greenspan."

11. The Toronto Star's Rick Westhead has drawn an inference from Mr. Radler's withstanding of Csr. Greenspan's cross-examination as of now: "Will Radler force Black to testify?" It quotes Steve Skurka, who concluded that "'Radler's breaking Eddie's rhythm and cadence,... If Black's team feels like Radler has satisfied the jury that he is credible, then Black is going to have to rebut what he has said.'" Also quoted in the article is Hugh Totten, who noted the split in the defense team's ranks.

12. The latest report from Mary Vallis, webbed by the Vancouver Sun, is entitled "Not lying now, Radler says." It mentions that the jurors aren't competely impressed with the way the cross-examination is going: "Some members of the jury seemed bored as the men sparred. One female juror appeared to fall asleep, as she had earlier in the week during assistant U.S. attorney Eric Sussman's direct examination of Radler. Another blew bubbles with a pink wad of gum and at times seemed more intrigued by the people in the public gallery than the witness."

13. The report by the Chicago Sun-Times' Mary Wisniewski also centres on Radler's past lying.

14. Phil Rosenthal's latest column in the Chicago Tribune approaches yesterday's testimony with the theme of seeing a former boss squirm on the stand, a discomfit that took the form of frequent memory lapses. "Not only did Radler say he didn't recall testimony he gave this week, which had to be read back to him, Radler testified he couldn't remember what he had read from a sales agreement moments earlier."

15. Joining the rest of the above media outlets is the Daily Mail, which has webbed a report that starts off with: "Bad tempers, tricks and treachery resounded across the courtroom deciding Conrad Black’s fate.... Using a blunderbuss rather than a rapier, Greenspan had unintentionally conjured sympathy for the self-confessed fraudster testifying for the prosecution of Lord Black." It also mentions that Csr. Greenspan has yet to impeach Mr. Radler's testimony, under direct examination, that Mr. Black had signed phony documents.

16. The Welland Tribune has webbed an opinion piece by Canada's éminence grise of punditry, Allan Fotheringham, who ventures that the most pitable people in the courtroom are the jurors, because they can't tune anything out (except by nodding off.)

17. A second piece from the Daily Mail comes out and describes Csr. Greenspan's cross-examination as "[f]loundering and repetitive", and Greenspan himself as close to hapless yesterday.

18. In the Chicago Reader blog "News Bites," Michael Miner tries his hand at getting both Mr. Black's and Mr. Radler's number, as based in what was revealed in the courtroom yesterday. Mr. Miner concludes that Conrad Black "clearly a piece of work", and Mr. Radler is pegged as "a guy so preoccupied with local revenues that he’s oblivious to what his papers actually publish." He balances the latter, though, by fingering Eddie Greenspan as someone who "sounded out of touch with his audience," specifically, with reference to Mr. Radler's opinion that having Mr. Black's article read in the Congressional Record meant nothing for the Sherbrooke Record, as "maybe the only guy in the courtroom who thinks having something read into the Congressional Record is a life-altering event."

19. From Romina Maurino, and webbed by the Ottawa Citizen, a report that picks up on the speculation that Conrad Black may have to testify in his own defense. It starts off by noting that Mr. Radler has been sufficiently credible a witness, so far, for that option to be taken seriously, and cites a few legal experts as backing for this conclusion, including one who believes that Mr. Black wouldn't do that badly on the witness stand when cross-examined. (Mr. Sussman or Mr. Cramer are the two most likely cross-examiners, by my seat-of-the-pants guess.)

20. Stephen Foley of The Independent has a different wrap-up, one that calls Mr. Radler's week on the stand "a week of electrifying legal theatre." His report is one of the few today which claim that Eddie Greenspan has done rather well with his cross-examination, and quotes Steve Skurka at the end to back up this assessment: "Steven Skurka, a Canadian attorney who has been following the trial for his blog, said the jury may not have warmed to Radler. 'He personified the difficult and evasive witness. He repeatedly answered Mr Greenspan's questions with accusations that he was "manoeuvering all over the place" and "taking things out of context". His course of ranting rather than responding should have been curtailed by the judge but it rarely was.'"

21. Finally, an item for hardcore Conrad Black watchers, from Crain's Chicago Business: Cardinal Capital, one of the institutional investors behind the Hollinger International shareholder revolt and eventual deposement of Conrad Black from its CEOship, has sold most of its stake in the company. Cardinal dumped 2.5 million shares, leaving it with 1.1 million shares. At the time the trial started, Cardinal had owned 4.4 million shares, acording to the report. (They sold on the recent spate of good news, folks.)

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Mark Steyn also got the name of the paper in which that right-hand-man quote appeared, in his Conrad Black trial blog entry yesterday afternoon. He also notes that "Radler appears to have been sent one of those uplifting Hallmark cards saying 'This is the first day of the post-Hollinger phase of your life.' He seems, in a sense, to have psycholically gone through prison and come out the other side. It's not that he's performing well but that he doesn't care if he performs badly,..."

Alan D. Gold, the legal analyst for the Toronto Life Conrad Black trial blog, makes the point that slapping a narrative on top of a real case obscures the relevant points of law. He notes, in the middle of making the point that embarrassing a prosecution witness is not the same as impeaching that witness' testimony, that the defendants haven't managed to win clear yet, even if a narrative-rooted assessment would imply that they have.