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Business
Survivor CEO: The Island of No Laws
Why waste our time and public resources on courts and prisons for those like Conrad Black who defraud each other? They should sort it out for themselves
By Kevin Potvin
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I’ll miss fellow newspaper launcher Conrad Black.
His conviction this week on old-fashioned Al Capone-like charges of mail fraud is the end of Lord Black of Crossharbour no matter what ensues in the courts of appeal both legal and public. His bombast was his ballast and that was all drained out of him by that Chicago jury. The surprising conviction was as much a measure of how far Capone’s Chicago has come in the 62 years of Conrad Black’s lifetime as much as it measures how far The Man has gone. Capone would never have been convicted by a Chicago jury only for killing fellow gangsters. They considered him a hero for that. Not Conrad Black.
His weren’t victimless crimes, but they weren’t crimes against innocents either. Those he defrauded are frauds themselves and the judge might have invoked NHL rules to spring Black: As any of hundreds of battery and assault criminals have learned, if you keep it on the ice against willing combatants, it isn’t really battery and assault and the courts have agreed (even if you break a guy’s neck, a la Todd Bertuzzi).
All of Black’s victims were willing combatants who knowingly skated on his ice. Nobody complained so long as invitations to his famously lavish parties rolled in. It was only when his considerable gravy train came to a halt that they started whining to the refs.
The whole thing should never have gone to court in the first place. Why is it that the captains of industry and their fans in the upper echelons of the investor class rail against all public spending and all public works of government until it comes to the public courts and the judges on the public payroll?
If, for example, abuse of the natural environment through excessive emissions of pollutants by factories should best be regulated by the factories themselves, as people like Black have often argued, they why should abuse of the financial environment by CEOs and their companies not also be addressed by those same CEOs and their backers among the investor class themselves too? Why are public resources being used to help legally regulate a bunch of people who have strenuously argued against public resources being used to regulate anything else they do?
What we need in this world is the legal equivalent of the Cayman Islands, sans hotels, servants, and any other amenities, and where no laws exist at all, nor police nor courts nor jails nor any public sector whatsoever. Operators like Conrad Black can be sent there for, say, 30 days, and qualified investors can go there to find him and anyone else on the island they are aggrieved at and they can all do whatever they want to them there.
Just to keep our executive class in trim working order, I suggest that all of them who work with investors’ money be required to attend the island for 30 days each year. Those who come back alive, all the power to them. If they don’t, well, they should have behaved better with their investors’ funds the other 11 months of the year, shouldn’t they have.
This would relieve the public sector of the costs of maintaining white-collar investigation departments, courts, judges and resort prisons. It would also promote self-regulation in a very visceral way. And it would no doubt prove to be very effective in protecting the interests of all involved, certainly more so than the cumbersome, expensive, and virtually penalty-free system we employ now.
How would Conrad Black fare for 30 days on such an island? We could install web-cams hung from every tree to find out. Maybe a condition of attendance would include a camera hung around the neck Blair Witch Project-like so we can palpably register the fear in those trying to survive.
What if we offered all executives and investors a waiver they can sign that excludes them from all possible legal action in our justice system in exchange for them agreeing to attend the island of no rules for 30 days each year?
At least this way we’d be spared the unsatisfying, anti-climactic end to what promised early on to be so dramatic a story line. After all the bombast, the scowls and the chest beating, to see Black simply leave the court to begin proceeding through endless appeals and thus to dissolve away under the slow drip of paperwork gives neither him nor us any closure.
Compare that to what we could watch online live from the island if Black was as bad as the investors say he was. You can’t bring anything to the island and there’d be no guns there, they’re too immediate. But there’d be plenty of rocks and sticks. The pursuit around the trees of the island, small enough to keep the chase up-tempo but big enough to allow media a chance to whip up a good story, would be so much more captivating than the usual pursuit around legal arguments with depositions and accounting testimony none of us have a hope of understanding. Given all the intricacies of the case, who amongst us can say that justice was served in Chicago this week? But on the island I dream of, proceedings would be reduced to the very understandable, and the serving of justice would be as readily evident as a rock to the head—literally.
So let Black go—go to the island. Fraudulent as he was, no one can say he isn’t an entertaining schemer who always livened up the newspapers, even creating his own newspaper to personally liven up, an accomplishment that should not be overlooked, says I. It’s a good paper, even if it’s lost a whole lot more money than The Republic has in about the same time.
Let him go and if he makes it back alive, if he’s really a survivor, let him come back and let him carry on—with the proviso that he makes a return trip to the island for a month out of every year.
If he doesn’t make it back, I’m willing to bet that even he’d welcome that outcome more than his present circumstance. He’d get his blaze of glory and maybe even a measure of much-deserved revenge in the process, taking a few of his detractors out with him.
I’d pay to watch the clip where, with face painted in the manner of Lord of the Flies, his eyes wide from lack of sleep and stripped to the waist toting a sharpened stick and a bag full of rocks, the hunted becomes the hunter when Lord Black flushes traitor David Radler out from behind a shrub. You can hear the drums beat hard and fast, can’t you? A little voice in my head would go “Yes!” and I’d want to pump my fist in the air.
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The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
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