‘The only revenge would be to see our persecutors guillotined’: Barbara Amiel’s knives are out in memoir

T. Belman. I followed this saga from day one.  I felt that the Blacks were mistreated by the press and by the Justice Departments in both Canada and the US.  When Conrad let it be known to his friends that he needed money to meet his legal bills, one such friend, or perhaps acquaintance, Donald Trump, contributed $10,000 to his defense, as I recall.  Black used to be the owner of the Jerusalem Post but was forced to sell his interest due to his financial difficulties..  I remember when Lady Black outed genteel society for being antisemetic.

‘Everyone applauded our undoing,’ Amiel writes in her book, Friends and Enemies, of her and husband Conrad Black’s riches to rags story. Now it’s Amiel’s turn

By Adrian Humphreys, NATIONAL POST

Barbara Amiel and Conrad Black. PHOTO BY JOE WARMINGTON/POSTMEDIA/FILE

Barbara Amiel became a household name — in some households an obscenity — in full cooperation and coexistence with her husband, Conrad Black, in a rare and twisting riches to rags story.

Not to elevate sweet and sour reality into fairy tale or myth, but there are meaty elements of modern parable to Amiel moving from high society ballrooms in maddeningly expensive haute couture to visiting her husband in prison with guards measuring the length of her dress because female visitors could not be provocative.

‘The only revenge would be to see our persecutors guillotined’: Barbara Amiel’s knives are out in memoir

Provocative, or however that translates into Latin, could be engraved on Lord and Lady Black’s heraldic crest.

Black was a wealthy media tycoon, controlling one of the world’s largest English-language newspaper empires, with titles in Britain, the United States, Israel and Canada, including founding, and once owning, National Post. His public persona mustered zealous admirers and detractors long before he was found guilty of fraud and obstruction of justice in Chicago in 2007.

Last year, Black received a criminal pardon from U.S. President Donald Trump. Perhaps a sense of vindication accompanying the executive clemency signalled the time was right for the release of Amiel’s lengthy memoir.“People were simply tired of us: tired of our bloody self-importance in the pronouncements we made verbally or in print,” Amiel, 79, writes in her book, Friends and Enemies, to be released next month. “Everyone applauded our undoing, at least everyone in print or on TV or anyone that had a grudge or schadenfreude, a bunion or sore tooth.”Now it’s Amiel’s turn.Knives out.A series of adapted excerpts was recently published in Britain, not in the Daily Telegraph, which her husband once owned, but in the rival Daily Mail. Cherry picking excerpts rarely gives the measure of a book. It’s hard to imagine the Mail passing over lurid details of her sex life to make room for her upbringing, or her impalement of rich and famous former friends for her time as a journalist in Toronto.

Nonetheless, by cherry picking the picked cherries, here is some of what she says.

Amiel holds grudges

“For me — soon to be 80 — the only revenge would be to see our persecutors guillotined. I have worked out 1,001 ways to see them die, beginning with injecting them with the Ebola virus and watching,” she writes.

“I do think the legal profession — and my experience of this was greatest in Canada — is a deplorable profession. If it were possible to have a society of laws without lawyers, I’d recommend disbarment for 90 per cent of them and the strangulation at birth of any infant whose parents wish the baby to go in that direction.”

Amiel and Black were too in-your-face“As it was, I realized we had been too blatant in our enjoyment of what Conrad called ‘the preferments’ of his position. There were just too many photos of us enjoying ourselves all over the place with important people,” Amiel writes, according to the Mail’s excerpts.“Hear Conrad on the radio. See Conrad being made a British peer. See Barbara prancing around on the social pages of the New York Times. People were simply tired of us: tired of our bloody self-importance in the pronouncements we made verbally or in print.”But she reveled in her high-society life“We sat balanced on our highly visible lifestyle, one where telephone calls to the prime minister would be returned the same day; where invitations to dinners and celebrations, written on implacably stiff cards, appeared at an improbable rate; where holiday greetings would come from world leaders, the royal family and statesmen across Europe, from film stars and industrialists,” she writes.

Amiel blames herself for Black’s downfall

In an interview in 2002, Amiel quipped: “I have an extravagance that knows no bounds.” It set the tone and was a klaxon for investors in Black’s newspaper company, Hollinger International.

“Was it possible that my husband’s fees (from Hollinger) were exorbitant because of me? He’d assured me they were par for the course in the type of deals he was doing, but I still can’t help thinking that marrying me was a disaster,” she writes.“Just because his circle in New York and Palm Beach wore couture, why did I have to wear it? His first wife hadn’t. I bought insanely, and I gave away less insanely but happily — bags to staff, Chanel jackets to cleaning ladies, private donations to distressed animal lovers.”They essentially went broke“At the end of 2003, we had just $20,000 in cash and my income as a columnist,” she writes.“Yet lawyers would demand millions and then more millions before even a shred of evidence had been produced or any charge laid. We had not yet realized that when we sold our houses, the money would be seized by the U.S. or Canadian courts. Or the FBI.

“When we sold our Manhattan apartment, for instance, I sighed with relief. Here I come, Chanel, I thought. Just one last jacket. But the cheque was seized on the spot by two FBI men.”

Conrad Black enters Federal Court in Chicago with his wife wife Barbara Amiel, March 15, 2007. PHOTO BY DAVID LUCAS/POSTMEDIA/FILE

Most friends abandoned them

“You aren’t quite sure which friends will cut you until it happens and you find yourself with a smile and an outstretched hand falling back limply to your side,” she writes, according to the excerpts.

She describes Ghislaine Maxwell, who invited the couple to the now infamous island owned by Jeffrey Epstein before he was accused of rampant pedophilia, bolting from her.

“Our smart New York society friends — whom I used to refer to collectively as the Group — struggled on gamely for a few months, like intrepid expeditioners in the jungles of the Amazon.”Billionaires’ wives who had been friends snubbed her. Many declined to be seen with them.“What is less forgivable are those friends who, instead of using you only as an occasional dinner-table anecdote, now become enthusiastic participants in tearing you apart.”Amiel paints a scathing view of those in “high-society life as lived in the thinnest of its ozone layers.”Getting bounced out, she writes, hit her while shopping: “The sales lady, who had just complimented me on my Hermès handbag, announced, with a note of slight triumph, I felt, that my Bloomingdale’s card was declined.”

Even service staff shunned them

“Robert Gage, my hairdresser for over ten years, fired me. When I called to make my appointment, at the salon where he’d proudly hung my photo on the wall, I was told by him: ‘It would be embarrassing for everyone to have you here,’” she writes.

“Then in early 2004, I called up my ‘good friend’ Abbey, the manager of the Manhattan Manolo Blahnik shop. (Money was already in short supply, but old habits die hard.) ‘Abbey, I think the situation calls for a pair of mood-lifting shoes,’ I said, trying to emulate an upbeat voice. ‘You’ve got quite enough,’ she replied brusquely and hung up.

“How poisonous must one be when even the New York vendeuses wish to distance themselves?”

Black didn’t have a snappy pick-up line  The two were on their way to the opera one evening.“He led me to my sofa. Then came the most god-awful torturous speech in haute Conradian style,” she writes.“I was completely flummoxed. He seemed to be asking me to have some sort of relationship, but he might have been describing his relationship with the great literary figures with which his speech was peppered — Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Héloïse and Abelard.

“‘Look, Conrad,’ I said, I’m really not in the market for an affair.’

“‘I’m not asking you for that,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand? I’m asking you to marry me.’ We had not exchanged so much as a kiss in all the time I had known him.”

She insists Black was wrongfully convicted

She said Black came to her on Oct. 29, 2003, “grey-faced with despair” and told her: “It’s finished. This is the worst day of my life.”

“Once there is an accusation that you have sidestepped the rules and ‘looted’ millions from your company, you’re done. Present yourself for execution,” she writes.

“No one wanted to know the one essential detail: the truth. And it would take years for the allegations against Conrad to be revealed as false. Losing status, money, reputation and security is a shock when it happens all within a few days. The feeling of falling down that elevator shaft is impossible to capture.

“I understood the skepticism about our innocence. No smoke without fire, and if we were innocent why did all this happen — I know. But these nightmares do actually happen to innocent people.

September 12, 2020 | 1 Comment »

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  1. ‘The only revenge would be to see our persecutors guillotined’ Barbara Amiel
    I second to that! As long as I remember, Barbara Amiel, was a real journalist… not like the plethora of pretenders this days… the only one I can read these days is Caroline Glick… what Pravda used to be in now all the press today… except Pravda! I cannot wait for the book to get out to read it!
    Conrad Black was the second great Canadian to have his company stolen like Garth Drabinsky Cineplex. both Black and Drabinsky saved the skin of millions of people and of two dying industries… soooo… they got rewarded… OMG… we are living in a society where the mediocre mind is lauded as genius… know what is in Barbara’s heart… this is exactly what I felt!