Former media baron Conrad Black is back in prison to finish his sentence for fraud. To promote the release of a new memoir, he has given interviews with several media outlets. As usual, the former media mogul had some interesting things to say.
“My grandfather used to say that for some people, experience is a slow teacher, and I’m afraid I may have been one of them. But finally, I think I’ve learned my lesson.”
— on CTV News, about his brush with the law
“I don’t doubt that I am a humbler, more sensitive person now that I have experienced conditions with which I’d had little experience. I’ve worked hard to find something meaningful.”
— in Vanity Fair
“… smuggling into prisons is conducted entirely by corrupt guards.”
“[I] was slightly mystified at the extent of official curiosity about that generally unremitting aperture.”
— to Vanity Fair, about the indignities of anal inspections.
“We had a security fear that if I went back there, that I was going to assault these two women. To go back there for seven months, I for the first time in my life, at the age of 67, am going to commit assault? My reaction is that no inanity, stupidity or malicious inconvenience inflicted by the Bureau of Prisons surprises me.”
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— on CTV, in response to news that he won’t return to a Florida prison because two female prison guards are too afraid of him.
“In general I think there’s an unspoken feeling that anyone who is not a lawyer who stumbles into the morass of the legal system in the United States is sort of like an insect who hits a spiderweb. And you don’t let him out. And it is perfectly acceptable to rack him up and scheme him. And it’s kind of their revenge for the fact that they’re in theory working for other people and they swaddle it all in this bullshit about the society of laws and the rule of law and that justice is blind and your day in court. It’s all just crap, all of it.”
“You can’t run the air conditioning in [my Palm Beach home] for more than half an hour on that. … If it had gotten any worse, I could have borrowed from some friends, but I didn’t want to do that.”
–in The Globe and Mail, about getting down to his last $100,000 and about his wife, Barbara Amiel Black, trying to sell jewellery to cover legal bills.
— in the National Post, about his return to prison
“Coming up to actually going to prison was difficult because the imagination is quite torture, and I didn’t really know what to expect,” Black said during the interview at the five-star New York hotel where he has been living for about a year. I was advised that there wasn’t much violence there, but you don’t know.”
— on CTV, about his first prison experience
“The myth, in all the Canadian papers, was that I would not hold up in prison, that I would be physically and sexually abused … I realized, well, it would be a little tedious, but it wouldn’t be difficult to endure.”
— in Vanity Fair
“You have to believe, whether you are cleaning latrines or tutoring inmates, that it served some purpose. I have tried to make the most of an unjust charge.”
— in Vanity Fair
“After the way I have been treated in this country I’ll be happy to see my American friends in London or Toronto.”
— in The Globe and Mail, about his thoughts on the U.S.
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