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Black was born in Montreal, Quebec , Canada , but renounced his Citizenship in 2001 in order to become a Life Peer in the British House Of Lords . He subsequently described his former Canadian citizenship as "an impediment to my progress in another more amenable jurisdiction." With the growth of his business and legal difficulties, since 2003 he is believed to have spent much of his time at his Bridle Path mansion in Toronto, Ontario . It was reported in the '' National Post '' on 18 November , 2005 , that Black had recently applied for permanent residency status in Canada. If convicted of the serious crimes of which he is accused in the United States, Black might be unable to permanently return to his native Canada, since Canada rarely allows entry to non-citizen felons. EARLY LIFE AND CAREER Conrad Black was born into a wealthy Toronto family. His father, George Montegu Black, Jr. , was the president of Canadian Breweries, an international brewing conglomerate. Conrad Black was first educated at Upper Canada College from which he was expelled for selling stolen exams. What led to Black's exposure was that he sold the exams at different prices according to the purchaser's social status. He then attended Trinity College School , the '' Alma Mater '' of his older brother Montegu Black . Black lasted less than a year. He eventually graduated from another private school in Toronto called Thornton Hall . He continued his education at Carleton University (History, 1965) and Université Laval (Law, 1970), later completing a Master's Degree (MA) at McGill University . He became involved in a number of businesses, mainly newspapers, but including mining and publishing. His family founded the Ravelston Corporation in 1969 as an investment vehicle. Together with friends, David Radler and Peter G. White, Black purchased and operated the '' Sherbrooke Record '', the small English daily in Sherbrooke, Quebec . In 1971, the three formed Sterling Newspapers Limited, a holding company that would acquire several other small newspapers. Black, a Roman Catholic convert, is married to Barbara Amiel , who is Jewish, and he has two sons, Jonathan-David and James Patrick Leonard Black, and a daughter, Alana Whitney Elizabeth Black, from a previous marriage to Joanna Hishon, of Montreal. Conrad Black was taken under the wing of Bud McDougald and E. P. Taylor , two of the most powerful businessmen in Canada. Following the death of McDougald, in 1978 Conrad Black acquired the shares owned by McDougald's widow in the Argus Corporation, a mammoth Canadian holding company. Argus' holdings at the time Black took it over included some of Canada's finest blue-chip companies such as Dominion Stores , Canada's largest supermarket chain, Massey Ferguson , Canada's large multi-national farm machinery corporation, Hollinger Mines , an important gold-mining company in Timmins, Ontario , and Norcen Energy, an energy and pipeline operation. His record in managing these operations is deemed by most financial experts as less than successful. In 1990, he was made an Officer of the Order Of Canada . He was ranked 235th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2004 , with an estimated wealth of £175m. BECOMING A PRESS LORD Black is the latest in a series of Canadian-born British press lords—his predecessors were Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook , Hugh Graham, 1st (and last) Baron Atholstan, and Roy Thomson, 1st Baron Thomson Of Fleet . In 1985, Black was approached by Andrew Stephen Bower Knight (then the Editor of The Economist ), and invited to finance a take-over of the ailing Telegraph Group. By buying into the Telegraph group, Black made his entry into the British press. By 1990 his companies ran over 400 newspaper titles in North America. Many of these were disposed of towards the end of the 1990s with around 150 titles being sold in a single deal with CanWest Global Communications Corp . He launched the '' National Post '' in 1998 but sold his interest in 2001. He gave up the majority of his remaining Canadian media interests in 2001. Through his Ravelston Corporation he had an 82-per-cent share-holding in the Toronto -based Hollinger Inc. group which, through Hollinger International , owned or controlled several newspapers, notably in the United States , including the '' Chicago Sun-Times '' (1994). He also held a minority interest in the '' New York Sun '' (2002). Hollinger once owned a large number of Canadian newspapers, accounting for a Plurality of that country's daily newspaper circulation, and acquired and relaunched the Financial Post as a section of the ''National Post'' (1998), in large part to get a foothold in the competitive Toronto newspaper market. Until his media empire came crashing down, he also owned Israel's Jerusalem Post , turning its editorial outlook from centrist to pro-Likud. In 2004 his Telegraph Group in the United Kingdom was sold to David And Frederick Barclay , after the accounting practices of Black and his board came under intense scrutiny by Hollinger shareholders and the U.S. Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC). Today, Black and his former associates have been removed from the boards of Hollinger International and Hollinger Inc., his Ravelston Corporation is under court protection against its creditors in Canada and he has been indicted by the US Department of Justice. Black's lieutenant and closest confidante, David Radler , has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud in the US and is expected to testify against Black, whose future and reputation remain clouded pending investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and numerous lawsuits filed by Hollinger shareholders. THE PEERAGE CONTROVERSY Black's initial attempt to assume a British Peerage was thwarted by Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien , who invoked the '' Nickle Resolution '' which disallows Canadians from holding British titles. Black attempted to work around the Nickle Resolution by taking dual British and Canadian citizenship. However, this tactic was unsuccessful and Black then initiated a lawsuit against Chrétien, arguing that Chrétien's strict interpretation of the Nickle Resolution was payback for Black's political opinions and past criticism of Chrétien. Black lost the lawsuit on the first instance and on appeal (as per). Therefore, in 2001, Black gave up his Canadian citizenship, and became Baron Black Of Crossharbour . Even without his Canadian citizenship, Black continues to enjoy the privileges of membership in the Queen's Privy Council For Canada , such as use of a special Passport . OTHER CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING BLACK Black has made several controversial statements, including the suggestions that Canada should join the United States and abandon its Universal Publicly-funded Health Care System or Medicare . On 17 November , 2003 , it was announced that Black would be resigning as chief executive of Hollinger after an internal inquiry alleged that he had received more than $7 million in unauthorized payments of company funds. The SEC had launched an investigation of his company's affairs. On 17 January , 2004 , Hollinger International reported that the executive committee of the board of directors obtained Black's resignation as chairman. At the same time the special committee in Hollinger already investigating the unauthorised payments filed a lawsuit in New York for the recovery of the money. Hollinger International also filed a $200 million (USD) lawsuit against Lord Black and his former top lieutenant David Radler as well as the companies Black has used to control the publishing it. On ) On 17 November , 2005 , eleven criminal fraud charges were brought by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald against Black and 3 former Hollinger executives. Eight of the criminal fraud charges are against Black and a warrant has been issed for his arrest. On 15 December , 2005 , four new federal charges were laid against Black by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago . The new counts include racketeering, obstruction of justice, money laundering and wire fraud. Under the racketeering count, Fitzgerald is seeking forfeiture of more than $92,000,000 (USD). The obstruction count against Black relates to the video that appears to show Black illegally removing more than a dozen boxes from the Toronto office of Hollinger Inc. (see). Black was also involved, albeit tangentially, in a controversy in December 2001 when the then-French ambassador to the UK, Daniel Bernard , called Israel a "shitty little country" in a conversation the two had at a private dinner party. The resulting scandal led to Bernard being reassigned to Algeria the following year. Earlier, in the 1980s, Black appropriated over $62,000,000 from the Dominion workers' Pension Fund over the opposition of his employees before divesting himself of the grocery store chain. Indeed, many of his critics have pointed out that most if not all of his acquisitions had been financed by money belonging to shareholders or employees rather than by the risk of his own funds. He does not dispute this and noted that he made his early purchases of brokerages and newspapers by borrowing half the money from a bank and the other half from the seller. The media watchdog group ). Conrad Black purchased at auction a collection of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt 's private papers. With the assistance of his wife, a conservative political columnist and other American conservative writers, he produced a 1,280 page biography, ''Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom'', in 2003. The book relies heavily upon the narrow information in the FDR collection he owns, emphasizing small, sometimes very personal details of FDR's life. The book is a thorough account which shows that FDR was neither the guileless, patrician altruist that his admirers would like to portray, nor was he the dupe for Stalin at Yalta that his opponents portray, but was rather a mysterious and complex individual who was able to marshall the forces that saved the United States from the Great Depression and the world from totalitarianism in World War II, leading it to greatness. Black the conservative, is also Black the admirer of FDR. He also wrote a book about Quebec's longest serving premier, Maurice Duplessis . As Black has often been a controversial figure in Canadian life, he has been lampooned by the Canadian humour magazine '' Frank '' as "Lord Tubby." Black was the subject of the 2004 documentary film ''Citizen Black'' which premiered at the Montreal and Cambridge Film Festivals. REFERENCES
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