Travels with Conrad.

This article presents an adapted excerpt from the book "Here Be Dragons," by Peter C. Newman about Conrad Black. This adapted excerpt describes Newman s three-decade-long relationship with Lord Black of Crossharbour, who excelled at being all three. That was the day the music died for Canada's poster boy tycoon, and some of it died within me, because I was there at the creation. We first met when he returned to Toronto from Quebec in 1974. Black was 29, had earned a law degree from Laval, had written an unusually perceptive master's thesis on Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis and, with his partners Peter White and David Radler, had purchased the Sherbrooke Record for $20,000. Black's downfall dates back to the fall of 1993, when he engaged in a feud with Rupert Murdoch, the pragmatic proprietor of the Times, who had reduced his paper's cover price to challenge the Telegraph's then heady circulation lead. Conrad's responsibility for what appeared to be a gross misappropriation of corporate funds remained to be proven.