Lord Black was also behind bars for obstruction of justice after he removed boxes of files from his office that government investigators were searching for, but he has served enough time already for those charges. He will likely face travel restrictions after his release and have to post bail in the seven figures.

Lord Black was sentenced to 78 months in December 2007 after stealing nearly $6 million from shareholders of his media holding company Hollinger, Inc. Hollinger's empire included the Chicago Sun-Times, London’s Daily Telegraph and Israel's Jerusalem Post. Lord Black was also an investor in The New York Sun.

Lord Black was sentenced to 78 months in December 2007 after stealing nearly $6 million from shareholders of the media holding company Hollinger, Inc. Hollinger's empire included the Chicago Sun-Times, London’s Daily Telegraph and Israel's Jerusalem Post. Lord Black was also an investor in The New York Sun.

According to the Washington Post, the government says that charges against Lord Black should stand, but his lawyers say that, in light of the Supreme Court opinion, his conviction should be thrown out entirely. Now a lower court will decide Lord Black's fate.

According to The New York Times, he just whips out his trusty LongPen, which is a recent technology invention, and signs autographs by satellite! The paper reports that Mr. Black has been using the device to "meet" with his fans at bookstore events and sign their books just like a real author.

Margaret Atwood created the LongPen in 2004, says The Times, "so that she could meet remotely with fans, chatting with them by videoconference and signing their books with a touchpad, which conveyed her handwriting from her home to an autopen in the bookstore."

Since then, the LongPen has been used by Norman Mailer, Alice Munro, and a host of others. "The LongPen events have been very enjoyable," he told The Times in an e-mail message. "This is a concept that will revolutionize book sales. It's an important and amazing invention."

Mr. Black is expected to deliver a lengthy court-room speech before his sentencing later today. We'll keep you posted.

According to this morning's Financial Times, the seizure would be part of a government effort to get $17 million from Mr. Black and two other executives of his Hollinger International following their fraud convictions in June.

Mr. Black sold the apartment at 635 Park in late 2005.

So imagine our excitement so see that Richard Siklos had written a short piece about the Lady Black!

Sounds like good material for a book! And apparently in their home country of Canada, that's just what publishers are trying to get her to do.

[Some will remember that some time ago Lord Black had reportedly come close to buying this newspaper—and speculation was that Ms. Amiel, who is the owner of a vast couture wardrobe and of a pretty nice-sounding apartment on Fifth Avenue near our old East 64th Street headquarters, would run the Observer.]

However, in the mixed jury verdict, Black was acquitted of nine counts that included wire fraud and racketeering.

The former Hollinger chief once presided over an empire that included the Chicago Sun-Times, Toronto’s National Post, London’s Daily Telegraph, and Israel's Jerusalem Post.

Now, Black—convicted today of pocketing money that should have gone to stockholders—faces up to 35 years in prison and a fine of $1 million.

Bloomberg reports:

The three co-defendants were former Hollinger executives Peter Atkinson and John Boultbee, and attorney Mark Kipnis.

• Bloomberg.com

There are not-crooks, and then there are not-crooks.

Richard Nixon carried that famously self-proclaimed status to the grave. How long Conrad Black will keep it is for a federal jury to decide. The Canadian media tycoon is currently on trial in Chicago on multiple counts of fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Lord Black alludes to that litany of charges (the last two of which carry a nice whiff of Watergate) in the acknowledgments to his massive, muscular and somewhat demented life of the 37th President. With uncharacteristic delicacy, he mentions his “very distracting circumstances” and “serious judicial problems.” Being charged with criminal behavior is not the worst preparation for the Nixon biographer.

In writing about Nixon, Lord Black joins a very long line of predecessors. All Presidents are worthy of our attention—but some better repay that attention. It’s often preferable that a President not be all that compelling (witness the genuine feeling displayed in so many of the tributes offered Gerald Ford last December). Certainly, Nixon would have been better off—the country and world, too—if he hadn’t had the unique ability to be both bull and toreador in a blood sport largely of his own making. But he did, and in a sense still does: Frost/Nixon is the toughest Broadway ticket of the season, and now we have this quartet of new books.

As Presidential subjects go, not even Nixon can compare to Franklin Roosevelt. Lord Black’s previous book was a biography of F.D.R. This makes him doubly suited to write about Nixon. Criminality helped end Nixon’s Presidency; Roosevelt helped drive it. He was the President under whom Nixon came of political age and, as such, the one Nixon measured himself against. For all that he had highly charged relationships with several other Presidents—Truman, who loathed him; Eisenhower, who elevated him; Kennedy, who defeated him; Ford, whom he elevated—it was the relationship with F.D.R. that did the most to form him.

“Relationship,” at least in the interpersonal sense, may be the last word ever associated with Richard Nixon. He was the Melvillean “isolato” as most powerful man in the world. Richard Reeves knew exactly what he was doing when he chose the subtitle for his fine study President Nixon: Alone in the White House. Yet it’s a relationship that defines Robert Dallek’s exhaustive Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, which concerns itself with the most important relationship of Nixon’s Presidency—and very likely the most singular between any President and subordinate in U.S. history. A far different relationship concerns Jules Witcover in Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. If Mr. Dallek’s book is a tragedy of global proportions, Mr. Witcover’s verges on lugubrious comedy as it details the now largely forgotten pas de deux between not-crook President and nolo contendere Vice President.

Elizabeth Drew’s Richard M. Nixon has a good deal about Nixon’s dealings with both men, of course. Her book is part of the American Presidents Series, edited by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. When Nixon lived in New York in the early 80’s, his townhouse backed onto Schlesinger’s. Strange things like that kept happening to Nixon. (When he moved to New York in the early 60’s, the apartment he bought was in the same building as Nelson Rockefeller’s.) He had a stunning propensity for the bizarre, something Ms. Drew wastes no time acknowledging. She begins her book thusly: “Richard Milhous Nixon was an improbable President.” That sentence is indicative of her restrained, nicely compressed style. That style is also rather gray, though she does have the occasional purple patch. Sometimes the purple justifies itself. “Nixon’s tumultuous presidency,” she writes, “was for those of us who lived through it the most riveting of our lifetimes, and, perhaps, in all of American history.” Other times, she just gets carried away. The members of the House Judiciary Committee, Ms. Drew declares, “rose to the task before them and some of them became giants—it seemed at times akin to the Founding Fathers—though in most cases and under other circumstances they were actually not even close to that stature.”

Nothing was more improbable about Nixon’s Presidency than his partnership with Henry Kissinger. The two men did great and lasting things together, also ghastly and inexplicable things. Squabbling and scheming, they tried to turn the making of U.S. foreign policy into their own personal prerogative, a secret society of two—and, for a time, effectively succeeded. It was folie a deux masquerading as Realpolitik. Their collaboration has been much written about. What distinguishes Mr. Dallek’s book is how extensively he’s drawn on the vast archive these two otherwise most secretive of men left: not just documents but also Nixon’s tapes and Mr. Kissinger’s transcripts of his telephone conversations. Although Mr. Dallek frequently acknowledges their great foreign-policy strengths and the often-impressive results that came of them, the overall portrait is damning in the extreme. Both men display a degree of duplicity, deviousness and personal instability that would seem utterly implausible—except for the overwhelming evidence of it they presented against themselves.

An oddity of Mr. Dallek’s book is that throughout it he refers to Mr. Kissinger as “Henry.” Lord Black, whose tone is that of a man on a first-name basis with the Deity, does not indulge in such familiarity. That’s one of the few indulgences he doesn’t allow himself in The Invincible Quest. He has an often-hilarious weakness for extraneous information and weirdly pedantic parentheticals. Having brought up the all-but-nonexistent possibility that Lyndon Johnson might have declined the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1964, Lord Black points out that his Presidency would have been in that case “the third shortest in history, after William H. Harrison and James A. Garfield.” Or, after quoting Nixon’s 1965 warning that a North Vietnamese victory would mean “The Pacific will become a Red Sea,” Lord Black offers the useful clarification: “He meant ideologically, not geographically.”

Lord Black (one keeps wanting to call him “Lord Copper”) also has a penchant for dumbfounding obiter dicta. Had Ike not chosen to run for re-election, he declares, Nelson Rockefeller—who had yet to hold any elective office—was Nixon’s “only plausible rival” for the nomination. Replacing John Foster Dulles with Nixon as Secretary of State “would have been a brilliant appointment.” Or if, rather than resigning, “Nixon had mounted a fighting defense on the facts, the animosity of most of the press, the hypocrisy of many of the Democrats, and the precedent of former presidents, he might have clawed his way back to a chance of finishing his term.” Lord Black neglects to add that Pat Nixon was Marie of Romania.

Still, he can bring the reader up short with a startling insight—or, rather, he does so frequently, and every once in a while for the right reasons. There’s a jarring brilliance to his noting “the dark, ironic, recondite cynicism that was often one of [Nixon’s] most attractive qualities.” The man is nothing if not a lively writer, and his prose often achieves a kind of loony splendor. In noting the replacement of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s delegation to the 1972 Democratic convention, Lord Black describes Jesse Jackson as a “rutting panther of an African-American nonconformist clergyman and racial militant.” The subject of the 1960’s excites in him a goatish sententiousness. “Oral contraception vastly facilitated premarital sex among young people, relieving their ancient risks and frustrations, and leading to a great deal of sexual exhibitionism, much of it agreeable to most people—thigh-high skirts and exiguous coverage of the most erogenous female areas.”

As a phrasemaker, Lord Black could have taught even Spiro Agnew a thing or two. That’s no small tribute. Hard to believe though it may now seem, such Agnew sound bites as “effete corps of impudent snobs” and “nattering nabobs of negativism” briefly made him the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee in 1976 and a cynosure of American conservatism. (Ronald Reagan? He was the guy who’d raised taxes in California and made abortion legal there.) Nixon enjoyed the benefit of his rhetorical muscle-flexing, but quickly realized what an unimpressive No. 2 he’d saddled himself with.

That unimpressiveness colors Very Strange Bedfellows. There’s little Mr. Witcover can do to make Agnew interesting or his career seem other than grimly absurd. Soon enough, Nixon began scheming to unburden himself of Agnew. Quoting a White House tape, Mr. Witcover describes Nixon calling up Presidential counsel John Dean to find out what the 25th Amendment says about the naming of a new Vice President. Ever cagey, Nixon didn’t want Mr. Dean to infer why he was interested. “[O]ne of my daughters is doing a paper,” he explained. At least he didn’t say King Timahoe had eaten her homework.

Mark Feeney is the author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief (University of Chicago Press).

Mr. Pepper, the president of the Canadian book-publishing company McClelland & Stewart, was on the phone from Toronto. He was explaining the timing of his client Mr. Black’s new book, The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon, which is scheduled to hit the shelves in bookstores throughout Canada on May 22.

Mr. Black already has a busy schedule.

Since the middle of last month, the author, media mogul, British lord, newspaper columnist and alleged corporate embezzler has been embroiled in a high-profile criminal trial taking place in a courtroom in Chicago. Prosecutors allege that during his time at the helm of Hollinger International, Mr. Black and three co-defendants bilked some $60 million from the company. In Canada, the trial has garnered the kind of fevered attention that O.J. Simpson’s trial generated in the U.S.

Mr. Pepper said that with Mr. Black’s encouragement, he scheduled the debut of the book to piggyback on all the free publicity. “The trial is the biggest story of the year, with the exception of the prime-ministerial elections,” said Mr. Pepper. “Conrad is an icon here, whether you love him or hate him. To wait any longer in this country would be a mistake.”

Apparently, the same logic doesn’t apply here in the States. Mr. Black’s U.S. publishers, PublicAffairs Books, don’t plan on rolling out The Invincible Quest until the fall of 2007.

“We wanted enough time to get it edited very carefully and circulated to reviewers and all those things,” said Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books. “For an American audience, the book is going to be read in a different way than from a Canadian audience. Also, there are three Nixon books out right now. So we felt that there would be more space for what is an extraordinary piece of work.”

An advance copy of the hefty tome arrived at The Observer today and weighed in at a whopping 1,059 pages. In a photograph on the back of the dust jacket, Mr. Black and Nixon, looking young and wearing tuxedos, stand shoulder to shoulder, smiling. Mr. Black dedicated the biography to his wife, Barbara Amiel, for her magnificence “through good and bad times.”

So how do you promote a book when prosecutors have already booked your author day in and day out?

According to Mr. Pepper, you plan ahead. Back in March, before the start of the trial, Mr. Black did a number of interviews with television and radio stations, which were subsequently embargoed until later this month. Next Friday, TVO, the public-television station in Ontario, will air one of the first of the interviews.

Also, you hope for the best. “He’s very gung-ho to promote the book,” said Mr. Pepper. “We are hoping very much that when the book comes out, that he can do some more appearances. But it depends whether or not he is needed in Chicago.”

Or, perhaps, whether he’s needed in the mess hall. If convicted, Mr. Black could spend more than 20 years in prison.

Embattled media mogul Conrad Black recently sold his co-op at 635 Park Avenue to developer Marty Berman for $10.5 million, according to New York magazine. And Hugh Jackman has been looking around some pricey properties lately, most recently in Harvey Weinstein’s old building on Mercer Street.

Actor Samuel L. Jackson recently paid $4.8 million an Upper East Side previously owned by the former basketball player Greg Anthony and his ex-wife, the novelist Crystal McCrary, according to the New York Times.

Who else is better to profile in the The Times Habitats column than the self-described “queen of New York real estate?” Take a walk inside Barbara Corcoran’s Park Avenue apartment with an audio slide show. Believe it or not, you don’t even need TimesSelect!