The Feature

When the Costa Concordia, a floating pleasure palace carrying 4,200 people, hit a rock off the Italian coast on January 13, it became the largest passenger ship ever wrecked, supplanting the Titanic in maritime history. From the moments when the captain made the first in a series of incredible blunders, through a harrowing night of mindless panic and deadly peril, in which rescuers and passengers improvised a massive evacuation and ordinary men emerged as heroes, Bryan Burrough reconstructs an epic fight for survival—in which all too many would perish.

Judge Amy St. Eve strides to her seat. An elfin 45-year-old, youthful enough to pass for a graduate student, she is a dead ringer for the actress Markie Post in Night Court. Before her, slumped at the defense table alongside four attorneys, sits the man whose crimes once transfixed so many: Conrad Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour, the ruined media baron who a decade ago controlled the world’s third-largest newspaper group; who owned London’s Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post, and more than 500 community newspapers across Canada and the U.S.; who traveled among homes in New York, London, Palm Beach, and Toronto on two private jets; and who rubbed elbows with Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, and the Rockefellers.

All that is gone now, the result of his 2007 conviction on charges of looting his company, Hollinger International. Yet Black, in his navy suit and pinkish-red power tie, is still here, 67 now, his hair white with age. The last time Judge St. Eve saw him, in December 2007, she sentenced him to six and a half years in prison. Black’s legal odyssey, before and since, has been unusual, especially compared with white-collar criminal peers such as Michael Milken and ’s Jeffrey Skilling. For one thing, as a foreigner, he wasn’t eligible to serve time in a “Club Fed”-style minimum-security prison camp. Instead he spent 29 months, until his release last July, at Coleman Federal Correctional Complex, in Florida, where his fellow inmates included child-molesters, drug traffickers, and Mafia dons.

And, unlike the Milkens and Bernie Madoffs of the world, Black tenaciously fought the case against him every step of the way, never accepting a settlement or expressing remorse and denying, to this day, that he ever committed a criminal act. His lawyers, in fact, all but demolished the case against him; of the 17 charges federal prosecutors originally brought, Black’s legal team managed to get all but 2 defeated, dismissed, overturned, or dropped. They took his fight all the way to the Supreme Court, in fact, and actually won. Free on bail for the last year as the remains of his case played out, Black has returned to Judge St. Eve’s courtroom for one final judgment, to see if he must return to prison on those two last, surviving convictions.