By Tom Bower

DRIVING into Bond Street in his Rolls-Royce in early August 2000, Conrad Black was smiling with anticipation. With his wife Barbara Amiel beside him on the purple leather upholstery, he intended to celebrate. He would buy Amiel a diamond ring at Graff for $2.6 million (£1.3m) and then an antique brooch for £300,000.

After that he would buy her £50,000 worth of clothes and some rare books for himself. The purchases would all be funded by his $51.8m (£25.6m) theft from the public shareholders of Hollinger International, his New-York-based newspaper company.

Days earlier, the directors of Hollinger International had approved the payment of those millions to Black's private company, Ravelston. Among the luminaries approving the payment were Henry Kissinger; Lord Weidenfeld, the publisher; Richard Perle, the former US assistant secretary for defence; Jim Thompson, four times mayor of Illinois; and Ray Seitz, the former US ambassador to Britain.

Black persuaded all of them that he was entitled to the $51.8m as a non-compete payment after selling nearly half of Hollinger's newspapers to a Canadian rival. In fact, CanWest, the purchaser, expected the money to be paid to Hollinger, not to Black. But by then, Black and David Radler, his partner since 1969, had established a crude scam to siphon off more than $100m in non-compete payments from Hollinger as they rapidly sold nearly all the company's newspapers.

Black may have had 78% of the voting rights, but he only owned 15% of the shares in Hollinger. Yet he took 92% of its net income. Little wonder he was accused of "corporate kleptocracy".

In the run-up to Black's six-and-a-half-year sentence, £61,000 fine and payment of $6.1m (£3m), the amount by which he was found guilty of having defrauded his former company, not a single US or British director of Hollinger agreed to write a testimonial about his good character.

All of them knew that Black was guilty of fraud. All privately admit their stupidity in falling for his lies. All those famous men and women were victims of a superb conman.

Now, few of them can understand why Black's British friends naively accept his protestations of innocence. Black's trial was so fair that all the defence lawyers at the end publicly thanked Judge Amy St Eve for her exemplary conduct. Post-trial interviews with some jurors reveal that nine out of the 12 wanted to convict Black of all 13 charges. Even the minority agreed he was guilty of fraud as set out in count one, embracing frauds of more than $32m (£16m), not the $2.9m (£1.4m) to which Black referred.

His champions in Britain say that he was a terrific proprietor of the Telegraph Group. In truth, by the end of his 19-year ownership, instead of investing in the newspapers' future, he pocketed all the profits and incurred huge debts.

Black's supporters were blind about the crook within their own office in spite of the warnings from shareholders in New York.

Hollinger owed nearly $1.9 billion in 1998. To stay in business, Black needed to repay huge loans by selling most of his newspapers. As the business diminished, Black and Radler decided to take a chunk of the proceeds. First, without approval, they took the non-compete payments then sold some of the newspapers to Horizon, their private company, for phoney valuations. On top of those blatant frauds, Black paid himself more than £20m a year in management fees and received more than £7.5m a year in expenses.

The truth emerged in 2003 when Black was ousted from control of his own company. On 16 November 2003, he signed a statement confessing he had defrauded Hollinger and agreed to repay $7.2m (£3.56m). If he had stuck to the deal, he would probably not have been prosecuted. Instead, he reneged.

Crucially, Radler also signed an admission but he stuck to the deal, and so appeared as a prosecution witness. Black still denies any wrongdoing. Yet during the long court case he did not testify in his own defence.

Only the other week in an interview for Radio 4 he dismissed his conviction as "rubbish" and "unjust"; and earlier this week he told Gavin Esler on Newsnight: "There were certainly no illegalities committed by me or by anybody that was answerable to me." He may now regret his lack of remorse. The US prosecutors passed on a tape of his Radio 4 remarks to Judge St Eve ahead of his sentence last week.

Had he shown contrition, Black would have deserved no more than five years in jail. As he showed no remorse, even 10 years would have been insufficient to warn others that white-collar criminals deserve greater punishment than mere bank robbers.

Tom Bower is the author of Outrageous Fortune: The Rise and Ruin of Conrad Black