Convicted felon Conrad Black (boy, saying that just never gets old, does it?) assembled a crack team of defence attorneys for his media-circus fraud trial this year: Canadian living legend Edward Greenspan and the equally august Chicagoan Edward Genson. In the end, it still wasn’t enough, although now we may know why. With the guilty verdicts reached and the sentences handed down, Greenspan burst like a dam yesterday, exposing all the gory details of the defence team’s various dysfunctionalities. Greenspan and Genson didn’t get along, with Greenspan feeling like the bumpkin Canuck who was made to sit at the kids’ table. “This is America,” Greenspan said. “They think they’re the best and treat the rest of us like we’re stupid.”
And we were shocked — shocked! — to learn that Barbara Amiel isn’t exactly Miss Congeniality. Greenspan says she was meddlesome, pushing for witnesses that the defence didn’t want on the stand, second-guessing his work, and generally putting everyone’s teeth on edge. “If it rained in Chicago, she blamed me. Everything that she didn’t like that Genson did became my fault because I picked him. She blamed me for this or that. It got in the way throughout the trial,” Greenspan said. The co-defendants’ attorneys apparently avoided Greenspan in the hallways during lunch hour, too (seriously, is this the fraud trial of the century or an episode of Degrassi?). “The knives were out,” Greenspan says. It appears they still are.