Will anything stick to Berlusconi?

By Leah McLaren - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Alessandro Garofalo/Reuters

On a balmy spring morning in a Fascist-era courthouse last week, Silvio Berlusconi’s hotly anticipated sex trial opened in Milan. But unlike the late night “bunga bunga” sessions in which the 74-year-old Italian prime minister is accused of participating, the proceedings showed little staying power. After less than 10 minutes, Giulia Turri—the presiding justice in what local media have dubbed “the broad squad” of female judges—adjourned the trial until May 31, the next date the Italian prime minister has said he is available to show up in person to defend himself.

As the gavel dropped, the stuffy courtroom packed with European press erupted in laughter and a mixture of Italian, French and English chatter. “It’s bizarre, yes, but we are used to bizarre states of affairs in Italy,” quipped Beppe Severgnini, an influential columnist for the newspaper Corriere della Sera. He arched an eyebrow under a pair of spectacles and brushed a piece of lint off his grey summer suit. “This trial is like High Noon—a shootout between the judiciary and Berlusconi. Who knows what will happen, but someone’s going to get hurt.”

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Judging the judge in Conrad Black’s appeal

By Nancy Macdonald - Monday, August 30, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Robyn Twomey/Corbis/ John Gress/Reuters

Richard Posner is famous, in legal circles, for a rare act of judicial insolence. In an antitrust ruling more than a decade ago, the appeals court judge wrote an opinion mocking a controlling U.S. Supreme Court precedent as “wobbly,” “moth-eaten,” and “unsound.” The high court’s response was even more surprising: they rolled over and unanimously struck the precedent. They even congratulated him.

Until recently, few in Canada had heard of Posner, a judge who has written some 53 books and who is widely considered one of America’s top legal minds. But from his perch at the U.S. Federal Court’s Seventh Circuit, Posner is once again considering Conrad Black’s case, after the Supreme Court returned it to the appellate panel. Black’s fate now rests largely with a man who has shown him no sympathy in the past—a judge who once described himself as “cold, furtive, callous,” with a cruel streak.

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What on earth will my husband think?

By Barbara Amiel - Friday, July 23, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Steve Carrera/Reuters

Last week I stood chequebook in hand at an immense Toronto Toyota dealership, ready to buy the world’s most hideously expensive minivan, and you’d think I had a nasty social disease. I had an appointment to test-drive the box-on-wheels, made after endless email exchanges, but the car wasn’t there.

As for the smart-looking headphoned receptionists chatting to air (or the car lounge lizards hanging around them), I was Grandma Moses. A line of salespeople loitered to the left.

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Conrad Black’s final battle

By Jason Kirby and Luiza Ch. Savage with Chris Sorensen - Monday, July 5, 2010 at 8:57 AM - 22 Comments

AP/ Canadian Press

An ardent student of history, Conrad Black knows about the long view. His own protracted battle with the U.S. government for his freedom and his reputation is turning into the kind of epic saga that could fill one of his loquacious tomes. The former newspaper magnate has drawn comparisons to Napoleon at Elba—in exile, unrepentant, his empire in tatters. And now, like his hero, he is plotting a return.

It has been more than two years since Conrad Black was locked up in a central Florida prison. But from behind bars the former media baron has soldiered on, determined to be vindicated from the charges that he looted Hollinger International at the expense of shareholders. He’s already dramatically recast the story line that was scrawled out against him. At the outset his accusers presented a straightforward yet lurid tale of unbridled greed and excess, in which Black ran a “corporate kleptocracy” and made off with US$400 million.

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The absurd trial of Geert Wilders

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 7:00 AM - 185 Comments

At a certain level, the trial of Geert Wilders for the crime of “group insult” of Islam is déjà vu all over again. For as the spokesperson for the Openbaar Ministerie put it, “It is irrelevant whether Wilders’s witnesses might prove Wilders’s observations to be correct. What’s relevant is that his observations are illegal.”

Ah, yes, in the Netherlands, as in Canada, the truth is no defence. My Dutch is a little rusty but I believe the “Openbaar Ministerie” translates in English to the Ministry for Openly Barring People. Whoops, my mistake. It’s the prosecution service of the Dutch Ministry of Justice. But it shares with Canada’s “human rights” commissions an institutional contempt for the truth.

As for “Wilders’s witnesses,” he submitted a list of 18, and the Amsterdam court rejected no fewer than 15 of them. As with Commissar MacNaughton and her troika of pseudo-judges presiding over the Maclean’s trial in British Columbia, it’s easier to make the rules up as you go along.

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Jacob Zuma: not so rotten after all

By Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 4:29 PM - 2 Comments

By now, Jacob Zuma’s South Africa should be careening toward the ranks of failed African states. Eight months ago, after an election anointed him president of the continent’s proudest democracy, editorialists everywhere drew thinly veiled comparisons to Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, who turned Africa’s shining light into a country that rivals only Somalia for sheer dysfunction. Even the most generous assessments had Zuma—once described as an “embarrassment” by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu—shackled by “suspicion” and “doubt” about his shambolic past, and fitness to lead Africa’s biggest economy. Yet under Zuma, South Africa has made pragmatic, positive strides in many areas, including health and the economy.

Early indicators were not good. Zuma, a former goatherd with no formal schooling and a stable of wives, has also twice stood trial. In April, the fraud, corruption and racketeering charges he’d been fighting for almost a decade were dropped, and in 2006, he was acquitted of rape (despite the acquittal, the case revealed “shocking” judgment, according to noted South African journalist Mark Gevisser: “He had unprotected sex with an unstable HIV-positive woman who regarded him as a ‘father.’ ”) To the chattering classes, Zuma seemed to embody the “rottenness” that famed novelist André Brink described as having befallen the country in A Fork in the Road, a memoir published in the weeks running up to the election.

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Accused bomb plotter went to his father for advice: informant

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 11:26 AM - 4 Comments

Accused bomb plotter was acting on his father’s advice: informant (Canadian Press)

An accused Canadian terrorist on trial for his role in an attempted bomb plot had the full support of his father, a prominent Muslim scholar who assured his son that an attack on Canadian soil was “Islamically correct,” and if innocent civilians are killed, it is “their destiny.”

The damning allegation—which the father vehemently denies—was leveled Tuesday during another round of testimony by Shaher Elsohemy, a civilian informant who was paid more than $4 million to infiltrate the so-called “Toronto 18.” Elsohemy, whose entire family is now in the witness protection program, said Shareef Abdelhaleem sought the advice of his dad, Tariq, before committing himself to mass murder. “Abdelhaleem said he obtained a religious fatwa from his father,” he testified on Tuesday. “He told me his father told him there was nothing wrong with it. In other words, it was acceptable. And if civilians were to be there, that was their destiny.”

With his dad’s approval, Elsohemy said, Abdelhaleem stopped wavering and started acting. He urged the RCMP’s undercover mole to purchase three tonnes of explosive fertilizer, brainstormed ways to profit from an attack, and suggested to the other suspects that, for maximum effect, they trigger the explosions on three consecutive days. “He informed me that by obtaining this fatwa from his father, things are clear for him,” Elsohemy said. “He has no doubts about the Islamic correctness. Had there been before, there is no doubt anymore.”

Tariq Abdelhaleem, Shareef’s father, is a civil engineer by training and a lecturer at the Dar Al-Arqam Islamic Centre in Mississauga, Ont. Until recently, the 67-year-old worked on a contract basis for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the Crown corporation that oversees the country’s nuclear reactors. Because he’s scheduled to testify as a witness for the defence, Tariq is not allowed attend any other part of the hearing. However, when contacted by Maclean’s via e-mail, he called Elsohemy a liar. “I have never said such a thing…what do you expect him to say!” he wrote. “I have been consistent throughout my life, in my writings and speeches, that it is completely un-Islamic to kill any person in Canada or anywhere else.” He added later: “This is [Elsohemy’s] day in court. We will have ours.”

Of the 18 suspects rounded up in the summer of 2006, only four were accused of actually participating in the bomb plot that dominated media coverage of the case. The other suspects, though charged with terrorism crimes, had no idea that a core group was armed with remote-controlled detonators and a list of three targets: the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Toronto headquarters of Canada’s spy agency, and an unnamed military base. All they needed to complete their plan was a deadly batch of explosive fertilizer. Unfortunately for them, the Muslim businessman they trusted to orchestrate that delivery turned out to be on the RCMP’s payroll.

Three of the four bombing suspects, including the ringleader, have since confessed and pleaded guilty, but Abdelhaleem is fighting the charges in court, claiming he had no knowledge of what the others were planning, and that Shaher Elsohemy was motivated by dollar signs, not the truth. When his trial finally began on Monday, he laid eyes on his old “friend” for the first time in almost four years.

Although much has been made of the mole’s hefty compensation (many in the Muslim community have branded Elsohemy a traitor) his payday garnered barely a mention during his first two days on the witness stand. Instead, Elsohemy provided a blow-by-blow account of how he went from an Air Canada flight attendant with a slew of side businesses to the Mounties’ primary asset inside the country’s biggest anti-terror bust. Among the many revelations, one thing is now clear: there is a long history of bad blood between the Elsohemys and the Abdelhaleems.

Their paths first crossed in 2004, when Elsohemy, looking to pursue a “proper Islamic education,” enrolled in weekend classes at Dar Al-Arqam. His teacher was Tariq Abdelhaleem; Shareef was one of his classmates. “Our relationship started to go from there,” he testified. They went to the gym together, ate Chinese food, and later booked a weeklong vacation to Morocco with Elsohemy’s younger brother. That’s when the trouble began.

Near the end of the trip, Abdelhaleem accused the younger brother of stealing his money; Elsohemy sided with his friend, forcing his sibling to hand over the cash. Back in Canada, things only got worse. When someone smashed the front windshield of Abdelhaleem’s convertible BMW, he again pointed the finger at Elsohemy’s little brother. And this time, Tariq—his teacher—joined in on the accusations. “I had respect for both Shareef and Tariq Abdelhaleem, but things became a little bit shaky,” Elsohemy testified. “The threats were just increasing.” By the end of 2005, Shaher and Shareef were no longer speaking to one another.

In yet another twist, Elsohemy was dealing with a separate headache at the same time: U.S. Customs. For reasons that remain unclear, the Americans wouldn’t let him board a Miami-bound jet, jeopardizing his job as a flight attendant. Air Canada, he says, told him to stay home until the matter was resolved. Then, in December 2005, he received a surprise phone call from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The spy agency wanted a meeting, and he happily obliged, anxious to clear up any misunderstanding about his border problems.

He was so anxious, in fact, that he offered the CSIS agent a juicy hypothesis: Maybe the Americans are suspicious of me because Tariq Abdelhaleem is my teacher?

Indeed, the elder Abdelhaleem is no stranger to CSIS. Long before the son was accused of plotting death and destruction, Canada’s spies were keeping a close eye on the father. Abdelhaleem himself admits that his phones are tapped and his e-mails are monitored. Why? “Because I talk,” he told Maclean’s two years ago. “But I don’t condone violence. I never condone violence. I swear to God—to Allah in heaven—if I know somebody is going to do this, the first thing to do is to go and report it. I’m not going to hesitate for one second. It’s totally wrong to kill innocent people. How can you kill innocent people? It’s not in my book.”

After his son was taken into custody, Tariq launched captiveincanada.com, a website that “appeals to the Canadian intellect and conscience” to learn the truth about his son and the rest of the “Toronto 18.” In a post published five months ago, Abdelhaleem revealed that CSIS “denied me a permit to enter my job site as a Nuclear Planner; a job I held for the last 20 years in Canada.” He continued: “It is obvious that the agency has determined that I am a dangerous person, all of a sudden, in spite of the fact that I have no role [in] the so called ‘terror’ plot, or, otherwise, I would be in a cell room wearing an orange jumper!” (Whether CSIS has truly banned him from nuclear plants has not been independently confirmed).

In February 2006, Shareef Abdelhaleem rekindled his relationship with Elsohemy, right around the time he started working with CSIS, and later, the RCMP. Elsohemy testified that his friend was a changed man. A talented computer programmer who earned a six-figure income was suddenly obsessed with jihad videos and joining the fight in Afghanistan. By April 2006, he was obsessed with something else: planting truck bombs in downtown Toronto. A heavy man with a dark black beard and a shaved head, Abdelhaleem is now facing two charges under the Criminal Code: participation in a terrorist organization, and intent to cause an explosion. Despite the other confessions, he is considered innocent unless proven guilty.

Maclean’s requested an interview with him last week, but through his father, he declined. During a series of jailhouse discussions in 2008, however, Abdelhaleem professed his innocence and vowed to sue the federal government after his acquittal. “I was not involved,” he said. “I am just listening to people talking. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t build no damn detonator, I didn’t pay for anything, I didn’t rent anything. It wasn’t my idea.”

When asked about Elsohemy, he answered this way: “I always knew what a low-life he was. I don’t care to see him in my life again, but I need him to go on the stand so I can get the answers I want so I can walk. Let’s put it this way: He has reason to lie. He has very strong motivations, which will come up in court.”

The informant is back on the stand Wednesday morning.

Seeking a nation's forgiveness

By Chris Tenove - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 10:02 AM - 5 Comments

When the Khmer Rouge forces were routed from Phnom Penh in January 1979, they left behind a ruined and vacant city. Following the odour of decomposing bodies, Cambodian and Vietnamese liberators discovered a high school surrounded by barbed wire fences. Inside they found 14 prisoners whose throats had been cut. Other rooms contained grisly evidence of torture: whips, lengths of chain, thousands of written confessions, photographs of beaten and terrified men and women. Scrawled across documents were orders from the prison’s commandant. On one interrogation record, he wrote, “beat until he tells everything.” Beside a list of names: “kill every last one.”

This was S-21 prison, and last week that commandant made a final appearance in court before a panel of crimson-robed judges, who will issue their verdict in early 2010. Kaing Guek Eav, known by his revolutionary name, “Duch,” is the first defendant at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a United Nations-backed tribunal. His trial has captivated Cambodians. Broadcast live on television, it’s debated at dinner tables and on radio programs. Each day, hundreds of Cambodians travel to Phnom Penh to attend in person, many leaving their villages in the middle of the night for the long bus ride. “I want to go to the trial to see what an evil person looks like,” an elderly woman told me on the eve of her journey. “I want to see his real face.”

Since the trial began in March, Cambodians have heard chilling testimony about torture techniques and bizarre medical experiments. But they have also been profoundly challenged by Duch’s defence. Duch was not an evil man, his lawyers argue, but a flawed one. Experts have testified he is now capable of compassion and ready to be reintegrated into society. Duch himself has suggested something many Cambodians would have considered preposterous: that they forgive him. He set the tone of the trial from his first statement. “I am responsible for the crimes committed at S-21, especially the tortures and execution of the people there,” he declared on March 31. He apologized to the victims and their families, and to all survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, before concluding, “I would like you to please leave an open window for me to seek forgiveness.” Continue…

'The last great Nazi trial'

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:06 AM - 33 Comments

It is being touted as the last great Nazi trial. In November, John Demjanjuk—now first on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most-wanted war criminals—will appear before a Munich court. He is charged with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder for his role as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk is 89, and those in favour of prosecuting him feel a sense of urgency. “It’s a race against time,” says Michael Scharf, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who has worked on the trials of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. “They’re trying to close the book on justice before [his] life ends naturally.”

For the most vehement advocates of prosecution, it has been an agonizing wait. Demjanjuk moved to the United States soon after the war, and was able to live quietly for 25 years before evidence of a darker past was unearthed. In the 1980s, he was brought to trial, but his conviction was later overturned on grounds that he had been mistakenly identified as “Ivan the Terrible,” a notorious sadist at Treblinka death camp in Poland. Only in 2000 was another investigation initiated; even then, nine more years passed until German officials issued a warrant for his arrest. In May of this year—some 30 years after the process began—he was deported to Germany, where his trial will begin on Nov. 30. Continue…

Liveblogging the David Frost trial (II)

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, November 3, 2008 at 9:51 AM - 8 Comments

Final submissions today, and there are huge questions hanging over the Crown’s case. Bear in mind that the players are supposed to be the victims here: Frost was in a position of trust over them. The girls are presumed to be participants in consensual sex.

Yet the one player we watched on Thursday was testifying for the defence, not the Crown. The gist of his story? That Frost, though deeply involved in his players’ lives, had nothing to do with group sex in which these young men appeared to be regularly engaged from the time they were, oh, 16 years old, and living in Deseronto, Ont., while playing for Frost’s team, the Quinte Hawks. There was a discernible sense of incredulity in the room toward this testimony. If Frost was not engaged in group sex involving with the players, a cynic might have thought, he was the only one within five miles who can say so.

The Crown was able to convey the sense that Frost’s former players are protecting him for some reason. He was clearly a strong presence in their careers and personal lives, at times driving wedges between them and their families. He even wrote them a kind of manifesto, which our witness last Thursday claimed he filed away and forgot about.

Still, the “reasonable doubt” hurdle looks awfully high. When your victims are testifying for the defence …

P.S. I hope to be a little more expansive in my own submissions today. I’m working off my lap-top keyboard, thanks to a high-speed internet “stick” supplied by the folks at Rogers. Wireless reception is a bit spotty in the court, but it should be a vast improvement over my BlackBerry.

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Sorry for the delay everyone. Turns out reception in the court isn’t good enough to support computer transmission. Here’s what’s happened so far:

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10:40 a.m. — Under way at last, with a surprise final witness for the defence: Dr. Hubert Manning. This is the long-awaited “third-testicle evidence.” It turns out Dr. Manning is Frost’s GP. Recall, this was raised by the defence as potentially exculpatory evidence, as one of the women who testified to participating in group sex with Frost and his players did not recall seeing it.

Dr. Manning has vague memory of Frost arriving in early 1994 with some sort of groin hernia, for which he received treatment from another physician. By June 1994, Frost had “significant swelling”—a hematoma—below the hernia site, right at the crease where the leg meets the abdomen. “Not the scrotum exactly. Just adjacent to the pubic area.” It’s size at the time was 5x5x3 cm, says the doctor.

Subsequent visits revealed that it had turned into a bulb of congealed blood lying under the skin. By 1998, Frost “had a large, plum-sized lump, protruding, just to the left of the scrotum, “pointing downward.” It was adjacent to the shaft of the penis, says Dr. Manning.

“It’s consistency is harder than a testicle,” and visible to the naked eye, says the good doctor. “Those kinds of swellings shouldn’t be there. It’s obvious, is probably the best way to describe it.”

10:55 a.m. — On cross-examination by Crown, Dr. Manning testifies that the lump is located at the base of the penis, to the left of the pubic area above the scrotum. Continue…

The Frost Trial

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 2:48 PM - 3 Comments

Former NHL-certified player agent David Frost is on trial in Napanee, Ont., charged with four counts of sexually exploiting two young hockey players on the now-defunct Quinte Hawks, a Junior-A club of which he was head coach. Frost is perhaps best known as the ex-coach and agent of Mike Danton, né Jefferson, a former St. Louis Blues forward who’s currently serving seven-and-a-half years in a federal prison in Minnesota for trying to have Frost murdered. Frost denies Danton tried to kill him, even though he pled guilty to the charges. And, similarly, both alleged victims in the ongoing trial deny any sexual abuse took place. The prosecution’s case relies on several women-teenagers at the time-who have already testified that Frost participated in three- and four-way sex with them and the alleged victims, and that he controlled his players’ sex lives down to the minutest detail. Frost faces no charges for having sex with the women, even though they were under 18, because prosecutors determined he wasn’t in a “position of trust or authority” over them.

Maclean’s Charlie Gillis is liveblogging the proceedings:

Monday November 3, 2008

Final submissions today, and there are huge questions hanging over the Crown’s case. Bear in mind that the players are supposed to be the victims here: Frost was in a position of trust over them. The girls are presumed to be participants in consensual sex. Continue…

Finding Comedy in the Muslim World

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 11:43 PM - 0 Comments

For all the seriousness of the charges, the trial of Momin Khawaja has provided some moments of great hilarity. A lot of it comes from the attempts by the  Crown attorneys and Justice Rutherford to come to grips with the peculiar mix of hip-hop and jihad that is emerging from the emails of MMK to the main witness, Mohammed Babar.

Early in the day, Rutherford expressed a certain amount of confusion over the meaning of the word “nigga”:

After the e-mail was presented in court, Judge Douglas Rutherford noted that the references to niggas “seem to cover a broad ambit.”

Mr. Babar told the judge that it’s a slang word whose use is difficult to explain: “In one sense, niggas means everyone involved,” he testified. “But to understand which niggas are niggas, you have to know the people and understand from the email who he was referring to.”

The judge replied: “That clears up how unclear it is.”

While the defence does not question the authenticity of the emails, one possible point of  contention is over the meaning of some of the coded terms used. In his testimony  Babar gave his interpretation of the coded messages contained in the emails. For example, “porn vid” = terrorist training video, “Yahoodiland” = Israel. The day ended with this exchange, beginning with the reading of the quoted passage from a final email:

From Khawaja to Babar: “next time, nigga, I’ll make sure to get your Mountain Dew ahead of time. I’ll bring some in December. inshallah. Keep in touch. Yas.”
Asked by Crown attorney Bill Boutzouvis what ‘Mountain Dew’ means, the U.S.-raised Mr. Babar said it means Mountain Dew. “I like Mountain Dew,” he said, explaining it it wasn’t available in Pakistan.

I swear, these guys should be given their own talk show.

From Andrew Duffy