Margaret Wente writes about the Black saga today in The Globe and Mail, and substantially deals with how David Radler -- who, according to Wente, the recently indicted Conrad Black is now hinting is responsible for anything bad -- ran the Chicago Sun-Times.

Radler was Black's right-hand man and president of Hollinger International and a former publisher of the Sun-Times.

An excerpt:

Mr. Radler squeezed the Sun-Times, the ninth-largest paper in the United States, exactly the way he squeezed all of Hollinger's small-town papers. "He turned off the escalators to save money," says Mr. (Dan) Miller (the paper's business editor). "Then he shut down one of the elevators. The phone system was one step above two tin cans with a string. And the place was was filthy." The editorial budget was cut to the bone, and then some. Meantime, Mrs. Black, who rarely ventured into the building, was collecting more than $100,000 (U.S.) a year for her editorial advice. The money barely covered her Manolos.

Wente sees Barbara Amiel Black's shoe fetish -- along with her Vanity Fair spread and famous dictum that "I have an extravagance that knows no bounds" -- as being the Blacks' undoing.

As it all began to unravel, Mrs. Black sent an e-mail to then-editor Mike Cook (sic; it's actually Michael Cooke). Mr. Miller read it. She assured Mr. Cook that she had always been there to advise him on any editorial matters -- and asked her to send her an e-mail back to confirm, for the record, that it was so. The bean-counters, meantime, had asked her husband to reimburse the compnay for a trip the couple took to Bora Bora on the corporate jet. Mr. Black was not inclined.

"Needless to say, no such outcome is acceptable," he allegedly replied.

Oh, to have lived in the 19th century, when a lord was a lord was a lord.