Hi John: Even-handed; that's me. :) You raise an excellent question about Radler. Here's what juror Monica Prince told the Star:

Radler, who pleaded guilty to fraud in exchange for his co-operation, was supposed to be the prosecution's star witness but, by the final rebuttal, the prosecutors had distanced themselves from him. "Radler, he was a farce," Prince said. "Radler sounded stupid on that stand, he kept contradicting himself. I said, 'he's playing us.' For (Black and Radler) to run a business for so long, and you're talking to someone intelligent like Conrad Black, you're not going to come off silly like that." His testimony played little if any role in their decision, she added.

Prince told the Chicago Sun-Times that she thought Radler was trying to cover for Black. Juror Tina Kadisak told the Globe she was also underwhelmed by Radler's testimony. Here is what she told the Sun-Times (according to the N-P):

"We were kind of hoping he'd come in and tell us the whole story and make it an easy case to figure out, but he didn't do that. He didn't give us something where we could go, 'Oh, look, there's the story. Everybody's guilty.' It was still really difficult."

I discounted the absence of a paper trail myself. Radler might be a reptile, but he's not a dumb reptile. Both Radler and Black are sophisticated businessmen. If they were going to conduct a systematic fraud against the company, I don't think they'd be paper-trailing themselves. But as you say in your amusing anecdote about Radler, he was a details man and a micro-manager. If he's coming across to the jury as being deliberately vague, I don't think it's a stretch to believe that's because he was trying to be deliberately vague. So we wait and see what the prosecution does. Cheers Bill D. PS: My posts on this trial really haven't received much attention from visitors to this blog. Weird.