Former media mogul Conrad Black is released

MIAMI – Former media mogul Conrad Black was released from a federal prison in Miami early Friday and faced deportation after serving about three years for defrauding investors.

Bureau of Prisons spokesman Chris Burke did not give an exact time on when Black was released and said he didn't have any other details.

Black, whose empire once included the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Telegraph of London, The Jerusalem Post and small papers across the U.S. and Canada, had returned to prison last September to finish serving his sentence.

U.S. immigration officials said they had custody over Black, who doesn't have American citizenship. Black is facing deportation and could travel to either Canada or Britain.

"I can confirm that he's in (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody," said bureau spokesman Nestor Yglesias He would not say where Black was headed, citing privacy laws.

A former member of the British House of Lords, he had been sentenced to more than six years in prison after his 2007 conviction in Chicago, but had then been released on bail two years later to pursue an appeal that was partially successful. A judge reduced his sentence to three years and he returned to prison last September. With time off for good behavior, he has completed his sentence.

Black's big chance to quash his convictions arose in June 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court sharply curtailed the disputed "honest services" laws that underpinned part of the case against him.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago tossed out two of Black's fraud convictions last year, citing that landmark ruling. But it said one conviction for fraud and one for obstruction of justice were not affected by the Supreme Court's ruling. The fraud conviction, the judges concluded, involved Black and others taking $600,000 and had nothing to do with honest services. It was, they asserted, straightforward theft.

Black — who received the title of Lord Black of Crossharbour — was known for a grand lifestyle, including a $62,000 birthday party for his wife, a swanky apartment on Park Avenue in New York and a trip to the island of Bora Bora.

Black's three-month trial drew international attention, heightened by his sometimes haughty comments. When shareholders grumbled about the cost of the Bora Bora trip, he wrote a memo saying: "I'm not prepared to re-enact the French revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility."

At the core of the honest-services charges against Black was his strategy, starting in 1998, of selling off the bulk of the small community papers, which were published in smaller cities across the United States and Canada.

Black and other Hollinger executives received millions of dollars in payments from the companies that bought the community papers in return for promises that they would not return to compete with the new owners.

Prosecutors said the executives pocketed the money, which they said belonged to shareholders, without telling Hollinger's board of directors.

At his resentencing hearing last year, several inmates wrote letters to the judge saying Black had changed their lives through lectures he gave on writing, history, economics and other subjects. But one prison employee claimed in an affidavit that Black had arranged for inmates — "acting like servants" — to iron his clothes, mop his floor and perform other chores. Another employee told her Black once insisted she address him as "Lord Black."