“Back to Radler,” said defence counsel Benito Romano late in the day yesterday. It all comes back to David Radler, one way or the other. Conrad Black’s lieutenant since the Sherbrooke Record days nearly 40 years ago, he was the consummate deal-maker. Unlike his partner, he had no emotional attachment to the papers he ran: He bought them, he overhauled them, and, when the time was right, he sold them. And, as his old colleagues see it, that’s what Radler’s doing now: cashing in. Only this time it’s them he’s selling. As Mr Romano put it, “This case is his most important deal. He sold a story and the government bought it.”

Indeed. And the price was right: a fine and a couple of years served not in the Federal penitentiary but one of the more agreeable country clubs of the British Columbia prison system. (Defence references to the general cushiness of Canadian jails were strongly objected to by the prosecution and slapped down by the judge.) Unlike his old comrade, who lost the papers to which he had the fiercest attraction and is (for the moment) out of the news business entirely, David Radler still runs four newspaper groups of small but lucrative North American titles, such as the local daily in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, home of the celebrated groundhog, to whom Mr Radler, in his cuddlier moments, bears a curious resemblance. I last heard from him a year or two back when he called up to enquire about carrying my column in the Punxsutawney paper and the rest of the group. He offered me $3 per column. I think that was per paper, though it may have been for the entire group. David Radler has always prided himself on never overpaying for content. Of course, that was just an opening bid. No doubt he was prepared to go up to $3.75.

Still, it is a remarkable thought that, if the prosecution get their way, everybody but David Radler will go to jail in the United States for what were essentially David Radler’s sales of David Radler’s papers. Indeed, in many cases he was selling Hollinger’s American papers to small companies run by …David Radler. And, while his colleagues are languishing in their cells decade in, decade out, he’ll still be running those self-same papers.

Radler is the heart of the prosecution case, and the core of the defence narrative. Yesterday, Black counsel Edward Genson produced a map of the world divided by a new iron curtain. On one side – east of Toronto and including the United Kingdom – Conrad reigned. The other side – western Canada and the entire United States – was Radler’s domain. In Blackland, the big boffo 3.5 billion-dollar deal with CanWest – the largest in Canadian corporate history at that time – was done by the book: everything in writing, in triplicate, lawyered and audited up to the hilt, and with various members of the Asper family actively demanding non-compete agreements, and confirming that that was their wish on many occasions since. South of the border, meanwhile, David Radler was selling The Dead Buzzard’s Gulch Weekly Shopper to himself for a buck with a six-figure non-competition agreement thrown in for agreeing not to compete with himself.

To those of us who worked for Hollinger, that’s certainly a more plausible narrative than the one offered by the prosecution. As Mr Romano said, “Peter Atkinson told the truth to the Special Committee. That’s what innocent people do. David Radler lied to the Special Committee. That’s what guilty people do.” It may be that the prosecution turned the wrong guy.