Conrad Black's Amazing Vanishing Rap Sheet

Want Conrad Black to write for your publication? He's got plenty of time to oblige -- 6 1/2 years, to be precise. Just don't get too specific about that part.

Black, like just about everybody else of note, has been contributing to The Daily Beast, which yesterday posted his review of Michael Wolff's book about Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News. (Black, who used to own a fair bit of the news himself as chairman of Hollinger International, calls it "a very uneven read.") Unlike most of the other contributors, however, he's doing it from prison.

Here's how the author bio at the bottom of the review currently reads:

Conrad Black is the author of biographies of Maurice Duplessis, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard M. Nixon, was the publisher of the London Telegraph newspapers and Spectator, and founded the National Post of Canada. He has been a life peer in the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour since 2001.

An earlier version of the same article, however, featured a somewhat longer bio that made reference, albeit obliquely, to the fraud and obstruction of justice conviction that resulted in his current imprisonment: "He has been engaged in a dispute with the US Justice Department and the SEC over the governance of his former companies for several years -- civil and appellate litigation continue." That sentence is now missing.

And ever the earlier version of the bio appears to be a sanitized version of one that was attached to an earlier piece he wrote about John McCain. That version concluded, "Currently, he is incarcerated in a federal facility in Florida."

Did Black make it clear that his legal travails are not to be mentioned if he's to keep contributing? I emailed Daily Beast editor Edward Felsenthal to find out. I'll let you know if I hear back.

Update: Felsenthal sheds some light: "I actually read it and cut it myself last night, unprompted by Conrad. We have writers who have gone through various life miseries, none of them mentioned in their bios. Except for Eric Idle's, who wrote it himself and revels in his misery."