"His astonishing career as well as the vagaries of his romantic and family life provide practically unlimited possibilities for dramatization."

Conrad Black said it a year ago about Franklin D. Roosevelt, the subject of a 1,300-page biography Black found time to write before his fall from corporate grace.

It could just as well be said of Black himself -- and in fact a TV movie is in production under the title Shades of Black.

The end of the epic remains distant and obscure, but the tale took another dark twist Thursday as U.S. federal prosecutors in Chicago charged Black and his associates with fraud in connection with an alleged plan to divert more than $80 million US from his former newspaper company, Hollinger International Inc.

Warrants have been issued for the arrests of Black, John Boultbee and Peter Atkinson. If they do not appear voluntarily in U.S. federal court in Chicago, the U.S. Attorney will seek their extradition.

The story began 61 years ago in the well-upholstered household of George Black, a Toronto brewery executive who fathered Conrad and his late brother Montagu.

Conrad, displaying an early flair for daring commercial transactions, was rusticated from tony Upper Canada College for selling purloined examination papers.

After university, he and friends David Radler and Peter White bought the Sherbrooke Record, a small Quebec daily that became the foundation of a media empire which at its peak in the late 1990s included the London Telegraph, most of Canada's big-city dailies, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and a swarm of smaller publications.

Black became a protege of industrialists Bud McDougald and E.P. Taylor, and after McDougald's death he took control in 1978 of Argus Corp. whose holdings included Dominion Stores, Massey Ferguson, Hollinger Mines and Norcen Energy.

Today, Argus is a rump holding company and only the Sun-Times and assorted minor holdings remain of the Hollinger International enterprise, where Black has resigned or been dismissed from all executive and board positions and which is suing him and his confederates for hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly purloined by a "corporate kleptocracy.''

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit a year ago accusing Black and Radler, his longtime second-in-command, of "fraudulent and deceptive'' activity at Hollinger International, after Black had invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during an SEC interrogation.

In September, Radler pleaded guilty in Chicago to criminal fraud, agreeing to serve 29 months in prison and pay a $250,000-US fine.

It is assumed he also will testify in Black's trial.

It's a long way down from 1986, when Black acquired the Telegraph group of London-based conservative newspapers in a buy-low transaction which in a single bound deposited him into British high society.

In May 2001, after selling most of Hollinger's Canadian holdings to CanWest Global Communications, Black renounced his Canadian citizenship to claim a British peerage that Prime Minister Jean Chretien had blocked.

As Lord Black of Crossharbour, he and his second wife, glamorous right-wing columnist Barbara Amiel, indulged in a lifestyle of ostentatious consumption and partying with fellow celebrities.

Black and Amiel had wed in 1992 after his divorce from his first wife, his former secretary Shirley Walters, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. It was Amiel's fourth marriage.

With Amiel, there were mansions in London, Toronto and Palm Beach, Fla., and fashion-magazine features about Lady Black's wardrobe -- in one of which she confided that "my extravagance knows no bounds,'' which she later explained was meant as a joke.

According to Hollinger documents, the personal expenses they charged to the company ranged from the lease of a corporate jet at more than $3 million a year to $42,870 for a birthday party for Lady Black at a New York restaurant, and $2,463 for her purchases of handbags.

Early this month, Black sued the U.S. government over the FBI's seizure of $8.9 million US in proceeds from the sale of a New York apartment. Black had acquired the 4,500-square-foot Park Avenue property from Hollinger in 2000 for about $3 million.

That lawsuit included a hint that the unemployed former press baron, who has spent undisclosed millions of dollars hiring top-rank lawyers in the past two years, is in financial straits.

It noted that criminal action against him appeared imminent, and stated that without the money from the apartment sale Black "will be hamstrung in his ability to challenge the substance of many allegations set forth.''