David Radler, of Conrad Black Infamy, Adds Quebec Paper to Holdings

By: E&P Staff David Radler, who turned star witness against his former business partner in the U.S. fraud trial of Conrad Black, has added another newspaper to his Alta Newspaper Group, the Sherbrooke (Quebec) Record reported Tuesday.

The Record, an Alta group property, reported that Sharon McCully, owner and publisher of The Townships Outlet, has sold the twice-monthly newspaper to Radler.

McCully will take over management of the Record and its sibling Brome County News as part of the transaction, the paper reported. No other terms of the transaction were disclosed.

"By pooling our resources, I think the English-speaking Townships community will be well served with a daily, a weekly and a bimonthly newspaper," McCully told the paper. She spent 20 years as a reporter and editor at the Record, the paper noted.

Radler and fellow Quebec native Black built Hollinger International into a newspaper empire with hundreds of small community papers, but also internationally known publications such as the Daily Telegraph in London, the Jerusalem Post and, in the United States, the Chicago Sun-Times.

Publisher of the Sun-Times was one of Radler's titles when, in 2005, following a couple of years of controversy with minority shareholders, he, Chairman Black and three other top Hollinger executives were accused of fraud for taking allegedly improper or bogus fees related to the sales of the many of the community papers in the U.S. and Canada.

In a plea bargain, Radler pled guilty to one count of mail fraud and agreed to testify at the trial of Black and the others. Black is currently serving in a federal prison in Florida. Radler, sentenced to a 29-month prison term, reported to a Pennsylvania prison in February 2008. He was transferred to a Canadian prison that September and released on parole in December 2008.