Former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black attacked Rupert Murdoch on Tuesday, calling the News Corporation chairman a "psychopath" and comparing him to Joseph Stalin.
The former owner of the Daily Telegraph in Britain and the Chicago Sun-Times, who spent 37 months in a U.S. prison for fraud, said the media magnate — a longtime business adversary — was an "astonishingly cold man."
"He's a psychopath … like Stalin, except that he doesn't kill people," Black told the Telegraph. "I'm not suggesting he's a homicidal psychopath — he just severs people out of his life like that. I have great admiration for what he's achieved but he's a terrible man."
Also read: Rupert Murdoch: Phone-Hacking Campaigners Are 'Scumbag Celebrities'
Canadian-born Black, who served in the House of Lords and became a British national in 1999, was in the United Kingdom promoting his memoirs on the BBC satirical show, "Have I Got News For You."
That wasn't his first "psychopath" attack on Murdoch during his book tour.
"For 40 years [the establishment] knew how Murdoch ran his company and they did nothing but kiss his undercarriage," Black told the Daily Mail on Sunday. "Murdoch is a psychopath, a person of no emotional or ethical thought, governed entirely by an expedient analysis of what his self-interest requires."
Black, infamous for his lavish lifestyle and opulence, was convicted in 2007 of embezzling money from his Chicago-based holding company, Hollinger International. He has since overturned 15 of the 17 charges against him and he hopes his new memoir, "A Matter of Principle," will help him repair his public image.
It's unlikely that News Corp.'s Fox properties will help him on that quest.