Contents
[ad_1]
Sailing onboard a 50-metre yacht named after his favourite daughter as it cruised the Atlantic, Robert Maxwell had all the appearances of a man of good fortune.
He was the domineering patriarch of a large family with a vast Italianate mansion overlooking Oxford, famous friends and a helicopter that could take him to London at a moment’s notice.
However, after waking from a fitful sleep on a cool November day in 1991, Maxwell was alone and, apparently, too close to the edge of the boat.
Back home, the empire he spent four decades building was speedily unravelling, crippled by a mountain of debt the mogul was unable to pay.
With the scandal only days away from being made public, the billionaire had flown to Gibraltar for a “few days’ rest” onboard his yacht.
He spent his holiday dining out in his usual extravagant style, floating in the ocean, and playing roulette at a local casino.
It seemed liked the perfect break, until staff went to rouse him from his bed one day and found his room empty.
The official ruling at an inquest found he died by a heart attack, combined with accidental drowning.
Others suspect he jumped, a desperate final act to avoid the trouble that was waiting for him upon his return home.
And then there is another conspiracy theory that, while often ruled out as absurd, persists to this day: Maxwell was pushed.
Those onboard the Lady Ghislaine claim they never saw Maxwell tumble from the boat.
According to the police report, the last time the media mogul was seen alive was about 4:25am.
By late afternoon, Robert Maxwell’s body was found, naked and floating offshore, by the Spanish coast guard.
His mysterious death set off a chain of events that culminated in the collapse of his newspaper empire, the bankruptcy of his children and a wave of conspiracy theories that persist to this day.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers also allege that it set her on a path that eventually led her to Jeffrey Epstein.
The poor Czech boy with a big dream
He was the poor boy from Czechoslovakia who escaped the Nazis, built a vast business empire and went on to become one of the biggest names in the United Kingdom.
Born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch to impoverished Yiddish-speaking parents, Maxwell was selling trinkets on the streets of Bratislava in 1939 when the Nazis marched in.
Almost every member of his immediate family was taken to Auschwitz, where his mother and most of his siblings were killed.
However, 16-year-old Ján snipped off the locks of hair that gave him away as a Hasidic Jew, fled to France where he joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile, and swiftly became a war hero.
In 1944, he met a young French interpreter, Elisabeth ‘Betty’ Maynard, to whom he proposed marriage with five promises.
“I shall win a Military Cross. I shall recreate a family. I shall make my fortune. I shall be Prime Minister of England. And I shall make you happy until the end of my days,” he said.
He kept only his first three vows to Betty.
After transferring to the British Army, he was awarded the Military Cross in 1945 for “heroism in the face of enemy action” when he stormed a German machine gun nest.
According to biographer Kirby Sommers, little Ján had been given two pieces of advice by his mother: Behave like an English gentleman, and never tell anyone you are Jewish.
And, so, after toying with the names Abraham Hoch, Ivan du Maurier and Leslie Jones, the British Army captain settled on a new identity: Ian Robert Maxwell.
In the years after WWII, he officially worked for the British Foreign Office in war-ravaged Berlin. However, with a reputation for bravery and his knowledge of up to nine languages, many suspect he was a spy.
All that is known for sure is that Maxwell spent his time in Germany building up business contacts so he could buy his first company, a textbook publisher that he renamed Pergamon Press.
As he slowly amassed his fortune, Robert and Betty also set about rebuilding the family he had lost.
Tragedy strikes the Maxwells
Together, they had nine children, though only seven made it to adulthood.
By the time baby Ghislaine was born in 1961, her doting father had gone from impoverished refugee, to war hero, to self-made millionaire.
However, not long after her birth, tragedy struck the young family. Her older brother, Michael, was crushed in a car accident that would leave him in a coma for the remaining six years of his life.
“This was the moment the family started to break apart,” says biographer and journalist John Preston, author of Fall: The Last Days of Robert Maxwell.
As the family spent months by Michael’s bedside hoping for a miracle, little Ghislaine stopped eating.
“One day, aged three, she planted herself in front of me and said simply, ‘Mummy I exist’,” Betty Maxwell wrote in her memoir, A Mind of My Own.
“I was devastated and, from that day on, we all made a great effort with her, fussing over her so much that she became spoiled.”
While Maxwell had always been a brash, bombastic man, his heartbreak over his son’s coma appears to have turned him into a fearsome bully.
Sunday lunches at their home in Headington Hill Hall became nightmarish for the Maxwell children.
“Another of Maxwell’s daughters described to me the kind of fear of watching the searchlight beam of her father’s gaze, move around the table towards her,” Preston told the UK Independent.
But little Ghislaine, who could charm her way past her father’s blustery exterior, remained her father’s favourite.
The cheeky heiress was known for her wild parties and pranks — she once asked her father’s helicopter pilot to put the chopper briefly in freefall to scare her friends.
As her mother became more interested in academia, it was Ghislaine who accompanied her father to public events.
In 1986, he paid $27 million for a 57-metre superyacht. He cracked a bottle of champagne over the hull and christened her Lady Ghislaine.
Maxwell’s rivalry with Rupert Murdoch
Nearly 20 years before he bought the yacht that would play a role in his downfall, Maxwell was set on becoming England’s Prime Minister.
The self-described socialist joined the Labour party in 1959, winning the seat of Buckingham five years later.
His political career seemed all but assured until Harold Wilson lost in 1970.
By then, Maxwell’s business career had also run into some trouble. He was dramatically expelled from the board of his own company, Pergamon Press, prompting an inquiry which later concluded: “We regret having to conclude that, notwithstanding Mr Maxwell’s acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company,” the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) found.
It was a significant blow to Maxwell’s reputation and devastating for the family.
However, by 1974, the publishing baron had found a way to wrestle back control of the crown jewel of his burgeoning empire and began to turn his attention to another long-held dream: the acquisition of a newspaper.
Maxwell had set his sights on purchasing the News of the World 13 years earlier, only to have it snatched from beneath his nose by a then-unknown newspaper man from Australia.
It would mark the start of an intense rivalry between Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch. Each time the publisher thought he was close to a deal, Murdoch would get there first.
The competition only further fuelled the businessman’s desire to own a paper. After losing to Murdoch three times, a desperate Maxwell finally claimed his prize in 1984.
In that year, he acquired the struggling Mirror Group at the rather steep price of 113 million pounds.
While headlines proclaimed him as the “Man who saved the Mirror”, editors and unions were in an uproar.
Clive Thornton, the chairman of the Mirror Group of only six months, resigned, telling reporters: ”I have no intention of working for Mr Maxwell.”
But the businessman was triumphant. As one of the few, left-leaning tabloids in the UK at the time, The Mirror elevated Maxwell to powerbroker status in Britain.
It also put him directly in the path of his long-time rival, Rupert Murdoch.
Mogul’s big spending spree
The competition between Murdoch and Maxwell was in full swing by the latter half of the 1980s.
“[Maxwell] picked up journalism quite quickly … he began to know what good front pages were,” former editor of The People, Bill Haggarty, told the BBC’s Witness program.
It was the era of rampant capitalism, excess consumption and the belief that “greed is good”.
Maxwell was on a spending spree that was fitting of the times. The scope of his purchases was as large as it was inexplicable: helicopter businesses, foreign television stations, football clubs and even a construction company.
As some wondered how Maxwell was able to fund it all, he would distract them with another purchase.
Maxwell “survived on publicity, on appearing to be rich”, says Roy Greenslade, a former editor of the Daily Mirror, in the podcast Power: The Maxwells.
Who would dare question the wealth of a man who hosted some of the country’s most-extravagant parties, dined with prime ministers and scientists and publicly sparred with businessmen?
One day he was rallying support for the famine in Ethiopia, the next he was helping fund the Commonwealth Games.
However, it wasn’t enough. By 1987, Maxwell’s interest had turned to America, where his rival Murdoch had already made his mark.
After the failed takeover bids of two companies, the mogul got into a bidding war and bought US publisher Macmillan for $US2.6 billion in 1988, millions more than anyone thought it was worth.
The purchase brought Maxwell more fame and status. But it came at a hefty price and would eventually sow the seeds of his downfall.
“In his own mind, his way to relieve stress was to do another deal. Maxwell had this view of himself as too big to fail,” Greenslade says in the podcast.
In order to buy Macmillan, Maxwell had accrued a substantial amount of debt. To keep the cash flowing, he continued to apply for loans from banks, while keeping his cash and collateral circling through a series of offshore bank accounts.
In January 1991, he acquired the struggling New York Daily News, taking on more debt before dispatching his favourite daughter to its headquarters in America as his representative.
Months later Maxwell was forced to sell a 49 per cent stake in Mirror Group to help alleviate his debts. Meanwhile, other cracks were forming beneath the surface of the Maxwell empire.
A BBC Panorama documentary on Maxwell’s business dealings had revealed allegations of financial irregularities.
Meanwhile, finance director Lawrence Guest was chasing Maxwell about the disappearance of millions from the company’s pension funds.
Maxwell assured him the money would be restored.
However, a month later, Maxwell departed England on a holiday and never returned. The money was gone.
House of cards collapses
Weeks after Maxwell’s body was fished out of the Atlantic, his secrets began to surface.
First came revelations that he had plundered hundreds of millions of dollars from the Mirror Group’s pension fund. Vast sums of cash had reportedly been funnelled to the family’s trusts in Liechtenstein.
All up, he was more than $1.8 billion dollars in debt.
Days before his death, he was asked by the Bank of England to come in for a meeting to explain a strange, $71 million hole in the pension fund.
While an inquest later listed his cause of death as a heart attack and accidental drowning, debate raged over what happened in the moment Maxwell lost his footing on the boat deck.
His close friend, Ken Lennox — who identified the body — insists it was an accident.
“He used to get up at night and pee over the stern of the ship. Everybody knew this,” he told the Guardian in 2019.
“The railings were wire. So I think he lost his balance, because he was very top-heavy.”
But with the glittering facade of his life about to fracture, some questioned whether Maxwell simply decided to leave his sons, Kevin and Ian, to pick up the pieces.
“He was a man who could not face the ignominy of jail, of being shown to be a liar and a thief. And he very much knew that was coming,” Greenslade told the Guardian.
Perhaps the wildest conspiracy theory of all was that Maxwell was a secret agent for Mossad, and that he was killed after trying to extort money out of the Israeli intelligence agency.
His daughter, Ghislaine, who would one day insist her former partner, Jeffrey Epstein, was murdered in a prison cell, insisted her father had been pushed from the boat.
”Ghislaine is the baby of the family and the one who was closest to her father,” her mother, Betty, told Vanity Fair weeks after her husband’s death.
”The whole of Ghislaine’s world has collapsed, and it will be very difficult for her to continue.”
Regardless of how he toppled from the yacht, Robert Maxwell left disaster in his wake.
“I’m in great financial difficulty,” said Betty, who once mixed with Britain’s elite in diamonds and furs.
“My husband’s will is impounded. I haven’t salted away anything, because I never for a minute believed that he’d leave me destitute.”
She denied claims that a secret fortune was hidden in Liechtenstein, and said her children had been left with nothing.
Like father, like daughter
With their patriarch dead, the House of Maxwell began to crumble.
“He is always painted as a saviour, coming from the skies,” Jim Boumelha, the former head of the Pergamon Press chapter of the National Union of Journalists in Britain, told the New York Times. “But it always ends in tears.”
Kevin, the anointed heir to the Mirror Group, became Britain’s biggest bankrupt after he was left with Maxwell’s $764 million in debt.
He and his brother Ian ended up in court, accused of taking part in their father’s fraud, although they were both acquitted.
And Ghislaine — who once accompanied her “Daddy” to royal receptions, Wimbledon matches and celebrity bashes — was left with “no money, no trusts, no funds anywhere”, according to Betty.
A year after her father’s death, she was living in a small apartment in New York and told Vanity Fair she was “broke”.
“I’m surviving — just,” she said. “But I would say we’ll be back. Watch this space.”
Just as her father had done, Ghislaine Maxwell had sought to reinvent herself by moving across the ocean.
A few months later, she met Jeffrey Epstein, another domineering, wealthy man whose life would also end in scandal and conspiracy.
Posted , updated
