Magic Alex

• 1. Introduction

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  Magic Alex arrived in England in 1965 with a student visa and a small plastic box full of randomly blinking lights. The box had no purpose. It did nothing. But John Lennon stared at it for hours while under the influence of LSD, and that was enough. Within two years, Yannis Alexis Mardas had been given his own laboratory by the Beatles, a British work visa, and a salary that would eventually reach £6,000 a year. He had also been handed a nickname that would follow him for the rest of his life.

  How does a television repairman from Greece end up at the centre of one of the most famous bands in history? How do a force field, a flying saucer, and a 72-track recording studio factor in? And what happens when the whole illusion finally collapses in a basement on Savile Row?

• 2. The Nothing Box

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  Mardas was 23 years old when he arrived in London, and his first foothold was through John Dunbar at the Indica Gallery. He moved into a flat with Dunbar on Bentinck Street, took work as a television repairman, and exhibited his Kinetic Light Sculptures at the Indica Gallery. It was Dunbar who brought Mardas into Brian Jones's orbit, and Jones who introduced him to Lennon.

  The Nothing Box was simple almost to the point of absurdity. A small plastic box with lights that blinked at random intervals. There was no signal, no code, no pattern. But to Lennon, sitting with it for hours, it carried the quality of a revelation. Lennon renamed him John Alexis Mardas, introduced him as his "new guru", and bestowed the title "Magic Alex".

  From there, the ideas began. A telephone that could recognise its owner's voice and identify who was calling. Paint that turned anything invisible. Car paint that changed colour at the flick of a switch. A force field that would surround the Beatles' homes. An X-ray camera. Wallpaper that doubled as speakers. Mardas later denied ever promising or discussing any of these things. Lennon, by his own account, was enraptured regardless.

  Dunbar, who had watched the whole process from the inside, was not impressed. He later described his flatmate in plain terms: "He was a fucking TV repairman: Yannis Mardas, none of this 'Magic Alex' shit!"

• 3. Inside Apple Corps

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  In September 1967, the Beatles set up a company for Mardas called Fiftyshapes Ltd. He was among the first employees of the newly formed Apple Corps, earning £40 a week and receiving 10 percent of any profits from his inventions.

  Mardas was given his own laboratory, Apple Electronics, at 34 Boston Place in Westminster. An American patent attorney named Alfred Crotti relocated to England to assist him. In a historical TV promo for Apple Corps, later included on the Beatles Anthology DVD, Mardas appears in a white laboratory coat. "Hello, I'm Alexis, from Apple Electronics," he says, before gesturing behind him to a collection of portable two-track recorders in wooden boxes, a studio recording machine, voltage meters, an oscilloscope, and a television screen displaying pulsating psychedelic shapes.

  A fire at the laboratory prevented him from ever presenting his inventions publicly. Mardas described his own approach with characteristic looseness: "I'm a rock gardener, and now I'm doing electronics. Maybe next year, I make films or poems. I have no formal training in any of these, but this is irrelevant."

  Paul McCartney recalled the Beatles' standard response to his ideas: "If you could do that, we'd like one." The collaboration extended beyond electronics. A Lennon-Mardas composition called "What's the New Mary Jane" was recorded and originally intended for inclusion on the White Album. Lennon later removed Mardas' songwriting credit for reasons that were never explained.

• 4. The Greek Island Scheme

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  On the 19th of July 1967, Lennon raised with the other Beatles a long-held idea: buying or leasing a Greek island where they could all live together. Mardas saw an opening. His father was a major in the Greek secret police, and Mardas told the group that this connection could smooth over the ownership complications that affected many Greek islands.

  On the 22nd of July 1967, Harrison, his wife Pattie Boyd, Ringo Starr, and road manager Neil Aspinall flew to Athens and spent the night at Mardas' parents' house. Lennon, Cynthia, their son Julian, McCartney, Jane Asher, Pattie's 16-year-old sister Paula Boyd, and assistants Mal Evans and Alistair Taylor followed. Their chartered yacht, the MV Arvi, was detained in Crete by bad weather, and the party waited in Athens for three days. Alistair Taylor complained that on a trip to a small hill village, the group rounded a corner "only to find hundreds of photographers clicking away at us" - which Mardas had organised.

  They eventually settled on an 80-acre island referred to as Leslo, which had a small fishing village, four beaches, a large olive grove, and four smaller neighbouring islands - one, in theory, for each Beatle. Taylor went back to London to handle the purchase. The Greek government granted permission, and £90,000 in special export dollars was acquired for the transaction. The Beatles then changed their minds. The export dollars were sold a few months later when exchange rates moved, turning a £11,400 profit - described as one of the few profitable business ventures of their career.

• 5. Maharishi and India

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  When the Beatles travelled to India to study meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Mardas and Neil Aspinall went with them. Starr had already returned to England, complaining about the food. McCartney left on the 24th of March 1968. Mardas and Lennon remained.

  From the moment Mardas arrived, he was suspicious of the Maharishi's hold over Lennon. On one of their frequent walks through the woods, he pointed out that the Maharishi always kept an accountant close by. Lennon acknowledged that he and Harrison were considering donating a large part of their income to Swiss bank accounts controlled by the Maharishi. When Mardas raised this directly with the Maharishi, the spiritual leader responded by offering Mardas money to build a high-powered radio station that could broadcast his teachings across all of India.

  Alcohol was banned at the ashram. Mardas smuggled some in from Dehra Dun. He then reported to Lennon and Harrison that the Maharishi had made a sexual advance toward a young American student and toward actress Mia Farrow. Farrow later wrote in her 1997 autobiography What Falls Away that she may have misinterpreted the supposed advance. But by then, Lennon and Harrison had already confronted the Maharishi. His answers did not satisfy them.

  Mardas insisted they had to leave immediately, warning that the Maharishi might otherwise send "black magic" down on them. He went to Dehra Dun to arrange taxis for the following morning to take the group to Delhi. Cynthia Lennon later concluded that Mardas had invented the story of impropriety to protect his own influence over Lennon. Harrison and McCartney both later offered apologies to the Maharishi. Lennon mused in 1970 that if Harrison was doubting the Maharishi, there must have been something in it. In 2010, Mardas issued a statement to The New York Times denying that he had spread any rumours.

• 6. The Savile Row Disaster

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  Mardas had been openly dismissive of Abbey Road for years, telling the Beatles that its technology was out of date. Producer George Martin watched the dynamic with frustration: "The trouble was that Alex was always coming to the studios to see what we were doing and to learn from it, while at the same time saying 'These people are so out of date.' But I found it very difficult to chuck him out, because the boys liked him so much."

  Mardas boasted he could build a 72-track recording studio, far beyond the 4-track setup at Abbey Road (which was itself being upgraded to 8-track at the time). He was given the basement of Apple's headquarters on Savile Row. One of his more elaborate proposals was to replace the acoustic baffles around Ringo Starr's drum kit with an invisible sonic force field.

  Starr remembered that Mardas bought enormous surplus computers from British Aerospace and stored them in a barn. They never left the barn, and were eventually sold for scrap metal.

  When the Beatles arrived to record the Get Back project in January 1969, what they found was not a studio. There was no 72-track machine - Mardas had quietly reduced the plan to 16 tracks. There was no soundproofing, no intercom system, and no patch bay to connect the control room to the 16 speakers that had been fixed haphazardly to the walls. The only new piece of equipment was a mixing console Mardas had built himself, which Martin's assistant Dave Harries described as looking like "bits of wood and an old oscilloscope." It was scrapped after one session. Harrison called it "the biggest disaster of all time."

  Mardas later stated that he had never been in the Savile Row basement, claiming his equipment was being tested at Apple Electronics in Marylebone. Martin was called in to salvage the situation. He borrowed two portable four-track recorders from EMI, and engineer Geoff Emerick built and set up a working studio from the loaned equipment. When Allen Klein became the Beatles' manager in 1969, he closed Apple Electronics. It was estimated that Mardas' schemes had cost the Beatles at least £300,000.

• 7. The Security Years

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  After leaving Apple, Mardas turned toward the anti-terrorism industry, which in the 1970s was offering bullet-proof vehicles, bugging devices, and security hardware to wealthy clients. He enlisted former King Constantine II of Greece - then living in exile in Britain - as his principal salesman. Constantine's connections to deposed royalty opened doors, including to the Shah of Iran, who had moved to Mexico and was believed to have financially assisted Mardas' companies.

  In 1974, Mardas held an expensive party for Prince Juan Carlos of Spain, then heir to the throne, and secured a contract. After the assassination of Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco, the Spanish royal family wanted more armoured vehicles. A second contract worth over half a million pounds allowed Mardas to establish two new companies, Alcom Devices Ltd and Night Vision Systems Ltd, operating together as "Project Alcom" from St Albans Mews off Edgware Road in London.

  The Sultan of Oman ordered six Mercedes 450 limousines in 1977. His former SAS bodyguards tested one in the desert in July 1977 by firing guns at it. A bullet struck an emergency air cylinder, which caused the fuel tank to explode and destroyed the entire car. The remaining five were returned with a demand for a full refund. King Hussein of Jordan had a fleet of cars customised by Mardas, then tested with live ammunition in November 1977. One witness reported that bullets easily pierced the armour-plating and that the thick armoured glass shattered into jagged splinters on impact. Hussein ordered the cars restored to their original state.

  By 1978, Mardas and Constantine had turned toward the European market, setting up a factory in London financed by over £1 million channelled through anonymous accounts in Monaco and Switzerland, believed to be controlled by the Shah.

• 8. Lawsuits and Legacy

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  Mardas spent much of his later life in court. After The People newspaper published articles in 1988, he sued and won £75,000 in damages. The Observer printed an apology in 1989 after naming him an arms dealer. The Daily Mail apologised and paid an undisclosed sum on the 16th of January 2004. The Independent apologised on the 21st of August 2006, correcting an earlier claim that Mardas had been a company employee of Apple Electronics; he had in fact been a director and shareholder, and had not been fired but resigned his directorship in May 1971 while retaining his shareholding.

  In 2008, a reporter for The New York Times named Allan Kozinn wrote that Mardas was "a supposed inventor and charlatan who had become a Beatles' insider." Mardas won the right to sue the paper for defamation in England. He won on appeal in 2009. After the paper produced Sir Harold Evans as a witness supporting its journalistic standards, Mardas agreed to drop the case on one condition: that the paper publicly clarify what it had meant. On the 4th of March 2010, The New York Times published an editor's update stating that the article had not accused Mardas of fraud or criminality, and that its reporting on the Maharishi events had been based on accounts attributed to Paul McCartney and drawn from published books and magazines.

  In May 2004, Mardas put 15 items of Lennon memorabilia up for sale at Christie's in South Kensington. The lot included Lennon's leather collar worn at the launch party for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and on the cover of Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins, a custom Vox Kensington guitar, a felt pen drawing called "Strong", and a pen and ink drawing entitled "Happy Fish". Mardas said he planned to donate the proceeds to a charity in Greece. The Vox guitar later sold at a separate auction on the 19th of May 2013 for £269,000. Mardas lived in Athens until he died from pneumonia on the 13th of January 2017, at the age of 74.