Robert Maxwell

• 1. Introduction

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  Oxford United supporters had a chant for their chairman: “He's fat, he's round, he's never on the ground.” The chairman was Robert Maxwell, who used the club's old grounds, close to his office at Headington Hill Hall, to land his helicopter. Maxwell lived from 1923 to 1991. He was a Czechoslovak-born British-French media proprietor and politician, and few businessmen of his era enjoyed more attention. How did a refugee from the far edge of Czechoslovakia rise so high in British public life? Why did an official inquiry doubt his judgment twenty years before his death? And what did the world discover about his companies once he was gone?

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• 2. A Clerk's Choice

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  On the 10th of June 1923, in the small town of Slatinské Doly in Carpathian Ruthenia, a boy was born who would one day be known as Robert Maxwell. The town sat on the border with Romania and is now called Solotvyno, in Ukraine. His parents were poor, Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews, and he was the third of their seven children. A brother and a sister died in infancy.

  His father, Mechel Hoch, wanted to name him Abraham Lajbi. At the town hall, the clerk insisted on a Czech name and wrote down Ján Ludvík instead. At home the family kept calling him Lajbi, while he mostly went by Ludvík. The region itself had changed hands often. It belonged to Austria-Hungary until early November 1918, and the family surname in those records was Hoch. Hungary annexed the area during the Second World War, and it became part of the Soviet Union in 1945.

  Maxwell later described his parents as peasant farm labourers. His father reportedly also served as a shochet, and worked as a woodcutter and as a cattle wholesaler to tanners and butchers. His maternal grandfather, Yaacov Schlomovitch, was a merchant who taught the boy the basics of trading. The grandfather also used the family home to smuggle alcohol.

  At his mother's suggestion, the eldest son went to a yeshiva, with the hope that he would become a rabbi. There he learned to read Yiddish, Hebrew and Czech. Later he spent three years in school, between the ages of eight and eleven. In those classes he picked up spoken Czech and Russian, and German from Carpathian German schoolmates.

  The family traced its origins to Maramureș. His authorised biography states that he was a distant relative of Elie Wiesel, but The Dispatch said it could find nothing to support that claim.

  The names kept multiplying. During the Second World War he was rendered as “Jan Ludwig,” and he also used the alias “Ivan du Maurier” or “Leslie du Maurier,” taking the surname from a cigarette brand. He became a British subject on the 19th of June 1946. By a deed dated the 30th of June 1948, he formally became Ian Robert Maxwell. Between the boy from Slatinské Doly and that new name lay a war.

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• 3. Soldier and Survivor

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  In 1938, at the age of fifteen, Maxwell left his job as a salesman after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. His parents sent him to Budapest. Some biographers claim he walked the 275 miles, while others say he went by train. After a brief stay with friends, he vanished without notice, and he later gave several conflicting accounts of those months. One version had him serving as a courier for the Czech resistance, which the biographer Tom Bower said had no presence in the city at that time.

  In May 1940, Maxwell joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Marseille. He had escaped to France years before the worst reached his home region. After Hungary was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1944, most of his relatives were deported to Auschwitz, where they died. Only Maxwell and two of his sisters survived the Holocaust.

  After the fall of France, the troops withdrew to Britain. There Maxwell took part in a protest against the leadership of the Czechoslovak Army. Along with 500 other soldiers, he was transferred to the British Army. He served first in the Royal Pioneer Corps and then, in 1943, in the North Staffordshire Regiment. He saw action from the Normandy beaches to Berlin, rose to sergeant, and received a commission in 1945 as a captain.

  In January 1945, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery presented him with the Military Cross. The citation praised his heroism in “storming a German machine-gun nest.” Afterwards he was attached to the Foreign Office and spent two years in Berlin, working in the press section.

  Also in 1945, he married Elisabeth “Betty” Meynard, a French Protestant. Over the next sixteen years they had nine children: Michael, Philip, Ann, Christine, Isabel, Karine, Ian, Kevin and Ghislaine. In a 1995 interview, Elisabeth said they were trying to recreate the family Maxwell had lost. Karine died of leukaemia at the age of three. In 1961, Michael was badly hurt at fifteen when his driver fell asleep at the wheel and crashed headlong into another vehicle. He never regained consciousness and died seven years later.

  Five of the children, Christine, Isabel, Ian, Kevin and Ghislaine, later worked in Maxwell's companies. His contacts among the Allied occupation authorities in Germany were about to become his first business asset.

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• 4. Pergamon and Parliament

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  After the war, Springer Verlag, a publisher of scientific books, gave Maxwell his start as its British and US distributor. In 1951 he bought three-quarters of Butterworth-Springer, a minor publisher. The remaining quarter belonged to Paul Rosbaud, an experienced scientific editor. The two renamed the firm Pergamon Press and quickly made it a major academic publishing house. After a disagreement with Maxwell, Rosbaud left in 1956.

  In the 1964 general election, Maxwell won the Buckingham seat for the Labour Party, and he held it in 1966. In a 1968 interview with The Times, he said the House of Commons gave him a problem. “I can't get on with men,” he said. “I tried having male assistants at first. But it didn't work. They tend to be too independent. Men like to have individuality. Women can become an extension of the boss.” In 1970 he lost the seat to the Conservative William Benyon. He stood in Buckingham again in both 1974 general elections, without success.

  At the start of 1969, Maxwell's attempt to buy the News of the World collapsed. The Carr family, which owned the paper, was incensed at the idea of a Czechoslovak immigrant with socialist views taking control. The board voted against his bid with no dissent. The editor, Stafford Somerfield, had already attacked the bid in an October 1968 front-page opinion piece. He mentioned Maxwell's Czechoslovak origins and used his birth name. “This is a British paper, run by British people... as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding... Let us keep it that way,” he wrote. Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, and later that year he acquired The Sun, which had also interested Maxwell.

  Pergamon was already in trouble. In 1969, Saul Steinberg, head of Leasco Data Processing Corporation, wanted to acquire it. Steinberg claimed that during negotiations Maxwell falsely said that a subsidiary publishing reference works was extremely profitable. In the same period Pergamon cut its 1969 profit forecast from £2.5 million to £2.05 million, and trading in its shares was suspended in London. In October 1969, the majority owners expelled Maxwell from the board, along with three sympathetic directors. Steinberg bought the company.

  A Department of Trade and Industry inquiry, led by Rondle Owen Charles Stable and Sir Ronald Leach, reported in mid-1971. It found that Maxwell had inflated Pergamon's share price through transactions between his private family companies. The inspectors wrote: “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.”

  In September 1971, Judge Thayne Forbes criticised the inquiry itself. He said the inspectors had moved from an inquisitorial role to an accusatory one and had “virtually committed the business murder of Mr. Maxwell.” He added that the trial judge would probably find they had acted “contrary to the rules of natural justice.” Meanwhile the United States Congress was investigating Leasco's takeover practices. In 1970 Maxwell had also set up the Maxwell Foundation in Liechtenstein. Pergamon did poorly under Steinberg, and in 1974 Maxwell bought it back with borrowed money.

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• 5. The Empire Years

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  In 1981, Maxwell acquired the British Printing Corporation. He renamed it the British Printing and Communication Corporation, and later the Maxwell Communication Corporation. The company was eventually sold in a management buyout and is now known as Polestar.

  In July 1984, he bought Mirror Group Newspapers from Reed International plc for £113 million. The group published six British newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, a pro-Labour tabloid. The purchase set off a media war with Murdoch, the proprietor of the News of the World and The Sun. At a press conference, Maxwell promised that his editors would be “free to produce the news without interference.” At a meeting of his new employees, the Mirror journalist Joe Haines declared he could prove their boss was “a crook and a liar.” Haines soon fell under Maxwell's influence and went on to write his authorised biography.

  Other ventures followed quickly. In June 1985, Maxwell announced a takeover of Clive Sinclair's ailing home computer company, Sinclair Research, through Hollis Brothers, a Pergamon subsidiary. The deal was dropped in August. In 1987, he bought part of IPC Media to create Fleetway Publications. In February of that year he launched the London Daily News after production delays, first meaning it as a rival to the Evening Standard and then as the first 24-hour paper. It closed in July, with contemporary estimates of its losses at £25 million.

  In May 1987, his BPCC made an unsolicited bid for the US publishing conglomerate Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. To defend itself, the company took on heavy debt in order to pay large sums to shareholders. That strain was a factor in its 1989 sale of its theme park holdings to Anheuser-Busch, including the SeaWorld chain it had bought in 1976.

  Football gave Maxwell a second public stage. He became chairman of Oxford United, rescuing the club from bankruptcy. In 1983 he tried to merge it with Reading into a new club he wanted to call “Thames Valley Royals.” Oxford reached the top flight of English football in 1985 and won the League Cup a year later. In 1987 he bought into Derby County. In 1984 he had tried to buy Manchester United but would not meet owner Martin Edwards's asking price.

  Critics fought back with ridicule. The satirical magazine Private Eye called him “Cap'n Bob” and the “bouncing Czech,” a nickname first coined by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, under whom Maxwell had been an MP. He sued the magazine several times, and one action cost it an estimated £225,000. He also hit back with a one-off spoof called Not Private Eye.

  By 1988, his companies also owned Nimbus Records, Maxwell Directories, Prentice Hall Information Services and the Berlitz language schools. He held half of MTV in Europe, along with Maxwell Cable TV and Maxwell Entertainment. That year he paid $2.6 billion for the American firm Macmillan Inc and launched a transnational newspaper called The European. Then the bills arrived. In 1991 he had to sell Pergamon and Maxwell Directories to Elsevier for £440 million to cover his debts. With some of the money he bought the ailing New York Daily News, and he sold forty-nine per cent of Mirror Group's stock to the public.

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• 6. Shadows of Espionage

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  Maxwell opened one interview with Romania's communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, with the question: “How do you account for your enormous popularity with the Romanian people?” His ties to Eastern European communist regimes produced several biographies of their leaders, built on interviews he conducted himself. They earned him a great deal of derision. Pergamon Press, a Soviet-friendly firm, also published numerous Soviet science books in the West.

  Those links reached into video games. According to the source, Maxwell pressured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to cancel the contract between Elorg and Nintendo over the rights to Tetris. He believed his software company, Mirrorsoft, already owned them. The 2023 film Tetris, which dramatises the legal battles, features Roger Allam as Maxwell.

  In 1948, John Loftus and Mark Aarons wrote, Maxwell's contacts with Czechoslovak communist leaders were crucial to the decision to arm Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In their account, he also smuggled aircraft parts into Israel, helping it gain air supremacy. Czechoslovak military aid was unique and crucial in that conflict.

  A more disputed story concerns PROMIS, a case management software program. It was allegedly sold in the mid-1980s for Soviet government use in a bugged version, with Maxwell acting as a conduit. Other allegations say he distributed a bugged Israeli version to many governments and financial institutions, enabling mass spying by Israel. He allegedly sold it to Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, two of the most important nuclear research and national security facilities in the United States. John Tower, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was allegedly employed to help with those sales.

  Suspicion followed Maxwell across agencies. He was suspected of ties to Britain's MI6, the Soviet KGB and Israel's Mossad. The British Foreign Office suspected him of being a secret agent of a foreign government, possibly a double or triple agent. It called him “a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia.”

  Shortly before Maxwell's death, Ari Ben-Menashe, a former employee of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate, approached news organisations in Britain and the US. He alleged that Maxwell and the Daily Mirror's foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, were long-time Mossad agents. He also claimed that in 1986 Maxwell told the Israeli Embassy in London that Mordechai Vanunu had revealed Israel's nuclear capability to The Sunday Times, and then to the Daily Mirror. Vanunu was later kidnapped by Mossad, smuggled to Israel, convicted of treason and imprisoned for eighteen years.

  The journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker repeated some of these claims at a London press conference for his book The Samson Option. On the 21st of October 1991, the Labour MP George Galloway and the Conservative MP Rupert Allason, also known as the espionage author Nigel West, agreed to raise the issue in the House of Commons. Parliamentary privilege meant British newspapers could report the debate without fear of libel suits. Maxwell called the claims “ludicrous, a total invention” and fired Davies. The Washington Post reported that sources in Britain and Israel disputed Hersh's claims.

  A year later, in Galloway's libel settlement against Mirror Group Newspapers, his counsel said the MP accepted that the group's staff had not been involved in Vanunu's abduction. Galloway still described Maxwell as “one of the worst criminals of the century.” Maxwell never saw that settlement, because he died within three weeks of the Commons session.

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• 7. Death at Sea

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  On the 4th of November 1991, Maxwell had an argumentative phone call with his son Kevin. It concerned a meeting scheduled with the Bank of England over his default on £50 million in loans. Maxwell missed the meeting and instead travelled on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to the Canary Islands, Spain.

  At 4:25 a.m. local time on the 5th of November, he was last in contact with the yacht's crew. Later that morning he was found to be missing. It has been speculated that he was urinating into the ocean, naked, as he often did. He was presumed to have fallen overboard while the vessel cruised off the Canary Islands, south-west of Spain. His naked body was recovered from the Atlantic and taken to Las Palmas. Apart from a “graze to his left shoulder,” there were no noticeable wounds.

  An inquest in December 1991 ruled that he died from a heart attack combined with accidental drowning. Three pathologists had been unable to agree on the cause of death, and he was found to have serious heart and lung conditions. The judge ruled out murder and, in effect, suicide. Kevin dismissed suicide, saying: “I think it is highly unlikely that he would have taken his own life, it wasn't in his makeup or his mentality.”

  The funeral took place in Israel and was lavish. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and President Chaim Herzog attended, along with at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence and many dignitaries, including Natan Sharansky. Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Herzog delivered the eulogy, and his friend and longtime attorney Samuel Pisar recited the Kaddish.

  In Britain, Prime Minister John Major said Maxwell had given him “valuable insights” into the Soviet Union during the attempted coup of 1991, calling him a “great character.” Neil Kinnock, then Labour leader, spoke of a man with “a zest for life” who “attracted controversy, envy and loyalty in great measure throughout his rumbustious life.”

  A private side of Maxwell emerged years later. A production crew researching Maxwell, a 2007 BBC film, found tapes stored in a suitcase belonging to his former head of security, John Pole. Apparently he had grown increasingly paranoid about his own staff and had the offices of suspected disloyal employees bugged so he could hear their conversations.

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• 8. Collapse and Legacy

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  After Maxwell's death, banks frantically called in their massive loans, and his publishing empire fell into instability. His sons Kevin and Ian tried to hold it together, but the companies soon collapsed. It emerged that, without adequate prior authorisation, Maxwell had used hundreds of millions of pounds from his companies' pension funds to prop up Mirror Group shares and save the business from bankruptcy.

  The pension funds were eventually replenished with money from the investment banks Lehman Brothers, Coopers & Lybrand and Goldman Sachs, as well as the British government. The refill was limited. It relied partly on a surplus in the printers' fund, which the government took toward £100 million it needed to support the workers' state pensions, and the rest of the £100 million was waived. The theft was therefore partly repaid from public funds, and pensioners generally received about half of their company pension entitlement.

  The Maxwell companies filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992. Kevin Maxwell was declared bankrupt with debts of £400 million. In 1995, Kevin, Ian and two other former directors went on trial for conspiracy to defraud. A 12-person jury unanimously acquitted them the following year.

  In November 1994, Maxwell's widow Elisabeth published her memoirs, A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell. She had earned a degree from Oxford University in 1981, and she devoted much of her later life to Holocaust research and Jewish-Christian dialogue. She died on the 7th of August 2013.

  In July 2020, Maxwell's youngest child, Ghislaine, was arrested in New Hampshire on six federal charges. They involved minors' trade, travel and seduction to engage in criminal sexual activity, and conspiracy to entice children to engage in illegal sex acts. The charges were linked to a sex trafficking ring run with her close friend Jeffrey Epstein, who had died in jail the previous year. She was convicted on the 29th of December 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison on the 28th of June 2022.

  Fiction soon claimed the story. In the final 1992 series of the British sitcom The New Statesman, Alan B'Stard believes Maxwell faked his death, and an episode ends with B'Stard pushing him off a yacht. Carol Ann Duffy's 1993 collection Mean Time includes “Fraud,” a monologue in Maxwell's voice. Jeffrey Archer's 1996 novel The Fourth Estate drew on the lives of Maxwell and Murdoch.

  In the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, the villainous media baron Elliot Carver was inspired by Maxwell, Ted Turner and Murdoch. Rod Beacham's one-person show Lies Have Been Told played at London's Trafalgar Studios in 2006, with Phillip York in the role. That year also brought Juval Aviv's novel Max, based on his investigation into Maxwell's death. On the 4th of May 2007, the BBC aired Maxwell, starring David Suchet and Patricia Hodge. Suchet won the International Emmy Award for Best Actor.

  Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, has said that Maxwell: The Final Verdict influenced the series. More recently, Maxwell and his daughter Ghislaine inspired the characters Charles Hanani and Yasmin Kara-Hanani in the British drama Industry.

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