Insanely brave, but Robert Maxwell led a scheming life of lies
Ghislaine Maxwell’s father built a media empire, but the dark truth reveals how the war hero turned notorious fraudster raised a daughter who would become Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice.
Ghislaine left that morning in tears. But clearly she was learning from each encounter with the versions of her father. She too would become cruelly devious and a loathsome, callous criminal who saw others as to be used, abused and discarded.
Her father failed in all of life’s departments but one: he was uncommonly brave. While Maxwell’s children would be born to the privileges of great wealth, he was born in June 1923 to a poor Jewish family in a two-room earthen-floor shack in the small town of Slatinske Doly, then part of the newly created Czechoslovakia, now part of southern Ukraine.
He began life as Jan Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hoch but was known as Lev. Almost nothing is recorded of his early years, but by the time of the German invasion he was living on the streets of Bratislava – then also in Czechoslovakia, now the capital of Slovakia – selling what were described as trinkets, presumably cheap jewellery, while studying at a yeshiva. When he became aware that Jews were being rounded up to be gassed or shot, he cut off the sidecurls and dispensed with the black hat, both of which indicated his faith, and made his way to France.
The former president of Czechoslovakia, Edvard Benes, formed a government in exile in London and put together a surprisingly robust army of banished Czechs. Units fought alongside the Poles and against Adolf Hitler’s invasion that sparked World War II in 1939 and shoulder-to-shoulder with the Red Army as Germany invaded Russia in 1941.
Like many young Czechs, the man who was still a few names short of becoming Robert Maxwell joined this fighting forces alongside volunteers with whom he crossed Europe, travelling through Hungary, Yugoslavia and across northern Italy to France where the Czech network was strongest. The Czechs operated under British command and many of them transferred to a British unit known as the Royal Pioneer Corps.
Later Maxwell joined the Prince of Wales’s North Staffordshire Regiment. By then he was calling himself Ivan du Maurier, after the cigarette brand (in turn named after London actor Gerald du Maurier, who endorsed it to pay off a tax bill but never smoked the brand, preferring unfiltered cigarettes).
He then briefly became Leslie du Maurier and fought across Europe starting at Normandy for the D-Day landings. That year in Paris he met a pretty interpreter two years his senior, Elisabeth “Betty” Meynard, and extravagantly promised her that he would not only win a Military Cross but also would make a vast fortune before occupying 10 Downing Street, adding that he would make her happy “until the end of my days”.
By January 1945, he had indeed won a Military Cross after bravely storming a Nazi machinegun post in a mission in which every one of his comrades was cut down. It was presented to him by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the legendary Monty. Only the day before Maxwell had learnt that his mother had been exterminated by the Nazis. He rose through army ranks swiftly, to sergeant and then captain. A platoon comrade, Ronald Dale, recalled after the war: “He was a good shot and the bravest man I have ever met. He was a credit to the British Army.”
As victory in Europe was proclaimed, Maxwell learnt that four of his siblings and his father also had been murdered in the Holocaust. Almost all the extended Hoch family had been killed by the Nazis, and not just a few dozen. Hundreds of them.
His mother had always advised her gifted son to “act like an Englishman”. So he did what he thought she would have wished and moved to London and adopted an English name. Indeed a few of them. He was briefly Leslie Smith and then Leslie Jones. On June 19, 1946, he became a British citizen.
Two years later he changed his name by deed poll to Ian Robert Maxwell. It is commonly reported that he was adopting the name of the instant coffee brand, but that is unlikely as it was not sold in England until 1969. Nonetheless, he did call his London headquarters Maxwell House, which is where, in 1984, I met him.
German was among the languages Maxwell spoke, which included Czech, Russian, English and French, and he put these to good use in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
As pressure mounted for the creation of a Jewish state, Maxwell and other European Jews understood that Arabs would try to violently prevent this and that the new state would need an air force.
A jumble of redundant aircraft from Britain and across Europe was bought, commandeered and stolen in a patchwork-quilt air defence system. Germany had established two factories in Czechoslovakia to assemble Messerschmitt fighters and Maxwell helped keep them running, having the wings sawn off and the parts secretly packed into American cargo planes and shipped to the Middle East.
When the Arab armies attacked the new state of Israel hours after its declaration of independence they were surprised by its aerial advantage, with the planes being flown by pilots from around the world who had volunteered to defend the infant state.
Tellingly, at Maxwell’s funeral decades later, Israel’s prime minister at the time, Yitzhak Shamir, said: “He has done more for Israel than can today be said.”
Newly married and without traditional credentials for employment, but after the war working for the British Foreign Office in the confusion and chaos of a recently divided Berlin, Maxwell worked his contacts. One was the boss of an academic publisher, Springer Verlag. German technical expertise and research were the world’s best, but there was no market for German books outside the country at that time. Maxwell knew international suspicion would subside and that German technical excellence had survived the war.
He started as Springer’s agent to Britain and later the US, working closely with former Austrian soldier and British agent Paul Rosbaud who, knowing Germany was advanced on nuclear fission, rushed to publish that research months before Hitler invaded Poland so that British scientists were made aware.
Maxwell and Rosbaud joined forces when the Czech bought most of Rosbaud’s fledgling scholarly publishing house. How Maxwell had the means to do so remains a mystery and has ever since fuelled speculation about possible links to British, German, Israeli and even Russian security services.
Their company, Butterworth Springer, was officially authorised by the British parliament to create an academic publishing house and business boomed. It was soon renamed Pergamon Press, the first evidence of Maxwell’s fantasies of grandeur. (The Library of Pergamon had been the world’s second greatest, with perhaps 200,000 parchment scrolls on its shelves, reportedly stolen by Mark Antony to give to Cleopatra as a wedding present and then lost in the fire at the Great Library of Alexandria.)
Not long after, Maxwell, suddenly very wealthy, leased the historic Headington Hill Hall in Oxford from the local council offering £2400 a year (worth more than $145,000 today). Oscar Wilde had once attended a party there, but Headington Hill Hall had fallen into disrepair and had been hit by a bomb in World War II. Maxwell repaired its large, historic stained glass window, creating an image of Samson bearing the gates of Gaza, only this Samson bears a close resemblance to Maxwell.
Having ticked off two of the promises he made his fiancee in 1944 – he had a Military Cross and was rich – he set his sights on becoming the first Czech-born occupant of Downing Street. “I’ve decided to become prime minister,” he announced.
He won a seat in the House of Commons in 1964 representing Labour in the electorate of Buckingham, dislodging the Conservative incumbent and helping Harold Wilson to a slim four-seat victory.
He was in the Commons until 1970, losing his seat in that year’s election. His time there was unremarkable except for his appointment as chairman of the catering committee. Under his guidance the Commons bars ran out of wines as he sold off stocks to pay its bills while privatising its operations – the sort of creative accounting solutions that were already part of his business practices.
He had been moving loans around his group of companies as he asset-stripped others. Some angry creditors reportedly approached Britain’s Insolvency Service and from that point on he was convinced he was being persecuted by the establishment.
But the business was healthy; indeed it became the world’s foremost technical publisher.
In 1969 Maxwell suffered a double blow. The owners of News of the World rejected his offer to buy the newspaper (it was bought instead by Rupert Murdoch, who founded this paper). And he tried to sell Pergamon to a US investor in 1969 for £25m, but when the books were examined it emerged that the glowing financial reports on the success of Pergamon’s encyclopedia arm were a fiction.
His own company forced Maxwell from the board and the Department of Trade and Industry found: “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.”
That would kill most business management careers, but Maxwell slithered away to lick his wounds and plan a comeback. Remarkably, he did, and regained control of Pergamon by borrowing the funds to buy it back. By then his business shenanigans were being documented by the satirical current affairs magazine Private Eye, where he was referred to as the Bouncing Czech.
His first response to anyone questioning his business ethics was to issue a writ, or several of them; on one occasion 32. Sometimes they stuck. On losing another, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop commented: “I’ve just given a fat cheque to a fat Czech.”
Maxwell’s media empire expanded exponentially in 1984 when he bought London’s Mirror Group Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Sunday People and Scottish mastheads. He started writing double-page editorials under the pseudonym Charles Wilberforce (the famous British politician of that name led the 18th-century campaign against slavery). And he liked his own face in his papers – two a week on average.
He appended his newspaper mastheads with the line “Forward with Britain”. The company was domiciled in the tax haven of Liechtenstein. For a while Private Eye changed its masthead, adding Forward with Liechtenstein.
Giddy with the excitement of finally owning a national title, Maxwell launched another in the capital. The London Daily News debuted in 1987 with the advertising slogan: “For the city that never sleeps the paper that never stops.” It was stopped with huge debts in months. But its owner, founder, chairman and chief executive wasn’t finished yet. In 1990 he launched The European newspaper across the continent, hoping for a circulation of 650,000. It achieved less than a third of that, bleeding millions of pounds.
Maxwell’s creditors were circling as his companies haemorrhaged unfathomable amounts because of his arrogantly incompetent management and his unnatural personal spending, including on his four-storey, 58m motor yacht Lady Ghislaine, named after his favourite child.
But he tried to borrow and buy his way out of it, purchasing Macmillan Inc, the US book publisher, for $US2.6bn in 1988 and then, in March 1991, the ailing New York Daily News in a final suicidal spasm of debt. He had no capacity, nor intention, of paying off these stupendous loans.
What Maxwell did next was one of the vilest acts of corporate villainy of the 20th century. He slipped his hands into the back pockets of those who faithfully served him and stole their futures.
As with BBC broadcaster Jimmy Savile, Maxwell’s grotesque life of crime took place in plain sight, with lonely whistleblowers silenced by writs and fawning but poisonous lickspittles.
By the summer of 1984 I was working days (nights were for my real job on The Times) on the Financial Weekly, an early attempt by Maxwell to get a foot in Fleet Street. Maxwell House, in London’s unfashionable Worship Street, housed the man’s uneven collection of publications and people.
Overseeing it all was Peter Jay, Maxwell’s chief of staff whom Maxwell publicly humiliated daily, but who had done a good job of humiliating himself. He’d married James Callaghan’s daughter and when Callaghan became prime minister he plucked the untested Jay, a newspaper journalist, to be Britain’s ambassador to Washington. Jay’s wife had a scandalous affair with married Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein while Jay impregnated their nanny.
One day, we were told Maxwell wanted to meet us all. On the roof. Headington Hill Hall butlers served us drinks and canapes and Maxwell made his grand entrance with Jay who, one by one, introduced us all. He didn’t know us; we all had large nameplates. Jay would tell Maxwell that this is whomsoever and Maxwell boomed: “Oh, very well.” To everyone.
I thought of that day when news broke in November 1991 that Maxwell was missing from the Lady Ghislaine off the Canary Islands. An aerial search soon found the pale body floating face up in the Atlantic near Las Palmas.
He knew that auditors and his own senior financial staff had become aware that his media empire had long been a house of cards. He knew because he had planted listening devices in their office walls.
Within days the Maxwell empire collapsed into an almost worthless heap of hollowed-out companies. Greedy narcissism, another deeply unflattering flaw domiciled in his bloated frame, had been in the driver’s seat these last few years. The morning following his death his Daily Mirror proclaimed on page one “The Man Who Saved The Mirror”. Days later the same front page shouted “Millions Missing From Mirror”.
How much? The next day’s front page stated “£526m is Missing”. That would be worth almost $3bn today. Most of that had been stolen from the pension funds of the 32,000 staff who worked for him.
He had not siphoned money away for his wife or children, although they had lived very well on funds stolen from his workers. His wife fled back to France, his underachieving sons faced scrutiny but were cleared of fraud. Maxwell’s socialite daughter, Ghislaine,had recently been sacked at the urging of my old friend and colleague Alan Armsden.
“She’s no good and she’s lazy,” he told me before taking the train to Headington Hill Hall. I wished him well. Unaccountably, Maxwell agreed to “let her go”.
The Maxwells had nine children, five girls and four boys. Ghislaine, their last, was born on Christmas Day 1961. Three days later their eldest, Michael, 15, was in a head-on crash when his driver fell asleep. The boy spent seven years in a coma before dying in 1967. A daughter, Karine, died of leukaemia at age three.
These were family tragedies beyond those of most. But families can and do regularly rise above them. Eldest boy Philip became a precociously talented scientist, married an Argentinian whom Maxwell never accepted, remarried and drifted back to London, where he lives anonymously. Older sister Anne became a Montessori teacher. Twin sisters Christine and Isabel attended Oxford and became successful dot.com entrepreneurs in San Francisco.
It is not clear but seems possible that pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein was involved in moving some of the stolen money about at the time Maxwell purchased the New York Daily News in 1991.
Maxwell sent Ghislaine to “oversee” his new masthead. An old friend of Prince Andrew (respected British historian Andrew Lownie claimed in this year’s biography of the Yorks that Andrew and Ghislaine were lovers), she moved seamlessly into Manhattan society circles and became Epstein’s partner in life. And crime.
A connection to the royal family was invaluable to the wily, dark-hearted Epstein, and Ghislaine appears to have enthusiastically joined in his treacherous abuse of underage girls. She had spent her life among wily, furtive crooks and, like so many criminals before her, became blase, reportedly taking Andrew to a “hookers and pimps” themed party in Manhattan.
Last month’s revelations that Andrew’s wife Fergie wrote to Epstein after he had been jailed as a pedophile and described him as “a supreme friend” was as disturbing as it was predictable.
Meanwhile, Ghislaine is a few years into her 20-year sentence, delivered by a US judge who noted: “The evidence at trial established that Ms Maxwell directly and repeatedly and over the course of many years participated in a horrific scheme to entice, transport and traffic underage girls, some as young as 14, for sexual abuse by and with Jeffrey Epstein.”
Epstein, Cosmopolitan magazine’s “bachelor of the month” in July 1980, did not want to see his day in court and took his life in a Manhattan police cell in July 2019.
Was Robert Maxwell to blame for the woman Ghislaine became? Her defence team said so, claiming she had been emotionally neglected by her father. The jury clearly was unconvinced.
You wonder what was going through Maxwell’s mind as he stood on the rear deck of the Lady Ghislaine that night staring across the Atlantic. His family believe he was murdered and ordered background checks on the nine crew. Many others were convinced he decided to end it all and entered the water off the back of the boat as it sailed on.
Here he was, once a confidant of prime ministers and royalty who had cultivated communist bloc leaders including Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev and Romania’s despised thug, Nicolae Ceausescu (of whom he once asked: “How do you account for your enormous popularity with the Romanian people?”), but now friendless, on the verge of humiliating bankruptcy and certain jail.
His heart and lungs were failing him. He knew he had been referred to as a media magnate for the final time.
He had not been Jan Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hoch for more than 50 years. He was not Ivan du Maurier. He was not Leslie Jones. He was not Samson and certainly not Charles Wilberforce. He was doomed.
Oh, very well.
The great girth of Robert Maxwell easily accommodated the dark carnival of characters that lived there: the beast, a madman and the lesser-seen angel. He was a thief, a bully, a manipulative liar and ruthlessly unpredictable. He thought women of little value, yet he idolised his youngest child – Ghislaine – whose photograph he kept on his office desk. Nevertheless, a senior staff member recalled a moment in the boss’s office when Ghislaine came in, hugged and kissed her father, saying “Hello, Dad”. Maxwell angrily shot back: “Bloody stupid woman. F..k off.” That’s the phrase he’d use when his wife’s company was inconvenient.