At 4.45am on 5 November 1991, Robert Maxwell called the bridge of his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to complain that his cabin was too warm. Those were his last known words. About 12 hours later, a Spanish search crew spotted a body floating in the Atlantic, 20 miles southwest of Gran Canaria. He was 68. Within weeks the empire he had built on borrowed money began to fall apart.
From Carpathian Ruthenia to Pergamon
Maxwell was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch on 10 June 1923 in Slatinské Doly, a small town in what was then Czechoslovakia. His parents were poor, Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews. He was the third of seven children, schooled first at a yeshiva with a view to becoming a rabbi. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, his parents sent the 15-year-old to Budapest. In May 1940 he joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Marseille. Most of his relatives were deported to Auschwitz and died there; only he and two sisters survived the Holocaust.
After the fall of France he was moved into the British Army and fought across Europe, from the Normandy beaches to Berlin. He was commissioned in 1945, rose to captain, and won the Military Cross that January for storming a German machine-gun nest. He became a British subject in 1946 and took the name Ian Robert Maxwell in 1948.
Business came next. He used contacts in the Allied occupation authorities to become the British and US distributor for the scientific publisher Springer Verlag. In 1951 he bought three-quarters of a minor publisher, Butterworth-Springer, renamed it Pergamon Press and built it into a major academic house. Labour sent him to Parliament as MP for Buckingham in 1964; he held the seat until 1970.
Setbacks and the Mirror
His rise was never smooth. In 1969 his bid for the News of the World failed, and a takeover tussle over Pergamon with Saul Steinberg’s Leasco ended with Maxwell expelled from the board. A Department of Trade inquiry concluded he could not be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company. He borrowed funds and won Pergamon back in 1974.
In 1981 he bought the British Printing Corporation, later renamed the Maxwell Communication Corporation. In July 1984 he acquired Mirror Group Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mirror and five other British titles, from Reed International for £113 million. It set off a media war with Rupert Murdoch. In 1986 he bought the yacht for $20 million and named it for Ghislaine, the youngest of his nine children and his favourite. Plenty of people who worked for him remember fear more than glamour. Journalist Andy McSmith recalled people freezing when Maxwell walked into a room.
Debts piled up. In 1989 he had to sell successful businesses, Pergamon among them, to cover some of what he owed. By November 1991 he was facing massive mounting debts and had skipped a meeting with creditors at the Bank of England.
Death and the hole in the pensions
A coroner ruled that he died of accidental drowning. Many who knew him disagree to this day. Some say he jumped or slipped; Ghislaine alone in the family has always believed he was murdered, her brother Ian said. He was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir among the mourners.
Then the numbers emerged. Banks called in their loans, and it became clear Maxwell had stolen as much as £460 million ($600 million) from the Mirror Group pension fund. About four weeks after his death, sons Ian and Kevin asked the High Court to appoint administrators for the two family companies, which carried debts of as much as $2 billion. Kevin, the chairman, was declared Britain’s biggest bankrupt. The Maxwell companies sought bankruptcy protection in 1992. Ian and Kevin were arrested in June 1992 and charged with fraud, and were cleared in 1996.
Ghislaine, who spent much of her time in New York after her father’s death, was convicted in December 2021 of sex-trafficking charges linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
Sources
- How spectre of Robert Maxwell hung over trial of his favourite daughter – Ghislaine
- Robert Maxwell – Wikipedia
- Ben Macintyre shines light on the real Robert Maxwell, the domineering media baron and father of Ghislaine
