Who Is Robert Maxwell? Narrated by Margaret Cho

Transcript

- [Interviewer] You understand that you're a very controversial man in this country. - I'm delighted. - [Margaret] That's Robert Maxwell. The media mogul grew up in

a shack and died on a yacht. In between, he was a well-connected opportunist with Jekyll and Hyde personalities. His ruthlessness deeply affected his daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite

accused of trafficking minors for a convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. I'm Margaret Cho, and this is the strange case of Robert Maxwell. (dramatic music) Robert Maxwell was born Jan Ludvik Hoch on June 10, 1923, in a remote salt mining

village in Czechoslovakia. The region, part of the modern day Ukraine, shifted four times between World War I and World War II, before eventually collapsing into the Soviet Union.

Growing up, times were tough. - We lived in one room with seven children, hungry most of the time. - [Margaret] The New York Post reported that Maxwell said, "I was never young.

"I never had that privilege." Political turmoil shaped Maxwell's childhood. His family was Jewish, and he was coming of age right as Adolf Hitler rose to power. At 11, he was sent to study

rabbinical literature. But a few years later, the Nazis invaded, so Robert decided to leave the yeshiva. Before catching the train home, he cut off his payot, his long side locks, to hide his Jewish identity. At 16, he enlisted in the Hungarian resistance as a spy, but was quickly arrested at the border.

He spent four months shackled in a windowless room before the authorities ordered a show trial for his execution. But Maxwell, always in survival mode, managed to escape on his way to court. As soon as he was out, he immediately wanted

back into the action. He joined the French Foreign Legion and was shipped to Liverpool. There, he taught himself English and changed his name to Ivan to sound more British. - I enjoyed the war.

- [Margaret] His name changed again before he finally became Ian Robert Maxwell. By then, he was a second lieutenant in the Queen's Royal Regiment and wanted to sound more distinguished, Scottish, and, well, less Jewish. During the war, Maxwell became

fluent in multiple languages and was often assigned to go undercover, but he didn't mind the danger. In fact, he had a reputation for acting pretty brazen and putting his life on the line for his soldiers, even if that meant going against orders. Near the end of his

life, he was investigated for having possibly killed an unarmed German civilian during the war. Maxwell even admitted the crime in a letter to his wife, but the case was closed because investigators were unable to find a witness.

When the war ended, Maxwell was awarded the Military Cross. That same year, he learned that his parents and four of his siblings had been killed at Auschwitz.

But he didn't get much time to grieve. Immediately, he left for Paris and wed Betty Maynard, a friendly French Protestant woman he met two months earlier at a service men's club. Four days after the wedding and

already back in the service, he sent Betty a very romantic letter with his six rules for the perfect partnership. One, don't nag. Two, don't criticize unduly. Three, give honest appreciation.

Four, pay little attentions. Five, be courteous. Six, have the utmost confidence in yourself and your partner. When his military service ended, he took over a subsidiary of a medical and legal textbook company and renamed it Pergamon. At the same time, he was also

importing and exporting goods under the name Anglo-Continental Exchange Limited with a business partner named Kurt Wallersteiner. For this, the FBI suspected the two had become Soviet spies.

A British intelligence file also described Robert as a thoroughly bad character, and almost certainly financed by Russia. But they were never able to prove it. KGB or not, Robert's first big business scandal was on the horizon.

In 1951, he acquired the publishing warehouse Simpkin Marshall with a loan from Wallersteiner. But when Wallersteiner inquired about the company's finances, he discovered that it was deeply in debt. Apparently Maxwell had

been taking Simpkin's money and investing it in other ventures. By 1955, Robert had run the 175-year-old company into the ground. In 1957, Wallersteiner was indicted in the United States for violating the Trading

with the Enemy Act. No more importing and exporting with the Soviet block. For Maxwell, things were relatively quiet on the business front for the next few years.

The family had become quite wealthy and lived in a 53-room mansion in Oxford. In 1961, they had their ninth and final child, a daughter named Ghislaine. There was no question that Ghislaine was daddy's little girl. Maxwell kept a picture of her on his desk.

And for a long time, it was the only photo in his office. He even named his beloved yacht after her. But for the most part, Maxwell's affection was characteristically hard to come by. He was a strict disciplinarian, and Betty recalled how he would shout and threaten and rant at the children until they were reduced to a pulp.

In that giant house, the kids lived under a microscope. Maxwell would do things like assign them specialized topics to discuss at meal times, and then evaluate their performance. Ghislaine's brother Ian said, "I always felt like I was

courting his approval. "You could never small talk with the old man. "Either something was of consequence, or it wasn't." For as cruel as he could be, Maxwell could also be very charismatic.

In the early 1960s, he became a politician and ran on the Labor Party ticket. According to his friend Dick Davy, Maxwell said, "Well of course I'm conservative. "But I'm not a member of the establishment.

"So I've got to become Labor." Maxwell became a member of Parliament in 1964. When he was up for re-election, he called himself the Man Who Gets Things Done and won by an even wider margin. But that reputation didn't last long.

He started recommending questionable austerity measures, like taking the free milks out of school lunches. And an investigation by the Sunday Times revealed he'd been using some creative accounting.

Maxwell threatened to sue the Times. But later, his demeanor changed entirely, and he even congratulated Harold Evans, the paper's editor, on his thorough research. Evans said the businessman seemed to have two modes.

Either he would thump the table and bellow at you, or he would turn seductive and pretend to be your friend. You never knew which Maxwell you were going to get.

That was Maxwell's M-O. In her memoir, Betty described Maxwell as having Jekyll and Hyde personalities and said he often reserved his worst self for his innermost circles. No one was spared, not even his favorite. One time, when Ghislaine said she wanted to meet a businessman named Donald Trump, Maxwell asked her, "Have you got your head in your bum? "Why the **** would Donald

Trump want to waste his time "seeing you with your crappy gifts "when he has a multi-million-dollar business to run?" In 1969, Maxwell suffered two big blows to his reputation. He lost a bid for the tabloid newspaper News of the World, which was later scooped up by Australian businessman Rupert Murdoch.

Maxwell had burned Murdoch on a business deal some years earlier, and the two men were bitter rivals. - [Interviewer] How do you feel about the prospect of losing yet another newspaper to Mr. Murdoch? - Well it's not my

newspaper that I was losing. I just happened to be the person who took the lead in negotiating for the Sun to become a paper that would give the Labor Party and the Labor movement support. - [Margaret] Meanwhile, the Sunday Times had caught wind of trouble at Pergamon.

Rumors were swirling that Maxwell was creating an illusion of profitability by using other subsidiaries to buy expensive encyclopedia sets. Fun. Maxwell denied the rumors, but became paranoid about whether Murdoch had planted the article.

In 1970, following this series of public humiliations, Maxwell lost his seat in Parliament. In 1980, Maxwell began to salvage his business reputation by saving Europe's largest printing company from bankruptcy.

But he still wanted a paper. At the time, Murdoch owned the right-leaning tabloid The Sun, so Maxwell set his sights on The Sun's rival, the left-leaning Daily Mirror. When he acquired the Mirror in 1984, Maxwell brought his creative

accounting practices with him. He used the company's four pension funds as his personal piggy banks, borrowing millions of pounds to cover shortfalls. He repaid the loans, but he knew it was risky.

In 1988, he combined the pensions into a single fund to be managed by a Lichtenstein-based foundation, his very own Maxwell Charitable Trust. Maxwell was borrowing hundreds of millions to keep his printing press empire, Maxwell Communication Corporation, afloat so graphics like these could stay in tact. And banks kept giving him loans because he backed them with

the money in Lichtenstein. The same year Maxwell acquired the Mirror, he accompanied fellow British business tycoon Gerald Ronson to a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister. For decades, Maxwell had kept

his Jewish roots private. But Ronson convinced him to admit his ancestry. Midway through their meeting, Maxwell announced he wanted to invest a quarter of a billion dollars in Israel and agreed to share security

intel with the Mossad. Maxwell kept his word. Two years later, an Israeli nuclear technician named Mordechai Vanunu went to London hoping to blow the whistle on a dangerous nuclear arms program. He was prepared to sell the

evidence to the Sunday Times. But Maxwell persuaded him to sell the story to the Mirror instead. Maxwell sent the pictures to the Israeli embassy in London, supposedly to confirm

the truth of the story. But Maxwell never paid Vanunu and never ran the story either. Later, Vanunu was drugged and kidnapped back to Israel, where he was imprisoned on crimes against the state.

Some years later, at Maxwell's funeral, Israeli President Shimon Peres personally praised Maxwell's services to Israel. In addition to his creative accounting, Maxwell employed some creative management practices at the Mirror. Almost immediately, he forced the unions to accept mass layoffs and threatened to shut the paper down if they didn't agree to his terms.

Needing to be in control at all times, he even wired tapped the office phones. - American business, ethics do not exist. And business apparently, you've got to assume right from the beginning that you're dealing with people who have got the morals of barnyard roosters.

- [Margaret] Maxwell was losing control. That year, he divorced Betty on the grounds she was raving mad. And a financial paper revealed that Maxwell Communication Corporation was operating at significant losses. Maxwell attempted to refute this, but the writing was on the wall. He was forced to repay his debts by liquidating a bunch of assets, including his 51% stake in MTV Europe, a pretty desperate move in 1990.

His finances got so unmanageable that, in 1991, he sold his crown jewel, Pergamon. By this point, Maxwell had sold 96 million pounds of the Mirror's pension assets. The paper's finance director

noticed some discrepancies and launched an internal investigation. It turned out Maxwell owed over a billion pounds to several banking institutions, including Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. Eventually, the Swiss bank

called in the fraud squad. On November 1, 1991, Maxwell boarded his yacht the Lady Ghislaine for a last-minute trip to Madeira and the Canary Islands. The crew said he was in

unusually good spirits and didn't do any work, which was unlike him. He also boarded alone, no butler, no personal assistant, and brought almost no luggage with him. Then, on the morning of November 5th, his crew noticed him missing.

A few days later, his body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean. - I also want to take this opportunity to thank all the many hundreds of people who have sent messages of support to us at this very, very sad time. - [Margaret] What happened to Robert Maxwell is still a mystery. Some have speculated that he

may have taken his own life or even been killed. But many think his death was probably just an accident. Although Ghislaine was his favorite, Kevin became his primary inheritor because Robert did not believe that these things should go to women.

Kevin and Ian were unable to salvage their father's companies and went through the largest bankruptcy in British history. In 1996, the sons faced fraud trials, but were both acquitted. Defrauded out of 446 million pounds, pensioners at the Mirror and other Maxwell companies were eventually bailed

out by public funds, though they only ever received about half of what they were entitled to. And somehow, the Lady Ghislaine is now owned by Rupert Murdoch's ex-wife, Anna. In the end, Robert's antiquated views on inheritance protected Ghislaine from taking

on any legal responsibility. But she didn't need to inherit her father's crimes. She was already well on her way to creating an infamous legacy of her own. For more on Ghislaine Maxwell, be sure to check out the

brand new docu-series "Chasing Ghislaine", now on Discovery+. (dramatic music)