- [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)