shareholders and pensioners to support his father’s fantastic dream of bestriding the world as a media colossus, Kevin successfully presented himself as a victim of his father’s tyranny. Along with his brother, he benefited from the lacklustre intellect of Britain’s law enforcers. Thanks to their incompetence, no one was found guilty for the theft of £2 billion, at the time Britain’s biggest fraud. Maxwell’s victims, the pensioners of his corporations, were bewildered by the failure of Britain’s judicial system.
Scandalously, after Kevin Maxwell’s acquittal, Mr Justice Buckley ruled that he should not face a second trial, for the theft of Berlitz shares worth £112 million from Macmillan Inc, a publicly owned company. There was no ‘public interest’, declared the judge, to launch the new prosecution. Buckley ignored Mr Justice Millet’s judgment about the same circumstances, given during a long civil trial, that Kevin was involved ‘in dishonesty’ and a ‘fraud’ regarding the disposal of the Berlitz shares.
Empowered by his acquittal and Buckley’s ruling, Kevin Maxwell now insists that his father too was innocent of any crime. Ever fewer these days recall the circumstances with sufficient clarity to prove convincingly the opposite. They will not be helped by a government investigation conducted by an accountant and a lawyer employed by the Department of Trade and Industry who finally reported on the saga in 2001, ten years after Maxwell’s death. The inspectors’ crowning achievement was their failure to name a single person involved in the frauds – lawyer, banker, accountant or Maxwell employee – who should be punished. Their salutary conclusion was that ‘high ethical and professional standards must always be put before commercial advantage’. The cover-up was complete. In his celestial banqueting chamber, enjoying his favourite Beluga caviar and Krug champagne, Robert Maxwell must still be chortling about his family’s victory over Britain’s justice system and over the establishment across the globe.
In the first days after his death, statesmen and clergymen praised the monster as a genius and near-saint. Even after the truth was known, legions of awestruck bankers, businessmen, politicians and journalists recounted their individual experiences of a unique man. By size and personality, Maxwell had dominated every room. Only those he could not buy won his respect. The rest were bullied. Among both groups, his death sparked endless speculation about the cause and the consequence of his death but never admissions of their own guilt.
Nearly thirty years after his death, Maxwell should not only be remembered as an extraordinary crook but also as one of an unusual breed of mavericks created in the aftermath of the Second World War. As an eyewitness to extreme suffering and multiple deaths, Maxwell was physically and emotionally courageous. Nothing and nobody caused him any fear. Like a savage, he inhabited and fought in a jungle. His survival instinct was a lodestar. His legacy was the exposure of corruption in the City, the professions and the media – all those who turned a self-interested blind eye to his crimes. In the aftermath, some were embarrassed by their profitable relationships with Maxwell. Reputations were shredded and jobs were lost. But most escaped with just a bruise.
Few will now remember that the Maxwell saga was the climax of the Thatcherite era, which featured staggering excesses of flamboyance, recklessness, nepotism, greed, sex, crime and shameless lust. The litany of spectacular City blowouts – Guinness, Polly Peck, Blue Arrow, BCCI and so many more – revealed sordid abuses by get-rich adventurers and charlatans. And then amnesia struck.
Bewildered spectators watched as so many guilty collaborators in those scams escaped justice while business continued as usual. The supremely ambitious and amoral counted, like Maxwell, on the weakness and vanities of those lesser breeds to climb the greasy pole, and to stay on top. None more than Lord Donoughue, a former Downing Street adviser to prime ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, whose lucrative services to Maxwell are described in this book. Donoughue was subsequently criticized by the government inspectors for failing to ask the right questions about how Maxwell was stealing the pension fund shares [DTI report, v1 p.316]. Pertinently, his employment by Maxwell has been expunged from his biography on the internet.
Maxwell’s success matches Edmund Burke’s observation: ‘For evil to succeed, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing.’ Good men, however, had repeatedly tried to halt Maxwell’s resurrection but their attempts were crushed by greed. Undaunted by prejudice, humiliation, morality and the truth, Maxwell bulldozed his way through any obstacle to fulfil his ambitions. Retribution was only delivered at the end. Friendless, alone and exhausted on his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, his fame and fortune had become worthless. The subversive unwillingly faced his Maker. Even in his last moments, death probably sparked no fear. Having suffered a heart attack while urinating over the side, he clung to the yacht’s railing until, unable to support his twenty stone, the muscles ripped under his arm and he fell dead into the sea. No water was found in his lungs by three Spanish pathologists and no bruises or cuts on his corpse. The heart attack, they concluded, had killed him. His legacy was borne by his children.
After their acquittal, Kevin and Ian Maxwell submerged themselves in a series of international communications and property ventures which ended in losses and occasional bankruptcy but from which, like their father, they always re-emerged. And by now, thirty years later, the Maxwell family would have been forgotten had Ghislaine Maxwell, the youngest of Robert’s seven surviving children, not burst into the spotlight.
At the beginning of 1991, Ghislaine was receiving a monthly income from Maxwell’s Liechtenstein trust through the Bank Leumi in New York. No one has been able to gain access to those Liechtenstein bank accounts or understand the flow of money to Ghislaine. After his death, at least £25 million remained unaccounted for from the debris of the Maxwell empire in New York and a lot more disappeared into unknown bank accounts in tax havens. Some of that money financed Ghislaine Maxwell’s lifestyle. The result was clear. Through her father’s considerable presence in New York, not least through his ownership of the New York Daily News, she had met most of the city’s financiers and power brokers. Liberated by Maxwell’s death, Ghislaine bought a house in Manhattan and burst into New York’s gossip columns as a brash, party-hopping socialite. Among those she met was Jeffrey Epstein, an investment manager for the super-rich. Undoubtedly, her attraction to a magnetic man with unusual sexual habits was influenced by her childhood. Rich, domineering men could seduce her.
Until Ghislaine, then aged thirty, arrived in Tenerife to inspect her father’s yacht after his death, she had been relatively invisible except when she disingenuously congratulated a London policeman after being stopped for drunken driving. Known in the Mirror building as arrogant, she was an aspiring status-seeker, enjoying lunch with Mick Jagger and other celebrities who instantly accepted her father’s invitation. Her life had been dominated by her father’s tyranny.
Betty Maxwell, Ghislaine’s mother, would recall that her youngest daughter had been woefully neglected since her birth in 1961. ‘I was devastated,’ Betty would recall of the occasion when her four-year-old daughter had exclaimed, ‘Mummy, I exist.’
During her childhood, Ghislaine had witnessed her father’s merciless bullying, especially at the family’s regular Sunday lunches. Maxwell would question his children about world affairs. In the event that they made a mistake, the meal was interrupted while he physically beat the errant child in front of the others. ‘Bob would shout and threaten and rant at the children until they were reduced to pulp,’ Betty Maxwell wrote about her husband after his death. If a comment in a school report was not perfect, Maxwell caned the child. ‘Remember the three C’s,’ he growled, ‘Concentration, Consideration and Conciseness.’ Ghislaine could expect little protection from her mother even in front of her friends at her birthday party. Betty, who had met Robert during the liberation of France in 1944, collaborated with the beatings of her children just as she connived in her husband’s financial crimes. Except that Maxwell could be particularly protective towards his daughter.
As a teenager, Ghislaine was once summoned to Maxwell’s office in Holborn while he was speaking to Roy Greenslade, editor of the Mirror.
