The Scandals of Robert Maxwell: From War Hero to Notorious Media Mogul

Oct 31, 2024

10 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Robert Maxwell reclining beside his wife Betty, who's holding a framed photograph

Thirty-five years ago today, on the morning of 5 November 1991, the crew of the superyacht Lady Ghislaine realised their boss wasn't on board. Robert Maxwell, owner of the Daily Mirror, friend of prime ministers and one of the loudest men in British public life, had simply vanished somewhere off the Canary Islands.

By that evening his naked body had been pulled from the Atlantic. Within weeks the country found out why his death mattered so much. The man the Mirror had called a saviour had been stealing from his own staff's pensions to keep his empire afloat, and he'd taken roughly £450 million with him.

Quick Answers

Who was Robert Maxwell? A Czechoslovak-born Holocaust survivor who won the Military Cross in the British Army, then built a publishing and newspaper empire that included Pergamon Press, the Daily Mirror and Macmillan.
How did he die? He went overboard from his yacht near Tenerife in the early hours of 5 November 1991. Accident, heart attack, suicide and murder have all been argued, and no theory's ever been proved.
What did he steal? About £450 million from Mirror Group and Maxwell company pension schemes, affecting more than 32,000 members.
Is he related to Ghislaine Maxwell? Yes. Ghislaine was his youngest child, and his yacht was named after her.

From Ján Hoch to Captain du Maurier

Maxwell was born Ján Ludvík Hoch on 10 June 1923 in Slatinské Doly, a poor village in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now Solotvyno in Ukraine. His family were Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews and money was so tight he later claimed he didn't own a pair of shoes until he was seven.

Field Marshal Montgomery pinning the Military Cross on a young Robert Maxwell in British Army uniform, 1945 — Maxwell receiving the Military Cross from Field Marshal Montgomery in 1945

As a teenager he slipped out of the country ahead of the Nazis and made his way to France, where he joined the Czechoslovak army in exile. When France fell in 1940 he was evacuated to Britain. His parents and most of his siblings stayed behind and were murdered in the Holocaust, several of them at Auschwitz. It's a loss he rarely talked about but never really got over.

In Britain he collected names the way other people collect stamps. He served as Leslie Jones, then Leslie du Maurier (borrowed, so the story goes, from a cigarette packet) before finally settling on Robert Maxwell. He went ashore after D-Day, fought through northwest Europe and was commissioned as an officer. In 1945 Field Marshal Montgomery pinned the Military Cross on him for bravery in action against the Germans in the Netherlands. A penniless refugee had become a British war hero in under five years, and he'd trade on that reputation for the rest of his life.

That same year he married Elisabeth "Betty" Meynard, a French Protestant from a well-to-do family. They'd go on to have nine children.

Black and white photograph of Robert and Betty Maxwell holding their newborn twin daughters in 1950 — Robert and Betty Maxwell with their twin daughters Christine and Isabel at two weeks old in 1950

Pergamon Press and the First Big Warning

Maxwell spent the immediate postwar years in occupied Berlin, where he made the contacts that launched his business career. He became the representative outside Germany for the scientific publisher Springer Verlag, picking up worldwide distribution rights for its journals and books. In 1951 he bought out Butterworth's stake in a struggling Springer joint venture and renamed it Pergamon Press.

Pergamon was a gold mine. Scientists needed journals, universities had to buy them and Maxwell worked out that he could charge almost whatever he liked. He used the money and the profile to get into politics, serving as Labour MP for Buckingham from 1964 to 1970.

Then came the episode that should have finished him. In 1969 the American firm Leasco agreed to buy Pergamon, only to pull out in August after it started doubting the accounts, especially at an encyclopaedia-selling subsidiary. Maxwell was voted off his own board that October. By the following autumn The Spectator was reporting heavy losses and a company being stripped back to its core publishing business.

The Board of Trade inspectors who investigated published their verdict in July 1971. They concluded Maxwell couldn't be "relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company". He never accepted it, and incredibly it barely slowed him down. In 1974 he bought Pergamon back for about £1.5 million, and Leasco's successor sold its 38% stake for just over £600,000 after paying around £9 million for it.

The Bouncing Czech Builds an Empire

The comeback was staggering. In a 1980 dawn raid Maxwell bought nearly 30% of the British Printing Corporation, and within a year he controlled it. It became the British Printing and Communications Corporation and later Maxwell Communication Corporation. In 1984 he bought Mirror Group Newspapers from Reed, finally getting the national paper and the political clout he'd always wanted.

In 1988 he went shopping in America. He paid $750 million for the Official Airline Guides and then won a bidding war for the publisher Macmillan at $2.6 billion. He later rescued the New York Daily News too. Along the way he owned Oxford United and Derby County, flew everywhere in his own jet and cruised the Mediterranean on a yacht named after his youngest daughter.

Private Eye nicknamed him the Bouncing Czech, partly because of his size and partly because his cheques had a habit of coming back. He sued the magazine repeatedly and his lawyers kept plenty of other critics busy. Biographer Tom Bower spent years in litigation over his unauthorised book about Maxwell.

Behind the swagger the numbers didn't add up. Banks lent to him because the fees were huge, and the Irish Times later noted that some lenders were fooled because they wanted to be. He pledged the same collateral to more than one bank and claimed his secretive family trusts in Liechtenstein were rich enough to cover everything.

Life at Headington Hill Hall

Home was Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, a grand mansion Maxwell leased from the city council, which also doubled as Pergamon's headquarters. Family life there was anything but relaxed. Former Mirror staff and family friends have described Sunday lunches where he'd tear into his sons Ian and Kevin in front of guests. Ghislaine, the youngest, was the obvious favourite.

The family also suffered terrible loss. Their daughter Karine died of leukaemia aged three, and their eldest son Michael was left in a coma by a car crash in 1961. He never woke up and died seven years later. Those who knew Maxwell said grief made him harder, not softer.

Robert Maxwell standing in the back row of a family portrait at Headington Hill Hall, with Betty seated holding baby Ghislaine on her knee — Robert Maxwell (back row, centre) with Betty, baby Ghislaine on her knee, and their children at Headington Hill Hall, Oxford, in the early 1960s

At the Mirror he was just as volatile. He sacked staff on a whim and rehired them days later, and he once assured his editor that the Gulf War would be over in two days. He later fired an editor who wouldn't run his prediction that Margaret Thatcher would survive the 1990 Tory leadership challenge. She didn't.

The Last Voyage of the Lady Ghislaine

By autumn 1991 the walls were closing in. The banks wanted their money and Maxwell was moving pension fund assets around to prop up his share prices. Even so, his last fortnight looked like business as usual. On 27 October he was at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York collecting a Man of the Year award from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial.

A few days later he flew to Gibraltar and boarded the Lady Ghislaine, telling people he needed a rest to shake off a cold. Newsweek's reconstruction of his final days shows the yacht stopped at Madeira and then Tenerife. On his last evening he went looking for lobster on the docks at Santa Cruz for his chef, couldn't find any and took a taxi to the Hotel Mencey. He ate alone: whiting with almonds and mushrooms, two beers and part of a third.

Robert Maxwell in sunglasses on a small boat with his white superyacht Lady Ghislaine moored behind him — Maxwell with the Lady Ghislaine

The yacht left port at 10pm with 11 crew on board. Around 11pm he spent about ten minutes on the phone to a rabbi in New York, who said he sounded calm and cheerful. The last time anyone saw him alive was 4.25am, out on the afterdeck near his stateroom.

At some point after that he went into the sea, probably through a gap at the stern where steel cables replace the guardrail so motorboats can be launched. The crew raised the alarm that morning. At 6.18pm a Spanish rescue helicopter recovered his unclothed body from the water near Gran Canaria.

Accident, Heart Attack, Suicide or Murder?

Three and a half decades on, nobody knows for sure what happened, and the autopsies only made it murkier.

The Spanish investigating judge, Luis Gutiérrez Sanjuan, said preliminary findings pointed to a heart attack before the fall. Only a small amount of water was found in his lungs. Maxwell weighed about 22 stone and wasn't in great health, so a coronary at the rail and a tumble overboard seemed plausible.

Man in a suit talking on a telephone on the deck of a yacht with a city skyline in the background

The family weren't satisfied and a second post mortem was carried out in Israel shortly before the burial. There was serious money riding on the result. The insurers stood to save £21 million if the death was ruled suicide, so they sent their own expert, the renowned Home Office pathologist Dr Iain West. The Israeli pathologists concluded he'd probably had a minor heart attack, fallen and died in the water.

Then in January 1992 the French magazine Paris Match published photographs of the body and a report on the Israeli autopsy. It claimed the autopsy had found serious injuries to his head, left shoulder, abdomen and spinal cord. It also said he hadn't drowned. One expert the magazine consulted thought a violent blow to the back of the skull was the likeliest explanation. Others have argued the torn shoulder muscles fit a heavy man clinging to the yacht before he lost his grip.

That's fed every theory going. Some people who worked for him believe he slipped while relieving himself over the stern, something he was known to do at night. Others think a man facing ruin and prison chose the sea. The most persistent theory says he was killed by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, either because he knew too much or because he'd become a liability. There's never been any hard evidence for it.

A Hero's Funeral on the Mount of Olives

Maxwell's body was flown to Jerusalem and he was buried on the Mount of Olives on 10 November 1991 with something close to a state funeral. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir attended and President Chaim Herzog gave the eulogy. Maxwell had poured money into Israeli businesses and causes, and the Israeli establishment treated him as a friend of the nation.

It was the last time he'd be talked about with respect.

Men in dark suits carrying Robert Maxwell's coffin during his funeral in Jerusalem — Maxwell's body is laid to rest at the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem on 10 November 1991

From Saviour to Robber: The Pension Fund Scandal

Within weeks of the funeral his companies were collapsing and the truth came out. Maxwell had used pension fund assets as collateral for loans to his private companies and to prop up the share prices of Mirror Group and Maxwell Communication Corporation. Most of the money sat in a fund run by Bishopsgate Investment Management, a firm he controlled. Its records were hopelessly out of date.

The Pensions Archive puts the missing sum at about £450 million, with more than 32,000 scheme members affected. Many were ordinary printers, journalists and office staff who'd worked for decades expecting a secure retirement. The Mirror, which had mourned him as a giant, now splashed him as a crook.

Two Daily Mirror front pages reporting Maxwell's death at sea and the millions missing from his companies — The Daily Mirror's front pages went from mourning Maxwell to exposing the missing millions within weeks

The government refused to use taxpayers' money to cover the losses. Instead it set up the Maxwell Pensioners Trust, which raised just under £6 million from businesses and individuals to keep people afloat. After years of wrangling a settlement worth about £276 million was finally agreed in March 1995.

The scandal changed British pensions law for good. The Goode Committee, set up in direct response, led to the Pensions Act 1995 and a new regulator, which later became today's Pensions Regulator. Rules on trustees, independent oversight and fraud compensation all trace back to what Maxwell did.

The Sons in the Dock

With Maxwell dead, the Serious Fraud Office went after the people closest to the business. Kevin and Ian Maxwell were arrested in June 1992. When officers turned up at Kevin's house, his wife Pandora, thinking they were reporters, shouted "Piss off or I'll call the police" through the door. She was told that they were the police.

Kevin was declared bankrupt owing more than £400 million, at the time the biggest personal bankruptcy in British history. Both brothers stood trial for conspiracy to defraud in a case that ran for eight months. In January 1996 the jury acquitted them, and the SFO's later attempts to prosecute Kevin went nowhere.

Ghislaine and the Epstein Connection

For decades the Maxwell name meant pension theft. Then it came to mean something much darker.

After her father's death Ghislaine moved to New York, where she became the girlfriend and later the closest associate of financier Jeffrey Epstein. She moved through the same high society circles her father had loved and introduced Epstein to many of them. In December 2021 a New York jury convicted her of sex trafficking for her role in recruiting and grooming underage girls for Epstein, and in June 2022 she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Investigators and biographers have often pointed out how much of her father's world she carried with her: the money, the yachts, the powerful friends and the habit of being untouchable until suddenly she wasn't.

The Legacy of Robert Maxwell

Maxwell's story still doesn't quite make sense. He was a genuinely brave soldier who'd lost almost everything to the Nazis and rebuilt himself from nothing. He was also a bully and a liar who robbed thousands of working people to save his own reputation. Both things were true at the same time.

If he'd lived, his trial would have been one of the great courtroom dramas of the century. Instead he took the answers into the Atlantic, and 35 years later we're still arguing about how he got there. Britain has had plenty of scandal-hit establishment figures, but few fell further or took more people down with them.