Robert Maxwell

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Hello and welcome. Citation Needed, podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and for today's espionage story, I'll be our

Dame Judy Dench.

I guess.

All right. I'm joined by our Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Browsnan, and Daniel Craig in whatever order.
Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Marsh.

Okay, just because I have the exact same accent in every sketch I'm in, regardless of where I'm meant to be from.

For example, this right now, this is me being a Spanish Highlander.

Yeah.

Russian name. Dibs on Roger Moore, right? He's the most forgettable despite doing the most Bond movies.
And I feel like there's like, there's something comforting about being forgettable, right?

Yeah, I get it. In this timeline, it definitely feels like tomorrow never ends.
In fact, today's taking its fucking time, actually.

If anyone is a guy getting his ball smacked by a bag of rocks like Daniel Craig and Casino Royale, It is Tom. Okay.
It is Tom. All right.
Yep. Yep.
That leaves a pierce frostnet for you, I guess.

There we go. It's all settled and all tracks.
Let's get into it. Marsh, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today? Robert Maxwell.

All right. Who is Robert Maxwell? So Abraham Leiby Hock.
Not what we asked, man.

Okay. Abraham Leiby Hock was born in June 1923 in the the small town of Satinskedole in Carpathian Ruthenia.

Now, that's a region that was part of Austria-Hungary until 1918, but it was in Czechoslovakia by the time that Abraham was born. And these days, it's part of modern Ukraine.

And the fact that two of those countries no longer exist and the third has been invaded by Russia gives you a flavor of the historical volatility of the region.

And that uncertainty and instability was absolutely a theme of Abraham's entire life.

So when he was three, thanks to the intervention of the newly minted Czech officials of his homeland, Abraham's family were persuaded to change his name to a more Czech-sounding Jan Ludwig Hyman bin Yamin Hock.

That's too many names. Like, I feel like the officials just had a bunch of leftover names that they had to get rid of.
before they could clock out. And they're like, okay, this is kid.

And look, like the name change, it wasn't exactly a hardship to them, given that it was only fairly recently that an Austrian official had changed their entirely family name to Hock

from whatever it had previously been, because the original was Yiddish. So, ew.
Hey, I just need to point out that I resent Michael Marshall for pronouncing all of that properly.

Like, it doesn't feel respectful to the spirit of our show.

Thank you. Thank you.
Especially when he's here to replace Eli. Yes.

Okay, yeah, that's fair. That is fair.
Well, the Hock family were Orthodox Jewish. He sat around and spelled something wrong.
I don't know.

Are you shitting blood while you read this?

It's not.

Always, at all times.

I'm just more subtle about it because I'm British.

I'll keep it on happily.

Shit, blood, and carry on.

So the Hock family, they were Orthodox Jews in a part of Europe that was both incredibly poor and an incredibly poor place to be an Orthodox Jew.

Case in point, their city was annexed by Hungary in 1939 and then occupied by the Nazis in 1944.

At which point, most of the Hock family, including four of Abraham slash Jan's six siblings, they were killed in Auschwitz.

Well, there is definitely a popular Twitter thread that explains why this is their fault.

Yeah.

And a Tucker Carlson episode, if you want to dive into that.

Very friendly Tucker episode. But thankfully, our hero was not killed in Auschwitz.
He'd been sent to study at a yeshiva in the mid-1930s.

So when the occupation happens in 1939, his Czech first name and his quasi-Austrian surname actually helped him evade the authorities. And so he joined the anti-Nazi resistance.

That said, he was really quickly caught and he was sentenced to death as a spy. And things were looking incredibly bleak.
But then he was able to escape his capture.

And to hear him tell it as an older man, he was able to wrestle his way free because he was a pretty tall guy, a pretty strong guy. And also the guard who was escorting him only had one arm.

Okay. He was just already hedging his lie.
yeah he's like i'm calling strong well also it was a one arm

and so he he knocked the guard out with a stick or possibly with his manacles depending on the version of the story he's telling at the time that he's telling it and so he hid under a bridge before then being rescued by a troll a kind passing gypsy his words not mine to be clear

How much that is true, you know, it's hard to say because these are stories that Jan would tell so much later in life.

Sure, Jan. Yeah, beat up the guard if you did, or whatever it was.
Sure. And bear in mind, he was already onto his second name by the point of this story.

And neither of those names are the one that I introduced the essay with. We maybe shouldn't just take his word for it.

Just a search party of seven Nazis with one leg jumping across the bridge he's under, you know.

All right, so what? I feel like we let the Holocaust survivor who escaped Auschwitz embellish a little, Marsh. I feel like that's the polite thing to do.
Okay, okay, fair.

So 17-year-old Jan makes his way to Marseille. He arrives there in 1940, just in time for France to be invaded by those same Nazis.
He grabs a stick and a manacle.

Don't worry, France, I know what to do.

Some of these guys

have two arms. Oh, shit.
Fuck!

That's unfair. So what does Jan do? Okay, he throws himself into a second.

Nice. Nice.

So Jan throws himself into a second resistance movement, enlisting in the Czechoslovak army, which is in exile in Marseille.

That's an army that fares as badly against the Nazis as the rest of the French forces do. And Jan was among the troops that were evacuated at Dunkirk to the UK.

So yeah, he's brought over to Britain, where despite being kept in less than ideal conditions, he decides to throw in with the British troops.

And that is mainly due to the anti-Semitism he experienced within the Czech army's ranks.

He actually took part in a protest against the leadership of the Czechoslovak army, who apparently hated the Nazis, but also weren't that fond of the Jews either.

So, Jan instead adopted Britain as his new home team for the war.

He taught himself an English accent, modeled on Winston Churchill, who he'd sound like for the rest of his life, and he gave himself a brand new name to fit his new British identity.

And that name was Ivan George. So sorry,

British, what? No. Sounds good.
Hey, guys, I hate the Nazis, but maybe they're not wrong about everything is not a take that's going to check out.

Oh,

So at this point, Abraham slash Jan slash Ivan clearly had a taste for fighting Nazis.

And so in 1943, he joined the North Staffordshire Regiment and he was recruited to the British intelligence services, mostly thanks to his ability to speak several different European languages, which comes in handy.

He was barely 20 at this time, and this was the second time he'd been a spy. And it definitely wouldn't be the last time he'd be a spy.

His regiment was sent to France as part of of the Normandy landings, where the Nazi killing goes so much better for him at the third time of asking.

He quickly gets made Lance Corporal and then Sergeant, and then he gets a battlefield promotion to lieutenant. And at this point, he gives himself yet another name.

Oh, this time, Ivan Dumorier, the surname taken from his favorite brand of cigarettes. Oh,

yeah, good thing you didn't smoke Lucky Stripes, I guess.

So now this quasi-Hungarian, Czech-Ukrainian spy is spying for the British with a Russian forename and a French surname.

Thank you all today for your brave and dedicated service. Our Medals of Honor recipients today are Virginia Slim Winston,

Benson Cool Dunhill, and

Joe Camill.

So, you know, evidently pretty happy playing fast and loose with the rules, he developed a habit while at war of looting any killed or captured German soldiers that he came across.

And he'd also dress up in their Nazi uniforms in order to better infiltrate occupied villages. And these are actions that are generally frowned upon even in the midst of war.

Yeah, hey, totally cool to set guys on fire with a flamethrower, but...

Let's not check their pockets. We're men and not animals, okay?

Well, that's it. You see, he was killing Nazis.
So his commanding officers, they weren't about to call foul on any technicalities.

Yeah, frowned upon by Nazis in warfare.

Like, they frown upon costume stuff. Like, I'm a spy.
I'm not wearing a unit.

Regardless of who I'm against. So, yeah, they weren't about to call foul.
But what they were about to call him was yet another name.

Oh, my God. This time they went with Leslie Smith, which they felt...
fit in a lot better with the British troops he was now among.

Although, according to one Canadian radio broadcast that was praising his heroic deeds, he was actually Leslie Di Maria, names he's never gone by.

That one guy who has to sew the names on the uniforms is so mad at him right now. God.

So, okay, so I really want the reveal in this story to be that these are all just different people whose deeds a grifter wanted to take credit for. So he's like, yeah, I should do a name again.

That would have been amazing.

So. January 1945, and whatever we want to call him, he's leading a battalion into the town of Parlo in Germany.

And suddenly they find themselves under heavy attack and they're penned in alongside another battalion that's led by his commanding officer. Well, let me guess he disarms them all.

So he takes a handful of his men. Farewell to arm because he's got hands, so he can take a handful of his men, unlike the guys he's fighting.

He can take a handful of his men and against extremely heavy gunfire, he raids the building that the Germans are holed up in and he kills most of them and the rest of them flee.

And for this, he was presented with the military cross, which is the second highest military honor at the time. And he was promoted to the rank of captain.

Kind of makes you wonder what the fuck they're holding out for with that highest honor, right? What's the guy got to do?

So from here, his Nazi killing gets so much more prolific and his gray areas get more and more complicated.

In one escapade, he single-handedly killed 15 SS soldiers and captured the 14 others who were surrendering.

Except there's a really good reason to believe that some of the 15 were actually trying to surrender when he killed them. He wasn't really fussy about the morals of warfare, particularly.

He'd actually go on to write home about routinely killing prisoners, even shooting some unarmed civilians, some of whom were in the middle of surrendering at the time.

And he'd later tell a story of how weird he thought it was that his men got really upset with him for encouraging a group of Germans to surrender.

only to then machine gun them down as they emerged from a barn. Okay, okay.

I know it's a war crime or blah blah blah war crime but i find it hard to let nazis do a surrender if i'm the soldier there right so like three seconds ago you were firing a gun in service of the literal adolf hitler and now i'm clearly winning and you're like time out time out i'll stop if you stop you you're a nazi oh no oh hey guys i know we've literally brainwashed and trained the humanity out of these guys so they'll kill strangers they've never met but you're doing it like

extra now

I think that's their fault, right? They're putting on costumes. It's just, it's ma'am.

I like that we covered both our bases on there. Good.
Thanks, guys.

Now we'll double the hate mail.

We can just pair them up against each other. They can argue with each other.
It's fine. It's fine.
That was Eli that made that last joke.

Hey, all the pro-Nazi people, send me the hate mail. That's perfect.
That's perfect. I want to hear from you.
I want to know who you are. So that was 1945, and the war was soon over.

And so too, therefore, were the war crimes. And given that our side won, those things stopped counting as war crimes, as America's big boy and little boy can readily attest.

Yeah, we thought they would be smaller.

But there was

a military target in there somewhere.

Yeah, yeah. The only crime was inaccuracy.

You're absolutely right. Yeah.

Well, and over. Exuberance, Marsh.

When the promise over deliver. That's been the American motto the entire time.

Oh, that's the best way to describe that. Amazing.

The nuclei had a lot of gumption in them. They didn't account for it exactly.
Big bootstraps.

So at this point, it's time for Ivan to become officially British, which inevitably meant, yep, choosing a new name, but this one he would actually stick with for the rest of his life.

And so he chose Ian Robert Maxwell. And so for the rest of his life, he'd be known to all as not the Ian bit, because fuck all of you.

So in March 1945, Robert Maxwell marries Elizabeth Betty Maynard, the wealthy French heiress of a silk mill. And over the course of the next 16 years, they've gone to have nine children.

There's Michael, Philip, Anne, Christine, Isabel, Karine, Ian, Kevin, and Robert's favorite child until the day he died. Ghillaine Maxwell.

That Ghillaine Maxwell.

Okay, yeah.

The new rule about the time machine, it's baby Hitler and then quick stop after Maxwell kid number eight to snick Robert, Ian, whatever the fuck, Jan, and then Marty McFly, kiss mom, clock tower.

That's like

whiteboard on that. It's so weird that all the other siblings got normal people names and then they were sick.
Yeah, yeah, it really is.

So for the rest of the 1940s, Robert Maxwell is working for the British military in Berlin.

ostensibly as an interrogator of German prisoners, given his approach to those grey areas around war crimes and stuff, but also probably just an outright spy.

There's suggestions he even spent some time monitoring his home country on behalf of MI6, and he was also he was well placed to cultivate links and sources behind the growing Iron Curtain, given his ability to speak Russian among just so many other languages.

Robert Maxwell's ambition was soon starting to know at him because the one thing this kid from an impoverished background in a country that no longer existed, what he really wanted was the kind of money that could protect himself and his wife and his future kids from the hardships that his own family had endured.

And he was really just perfectly positioned to create that wealth with all the connections he has as a probable spy in allied occupied Germany, no less.

And it's actually through one of those connections, a publisher named Ferdinand Springer, that Robert Maxwell spies the opportunity that would change the course of not just his life, but also irrevocably change the process of scientific publishing as we know it.

Huh. Cool.
Better be some fucking amazing spreadsheets of science or whatever if you're going to not wear a condom after eight kids, bud.

We'll see how it goes after a quick break.

Maxwell, get in here. Yes, Colonel, what's up? Maxwell, this is the fourth time this month that a prisoner has died in your care.
What can I say, sir? I'm an unlucky guy.

One of them was found with half his body stuck inside the toilet. I think he was hanging a picture and he slipped.

Yeah, another got a hold of your gun. It's and he shot himself.
Yeah, that one was weird. He did say he was really depressed, though.

Another guy says here, uh, killed himself by jumping on a pile of of bear traps. Oh, I think those were improvised, like, prison bear shanks.
You know what I mean?

All right, look, Maxwell, I don't like these prisoners either. But I'm getting a lot of pressure from the higher-ups.
And every time this happens, there is a ton of paperwork. So

can you just

not?

Okay, all right. How about this, Colonel? I got an idea.
Every time we find a dead prisoner from now on, I will make sure it definitely looks like they will have hanged themselves with bed sheets.

I'll make sure that the guard logs show that nobody went to their cell, too. I mean, that

sounds fine, actually. But can you also make sure their neck is broken in a certain way so as not to arouse suspicion? I will do my best with that, yes.
And disable the cameras.

Disable the cameras, obviously, yes. They didn't have cameras in prisons in World War II.
It's a call forward. Get out of the sketch.

Tom is not cursed. His computer literally blew up when he had on face recognition.
It sounds rare, but possible. That is his third computer blow-up this week.

Oh, hey, Marsh, how's it going? Oh, yeah, great, thanks. I was just texting a mate of mine.
I was, you know, reminiscing about some of the food we grew up on. Oh, nice.
Like what?

So the Bedfordshire clanger. Ooh, mushy smoosh.
Oh, the Scunthorpe squirts. Overcooked meat products.
Hmm. Those sound regional.
Yeah, they weren't great, to be honest.

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Yeah, thanks.

Oh my God, what was that? Sorry, sorry. My computer exploded again.
I should have warned you guys I was unboxing it. Yeah, Mike, you gotta hit the claxons when you interact with technology.

Yeah, sorry, sorry. I know the rules.
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And we're back.

Where we left off, Robert Maxwell, Ian Jan, whatever the fuck, was an actual super spy going around Europe after World War II, exchanging briefcases on like opposite-facing park benches and carving up the world.

Also, something about like science publishing or spreadsheets, whatever. What's next, Marsh?

So, yeah, bear in mind, this is the late 1940s and the world has just seen how important science could really be.

So the US, they've dropped the atomic bomb on Japan and then they've paperclipped some rocket scientists out of Germany.

And it's clear that whatever future is on the horizon, it's going to be built by nerds in labs. Yeah, no, you see nerds vaporize enough sand and you lose your urge to kick it in their faces, I think.

And so the thing is, those lab nerds, they're going to need somewhere to publish all of their work.

And so in meeting Ferdinand Springer of Springer Verlag, the science journal publisher, Maxwell realizes he's talking to the owner of arguably the world's largest repository of scientific literature, but they're German and a lot of countries want nothing to do with them.

Springer had this vast wealth of 50,000 cutting-edge science books, but nobody was willing to buy from them.

So Maxwell secures from Ferdinand a cut price rate on distribution rights, and he goes into business as Springer's exclusive British and US distributor.

Oh man, remember when deals with Nazis were like a secret spy thing that you would have to hide in your business?

Oh, man. So at the time, science journals were often operating at a loss.
As opposed to the money printing machines they are now.

But Maxwell instinctively understands just how much money there is in the doing of science.

Because there's grants, there's government contracts, philanthropy, equeathments, all sorts of revenue streams that Joe Rogan is getting getting so wet right now just hearing this.

And while all the science was well-funded, the publishers who make the findings available, they weren't getting a taste. And that is where Robert Maxwell comes in.

So he buys three quarters of a small publisher called Butterworth Springer, and he goes in a partnership with a professional science editor and not so coincidentally, an ex-spy for the British, a guy called Paul Rosbod.

Now, where he gets the £13,000 for that deal to happen, that's unclear because his heiress wife did not front him the cash.

Decades later, a former British intelligence officer claimed that MI6 actually set Maxwell up with the cash, but that is unconfirmed. He had no idea where he got all that money.

I do remember he paid the deposit with a coin purse filled with gold Nazi teeth, though.

Jesus Christ. They were Nazi teeth.
I could tell that they were Nazi teeth, but yeah.

Maxwell and Rothbard have changed the name of the company to Publisher.

Of course he fucking changed the name. Yeah, okay.

Exactly.

And it actually went on to become one of the biggest academic publishing houses in the world. And a large part of that was Maxwell's complete lack of scruples.

So he'd turn up to academic conferences and offer bewildered scientists. fairly large financial incentives to sign exclusive publishing deals with him.
Cool.

He was like Chug Knight with vanilla ice of his time.

He'd also persuade scientists that what they were doing, the science they were doing, was so unique. It just couldn't go in a regular journal.

What it really needed was a brand new journal all of its own that they should be the editors of.

And so Pergamon started with just six serials and two books in 1951, but by 1960, it had 59 regular journals. And by 1991, they had more than 400.

Okay, it is so very British of you, Marsh, to use the part where he's cutting Nazi throats as like a lead-in to talk about the ruthless scientific publishing houses that you really wanted to tell them.

That's a weird

shift. I'm easing in before we get to the evil stuff.

So, that proliferation of science journals was a key cog in his money-making machine because he realized all that money that was sloshing around in science funding, he didn't have to give his journal away for free, like they'd been doing.

So, he could actually charge universities and research institutions across the world a subscription to access all the latest science. And the more journals he created,

And the more journals he created and published, the more those institutions would be forced to collect. And the more subscription fees Pergamon could therefore charge.

And this would change the face of scientific publishing as we know it. There's an app to tell you all the scientific journals subscriptions that you don't use.
It's called Nazi Rocket Scientists.

Okay, just to say this out loud back to you, Marsh, he seems to have revolutionized the business business model here by um let me check the notes charging money for them yes he did yes he was genius that was what he came up with out loud the tragedy of the commons was that nobody owned the damn thing don't worry capitalism solved it

and then what's more he had all those connections to the east and that also boosted his value because during the cold war Pergamon became the sole publisher of Russian scientific information into the West.

In 1964, Pergamon floated on the stock exchange for £4 million

then. That's over £70 million in today's money.
Okay, so I know Russians were doing cutting-edge stuff back then, but having just watched their best robot face plant when it tried to wave,

I feel like he was overcharging, right? Yeah, maybe, maybe.

Still, by now, it was the 1960s, and while Robert Maxwell now had all the money he dreamed of, he didn't quite yet have the kind of power and influence that he'd come to crave by this point.

So as an attempt to gate crash the British upper classes, he bought himself a mansion in Oxford, the Headington Hills Hall Estate.

And living in a 200-year-old stately home is like a kind of cheat cord for entering the establishment.

And he parlayed all these new connections into actually becoming the MP for Buckingham in the 1964 and 1966 general elections.

And this is despite the fact that he'd committed as many war crimes as he'd had different identities by this point in his life.

Hold on, hold on. You're saying he had the cash.
Do you need like a good resume to be rich in England? What are you talking about? Yes, you do. You absolutely do do that.

Apparently, there's a names to war crimes ratio that's considered like proper, and one that's considered

outside of that range.

Yeah, no, whoever heard of a person who committed war crimes excelling in British politics. I mean,

we normally get rid of them after the war crimes, to be fair. Technically, I had a good one up until the war crimes.

Look,

unsurprisingly, this brash and quite burly foreigner who'd made millions disrupting the entire field of scientific publishing didn't mix well with the establishment figures of British Parliament, not least because he self-defined as a socialist, albeit

a billionaire socialist with a captain's rank and a 200-year-old rank.

So he wasn't a very good socialist.

He really wasn't

a natural loss to see for the Conservatives

in the 1970 election. He failed to win it back in either of the two elections that we had in 1974.

Yes, we had two elections in 1974, despite the fact that Labour, his party, won the latter of those elections.

I know he's a villain. I know, I know.
But like, so far, he's also a Nazi-killing socialist, thumbing his nose at British aristocratic norms.

And I'm not saying we need more of those guys, but I feel like so far having less of them hasn't worked out so great.

Unwanted, sadly, in the world of politics, Maxwell turned to the next best refuge for the power-hungry billionaire, the mainstream media.

In 1969, he tried and failed to buy the tabloid newspaper, The News of the World, which is a newspaper which is also on my citation-needed essay list. Jesus Christ, Guy's been here 15 fucking minutes.

He's already calling Dibsies like a snow-covered Chicagoan with a shovel and a lawn chair in his hand.

Christ.

Isn't that one of the topic? If you want to tell us about the news of the world, Tom, you're welcome. Yeah.

So

the family who owned the newspaper just simply point blank refused to sell it to a sourceless Czechoslovakian immigrant.

In fact, the News of the World's editor, Stafford Summerfield, published a front-page opinion piece opposing Maxwell's bid, writing, this is a British paper run by British people, as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

Let us keep it that way.

And then later that same year, the newspaper was sold to Australian Media Book.

When I was in Manchester, I called Yorkshire pudding a muffin, and I thought the server was going to kill me.

Okay, they've got pudding as the general term for all the desserts, right?

A specific dish called pudding. It's pandemonium.
It's impossible to follow. You know how we don't have a dessert called New York City dessert?

It's also not even a dessert because that is insane. It's like.

So despite some big acquisitions, cracks were starting to appear in the Maxwell business world by this point.

But unscrupulous as ever, Maxwell just papered over those cracks with his customary amoral attitude to the rules.

So when he came to try and sell Pergamon Press to Leasecore Data Processing Corporation in 1969, he just lied about the profitability of one of the subsidiary businesses, which was a publisher of encyclopedias.

Meanwhile, profits of Pergamon were on the decline, and so the company shares were suspended from the London stock market. Try changing the name.
That usually works.

And as a result of these various fiscal shenanigans, Maxwell was ousted from the Pergamon board.

And a subsequent 1971 inquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry found fraudulent payments between departments within his company, which were designed to inflate share prices and downplay just how financially disastrous some of Maxwell's investments and new ventures had been.

The inquiry concluded: quote: Notwithstanding

Mr. Maxwell's acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not, in our opinion, a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.

Okay, I like that they lead with the compliment, though. Like,

that's good millennial management energy. While Jim has an admirable ability to maintain boundaries and work-life balance, his penchant for embezzlement is not compatible with our Q3 projections.

Can we put a pin in embezzlement, Tom? Because we will get there.

So this not the right person to exercise stewardship of a publicly owned company, that lasted all of three years because Lise Core managed Pergamon so badly that by 1974, their price had completely tanked.

And

Maxwell was able to borrow enough money from people apparently willing to lend him money despite all of the financial shenanigans, that he was able to buy his company back.

And from there, he went on to buy the Daily Mirror, which is the leading left-wing tabloid, partly as a way to compete with Rupert Murdoch's News of the World and The Sun, and partly to undermine and destroy support for trade unions, which he saw as a barrier to profitability.

This socialist. And then he used his blood emerald money to buy plans for an electric car company, right?

He tried to buy Clive Sinclair's failing home computer computer company, Sinclair Research, but the deal was aborted in August 1985.

Lucky? 29 states in the U.S., he'd be forced to go through with it.

Just kidding. He's a man.
He can do whatever he wants. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And hey, not for nothing, Marsh, but don't you dare try to call dibs on Uncle Clive on it.

Maxwell also launched the London Daily News as a competitor to the London Evening Standard, but it closed within six months with losses of £25 million.

His up and down business career by this point led his former labor prime minister, his boss, Harold Wilson, to nickname him the bouncing check.

That's excellent. That's pretty fucking good.
That's so good.

So, yeah, it turns out that having the, what if I took this thing that people are giving away out of the goodness of their hearts and I charged for it?

Like that, like that idea can make you a lot of money, but it can't make you a savvy business investor.

Yeah, it really can't. It really can't.

So the 1980s is when he decides to visit Israel, meeting with the prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and promising to channel some of his fortune into supporting the country, which he actually does do.

He used profits from the Daily Mirror to buy Israeli newspapers and to majorly invest in pharma and tech companies in Israel. And rumors emerge of Maxwell being a spy for Mossad.

And you can kind of understand why. He's been a spy before multiple times for multiple different countries by this point.
100% certain he's a spy for all these countries at this point.

And then also when an Israeli physicist leaked details of the country's secret nuclear weapons program to the British press, which obviously Maxwell is part of, Maxwell is alleged to have passed those details on to Mossad, which led to the scientist being imprisoned for 18 years.

Though it is worth pointing out, that isn't proven. And Mossad also had other contacts in Britain feeding him information too.
So maybe it wasn't him.

The British Foreign Office, they suspected Maxwell of being a secret agent of a foreign government or even possibly a double agent or even a triple agent. Awesome.

One source called him a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia.

Maxwell denied all of this and he doggedly sued anyone who made those accusations. Marsh said after making those accusations on our show.

Yep.

Okay, here's the thing. If you ever get caught being a spy, you just add one to your agent number.

Like if I see a spy, I'd be announcing my like double triple cross at every moment to the people. Like, I'm going to go do the triple cross now, but saying everything in like air quotes.

Like, I'm going to, now I'm going to, you know, triple cross us, uh-huh. Right? Yeah, just sarcastic tone, the whole thing.
Plausible deniability. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

What do you think the record is for like octuple agent? Like, what do you think the highest number that somebody landed on and got away with it? I feel it. It's got to be an odd number.

I think it's got to be an odd number.

I feel you don't, you don't get into the high numbers and stay because at that point, I think someone's going to start suspicion of being suspicious. it.
See if it cancels. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.

Interesting. So 1988, Maxwell was personally worth over £3 billion.

He owned Nimbus Records, Maxwell Directories, Prentice Hall Information Services, the Burlitz Language School, half of MTV in Europe, Oxford United Football Club, and Macmillan Publishers.

The latter, which was acquired for $2.6 billion.

The latter, which was acquired for $2.6 billion

in 1988. Jesus Christ.
This was a meteoric rise, but it was also a catastrophic fall.

Because each one of those ambitious new ventures only added to the financial strain that his entire empire was under.

Macmillan, for example, was actually worth less than $2 billion when he bought it, even then.

And even to do that, Maxwell had to borrow extensively in order to afford the inflated price that he was willing to pay.

In 1991, he was forced to sell Pergamon Press again, this time time to publishing rivals Elsevier for £440 million in order to cover his debts.

But then he used some of that income to buy the New York Daily News, which was a tabloid completely mired in debt. And it didn't end well for him at all.

Yeah, you can't lay newspapers on the ground to soak up other newspapers. That's not his approach.

And speaking of not ending well, On November the 4th, 1991, Maxwell was meant to be in a meeting with the Bank of England to discuss his default on £50 million worth of lawns.

But he missed that meeting.

Choosing instead to take his private yacht, the Lady Ghillane, named after his favorite and now extremely famous daughter, he took that yacht to the Canary Islands, just off the coast of Spain.

And that was the last that anybody heard of him. And a few days later, his body was found in the Atlantic ocean.

And the coroner who examined him ruled he likely suffered a heart attack and had fallen overboard, possibly while partaking in his unwise habit of pissing off the side of the board.

Just like eight different spies from eight different countries, they see each other all swimming up to the yacht at the same time for the same murder. You're going to do like rock, paper, scissors.

What are we doing?

The police investigating.

So, did the deceased have any known enemies? Yes, I'll wait.

All eight of us over here, we had to do rock, paper, scissors.

After his death, his empire just completely collapsed.

the banks that he borrowed from desperately tried to recall their loans only to find the coffers were completely bare and worse than that subsequent investigations found that in his desperate need for funds to keep the wolves from his company's door maxwell had stolen almost half a billion pounds from the pension fund of the mirror group and even then there was still a three quarters of a billion pound financial black hole in his records in the ensuing financial meltdown, his sons Kevin and Ian were declared bankrupt with debts of 400 million pounds and the family stability that he claims to have spent his life trying to provide was comprehensively destroyed.

Only his favorite daughter, Ghelane Maxwell, survived the collapse of his media empire unscathed. Don't Google it.

Didn't he get bailed out by the ethical and responsible Lehman brothers with that amount of money?

Cool. Fun times.
I will not Google the thing you said not to Google. If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

You can commit literal war crimes and still not be the worst member of your family. Either that or never trust anybody who goes by a pseudonym, Heath.

Yeah.

And are you ready for the quiz?

If I'm not, then I've defrauded all those pensioners for nothing.

All right. A lot of people in Jelaine's orbit end up dying in ways that are,

A, obviously very chill and cool. B, perfectly normal, nothing to see here.

C, actually, maybe we should be suspicious of you. D,

now I'm just taking the piss.

Because he was peeing off the side of the bed.

Okay, I'm going to go B, because I spend my entire friendship with Heath trying to dissuade him from believing one. interesting conspiracy theory or another.

And I'm going to be damned if that work was in place.

Come on, you don't think he got murdered by spies on that pad?

I can't tell you how many times Heath has looked over at me with across from with a glass of wine and saying be like, Come on, though, come on, come on, just it's just us, be honest. Come on, really?

Heath, is it the black spy versus spy or the white spy versus spy? That's the only question that I you know, you know, with Heath, it's the white spy. You know, Heath is okay.
Let's move on.

You were in Pennsylvania 9/11, and that's the only time Marsh was just like, Yeah, all right, man. I don't know, just don't talk about it.
It's probably that, but it's like, don't tell a meme.

Nothing can be gained from asking those questions, Heath. You're just pissing on heroes.
Okay.

All right. Marsh.
What was the name of the spy movie about Robert Maxwell? A, Dr. No, you need a subscription.
B,

lowborn identity. C, kosher salt.
D, Lancet link. Or E,

publishing license to kill. That's what we've done.
Okay, well, according to a lot of dead Nazis, it's got to be E, publishing license to kill. Correct.
Publishing license to kill. All right.

I have an obvious question for you, Marsh. Why isn't Eli here today?

A, all this talk about family fortunes built on corruption, bad investments, and mounting debt hits a little too close to home for him.

B, when he found out that we were going to spend the episode answering who's your daddy on behalf of Ghelane Maxwell, he assumed that this was going to be in poor taste. Or

C, he just doesn't like you.

Okay, right. Well, I'm going to go secret answer D.
The last time I saw him, he was going for a piss off the side of the yacht, and I have no idea what happened to him next.

I read that Robert Maxwell enjoyed doing that specifically naked. Like, he would be completely naked, and then his hobby was to pee on the side of the boat.

No, that is. But, you know,

I'm saying that. And he also was not a well-man at all.
He was

under a lot of stress. I think it was a hard time.
Yeah, I think it was that way. Yeah, he did.
Okay.

Noah wins.

All right, so I would like an essay from Tom next week, then. All right.

All right. Well, for Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Marsh, I'm Heath.
Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week, and Tom will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Distance, No Rogan Experience, Skeptics with a K, Dear Old Dads, God Off Movies, The Scathing Atheist, The Skepticrat, and DD Minus.

And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash citationpod.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect us on social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com.

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