Robert Maxwell

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Speaker 4 Hello and welcome. Citation Needed, podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 Dame Judy Dench.

Speaker 16 I guess.

Speaker 4 All right, I'm joined by our Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Browsnan, and Daniel Craig in whatever order. Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Marsh.

Speaker 23 Okay, just because I have the exact same accent in every sketch I'm in, regardless of where I'm meant to be from.

Speaker 27 For example, this right now, this is me being a Spanish Highlander.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Russian name.

Speaker 28 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?

Speaker 13 Yeah, I get it. In this timeline, it definitely feels like tomorrow never ends.
In fact, today's taking its fucking time, actually.

Speaker 7 If anyone is a guy getting his ball smacked by a bag of rocks like Daniel Craig and Casino Royale, It is Tom, okay?

Speaker 32 It is Tom.

Speaker 25 All right. Yep.

Speaker 29 Yep.

Speaker 28 That leaves a pierce frostnet for you, I guess.

Speaker 15 There we go.

Speaker 1 It's all settled and all tracks.

Speaker 32 Let's get into it.

Speaker 4 Marsh, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today?

Speaker 25 Robert Maxwell.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 15 Who is Robert Maxwell?

Speaker 34 So Abraham Leiby Hock.

Speaker 16 Not what we asked, man.

Speaker 27 Okay, Abraham Leiby Hock was born in June 1923 in the small town of Satinskedole in Carpathian Ruthenia.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 11 And these days, it's part of modern Ukraine.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 35 And that uncertainty and instability was absolutely a theme of Abraham's entire life.

Speaker 49 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 Jamin Hock.

Speaker 29 That's too many names.

Speaker 28 Like, I feel like the officials just had a bunch of leftover names that they had to get rid of.

Speaker 51 before they could clock out.

Speaker 10 And they're like, okay, this kid.

Speaker 24 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

Speaker 24 from whatever it had previously been because the original was Yiddish. So, ew.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 29 Thank you.

Speaker 10 Thank you.

Speaker 29 Especially when he's here to replace Eli.

Speaker 55 Yes.

Speaker 30 Okay, yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 10 That is fair.

Speaker 42 Well, the Hock family were Orthodox Jewish.

Speaker 4 He sat around and spelled something wrong.

Speaker 56 I don't know.

Speaker 55 Are you shitting blood while you read this?

Speaker 13 It's not.

Speaker 30 Always, at all times.

Speaker 12 I'm just more subtle about it because I'm British.

Speaker 56 I'll keep it on happily.

Speaker 13 Shit, blood, and carry on.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 47 Case in point, their city was annexed by Hungary in 1939 and then occupied by the Nazis in 1944.

Speaker 49 At which point, most of of the Hock family, including four of Abraham slash Jan's six siblings, they were killed in Auschwitz.

Speaker 7 Well, there is definitely a popular Twitter thread that explains why this is their fault.

Speaker 56 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And a Tucker Carlson episode, if you want to

Speaker 4 very friendly Tucker episode.

Speaker 59 But thankfully, our hero was not killed in Auschwitz.

Speaker 20 He'd been sent to study at a yeshiva in the mid-1930s.

Speaker 34 So when the occupation happens in 1939, his Czech first name and his quasi-Austrian surname actually helped him evade the authorities.

Speaker 42 And so he joined the anti-Nazi resistance.

Speaker 47 That said, he was really quickly caught and he was sentenced to death as a spy.

Speaker 34 And things were looking incredibly bleak.

Speaker 20 But then he was able to escape his capture.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 10 And also the guard who was escorting him only had one arm.

Speaker 8 Okay.

Speaker 10 He was just already hedging his lie.

Speaker 4 He's like, I'm calling strong. Wow.

Speaker 57 Also, it was a one arm.

Speaker 65 And so 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.

Speaker 42 And so he hid under a bridge before then being rescued by a kind passing gypsy.

Speaker 70 His words, not mine, to be clear.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 57 Sure, Jan.

Speaker 4 Yeah, beat up the guard if you did, or whatever it was.

Speaker 8 Sure.

Speaker 43 And bear in mind, he was already onto his second name by the point of this story.

Speaker 35 And neither of those names are the one that I introduced the essay with.

Speaker 60 We maybe shouldn't just take his word for it.

Speaker 7 Just a search party of seven Nazis with one leg jumping across the bridge he's under, you know?

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay, fair.

Speaker 1 So 17-year-old Jan makes his 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

Speaker 10 so some of these guys

Speaker 10 two arms oh

Speaker 30 so what does jan do okay throws himself into a second

Speaker 33 nice nice

Speaker 35 So Jan throws himself into a second resistance movement, enlisting in the Czechoslovak army, which is in exile in Marseille.

Speaker 22 That's an army that fares as badly against the Nazis as the rest of the French forces do.

Speaker 61 And Jan was among the troops that were evacuated at Dunkirk to the UK.

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 47 And that is mainly due to the anti-Semitism he experienced within the Czech army's ranks.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 37 So, Jan instead adopted Britain as his new home team for the war.

Speaker 72 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.

Speaker 72 And that name was Ivan George.

Speaker 10 So Irish British?

Speaker 57 What? No.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 58 Oh,

Speaker 49 So at this point, Abraham slash Jan slash Ivan clearly had a taste for fighting Nazis.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 73 He was barely 20 at this time, and this was the second time he'd been a spy.

Speaker 27 And it definitely wouldn't be the last time he'd be a spy.

Speaker 47 His regiment was sent to France as part of the Normandy landings, where the Nazi killing goes so much better for him at the third time of asking.

Speaker 66 He quickly gets made Lance Corporal and then Sergeant, and then he gets a battlefield promotion to lieutenant.

Speaker 43 And at this point, he gives himself yet another name.

Speaker 31 Oh, this time, Ivan Dumorier, the surname taken from his favorite brand of cigarettes.

Speaker 8 Oh,

Speaker 54 yeah, good thing you didn't smoke Lucky Stripes, I guess.

Speaker 45 So now this quasi-Hungarian, Czech-Ukrainian spy is spying for the British with a Russian forename and a French surname.

Speaker 13 Thank you all today for your brave and dedicated service. Our medals of honor recipients today are Virginia Slim Winston,

Speaker 13 Benson Cool Dunhill, and

Speaker 13 Joe Camill.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 47 And he'd also dress up in their Nazi uniforms in order to better infiltrate occupied villages.

Speaker 42 And these are actions that are generally frowned upon even in the midst of war.

Speaker 13 Yeah, hey, totally cool to set guys on fire with a flamethrower, but...

Speaker 13 Let's not check their pockets. We're men and not animals, okay?

Speaker 41 Well, that's it, you see.

Speaker 47 He was killing Nazis, so his commanding officers, they weren't about to call call foul on any technicalities.

Speaker 4 Yeah, frowned upon by Nazis in war.

Speaker 4 Like, they frown upon costume stuff. Like, I'm a spy.

Speaker 31 I'm not wearing a unit,

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 43 This time they went with Leslie Smith, which they felt fit in a lot better with the British troops he was now among.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 7 That one guy who has to sew the names on the uniforms is so mad at him right now.

Speaker 10 God.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 77 So he's like, yeah, I should do a name again.

Speaker 34 That would have been amazing.

Speaker 56 So.

Speaker 41 January 1945, and whatever we want to call him, he's leading a battalion into the town of Parlo in Germany.

Speaker 27 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

Speaker 43 so he takes a handful of his men

Speaker 50 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 hold up in and he kills most of them and the rest of them flee.

Speaker 21 And for this, he was presented with the military cross, which is the second highest military honor at the the time.

Speaker 47 And he was promoted to the rank of captain.

Speaker 28 Kind of makes you wonder what the fuck they're holding out for with that highest honor, right?

Speaker 79 What's the guy got to do?

Speaker 65 So from here, his Nazi killing gets so much more prolific and his gray areas get more and more complicated.

Speaker 73 In one escapade, he single-handedly killed 15 SS soldiers and captured the 14 others who were surrendering.

Speaker 20 Except there's a really good reason to believe that some of the 15 were actually trying to surrender when he killed them.

Speaker 1 He wasn't really fussy about the morals of warfare, particularly.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 71 only to then machine gun them down as they emerged from a barn.

Speaker 10 Okay, okay.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 57 You, you're a Nazi. Oh, no.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 15 extra now.

Speaker 51 I think that's their fault, right?

Speaker 10 They're putting on costumes.

Speaker 32 It's just, it's ma'am.

Speaker 7 I like that we covered both our bases on there. Good.
Thanks, guys.

Speaker 7 Now we'll double the hate mail.

Speaker 41 We can just pair them up against each other.

Speaker 12 They can argue with each other.

Speaker 30 It's right.

Speaker 7 That was Eli that made that last joke.

Speaker 4 Hey, all the pro-Nazi people, send me the hate mail. That's perfect.
That's perfect.

Speaker 39 I want to hear from you.

Speaker 55 I want to know who you are.

Speaker 49 So that was 1945, and the war was soon over.

Speaker 66 And so, too, therefore, were the war crimes.

Speaker 17 And given that our side won, those things stopped counting as war crimes, as America's big boy and little boy can readily attest.

Speaker 57 Yeah, we thought they would be smaller.

Speaker 56 But there was

Speaker 77 a military target in there somewhere.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 48 The only crime was inaccuracy.

Speaker 30 You're absolutely right. Yeah.

Speaker 30 Well, and over.

Speaker 32 Exuberance, Marsh.

Speaker 32 And the promise over deliver.

Speaker 30 That's been the American motto the entire time.

Speaker 7 Oh, that's the best way to describe that.

Speaker 51 Amazing.

Speaker 57 The nuclei had a lot of gumption in them.

Speaker 15 They didn't account for it exactly.

Speaker 77 Big bootstraps.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 44 And so he chose Ian Robert Maxwell.

Speaker 35 And so for the rest of his life, he'd be known to all as not the Ian bit, because fuck all of you.

Speaker 22 So in March 1945, Robert Maxwell marries Elizabeth Betty Maynard, the wealthy French heiress of a silk mill.

Speaker 21 And over the course of the next 16 years, they've gone to have nine children.

Speaker 50 There's Michael, Philip, Anne, Christine, Isabel, Karine, Ian, Kevin, and Robert's favorite child until the day he died.

Speaker 39 Ghillaine Maxwell.

Speaker 70 That Ghillaine Maxwell.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 56 That's like

Speaker 77 whiteboard on that.

Speaker 28 It's so weird that all the other siblings got normal people names and then they were sick.

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah, it really is.

Speaker 71 So for the rest of the 1940s, Robert Maxwell is working for the British military in Berlin.

Speaker 66 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.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 17 Huh.

Speaker 15 Cool.

Speaker 4 Better be some fucking amazing spreadsheets of science or whatever. If you're going to not wear a condom after eight kids,

Speaker 57 we'll see how it goes after a quick break.

Speaker 13 Maxwell, get in here.

Speaker 4 Yes, Colonel, what's up?

Speaker 13 Maxwell, this is the fourth time this month that a prisoner has died in your care.

Speaker 4 What can I say, sir?

Speaker 15 I'm an unlucky guy. It's bad.

Speaker 13 One of them was found with half his body stuck inside the toilet.

Speaker 4 I think he was hanging a picture and he slipped.

Speaker 13 Yeah, another got a hold of your gun. It's and he shot himself.

Speaker 31 Yeah, that one was weird.

Speaker 4 He did say he was really depressed, though.

Speaker 13 Another guy says here, killed himself by jumping on a pile of bear traps.

Speaker 31 Oh, I think those were improvised, like, prison bear shanks.

Speaker 65 You know what I mean?

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 can you just

Speaker 13 not?

Speaker 63 Okay, all right.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I'll make sure the guard logs show that nobody went to their cell, too.

Speaker 13 I mean, that

Speaker 13 sounds fine, actually, but can you also make sure their neck is broken in a certain way so as not to arouse suspicion?

Speaker 4 I will do my best with that, yes.

Speaker 13 And disable the cameras.

Speaker 71 Disable the cameras, obviously, yes.

Speaker 7 They didn't have cameras in prisons in World War II.

Speaker 51 It's a call forward. Get out of the sketch.

Speaker 7 Tom is not cursed.

Speaker 4 His computer literally blew up when he had on face recognition.

Speaker 11 It sounds rare, but possible.

Speaker 4 That is his third computer blow-up this week.

Speaker 7 Oh, hey, Marsh, how's it going?

Speaker 70 Oh, yeah, great, thanks.

Speaker 47 I was just texting a mate of mine.

Speaker 35 I was, you know, reminiscing about some of the food we grew up on.

Speaker 15 Oh, nice.

Speaker 55 Like what?

Speaker 37 so the Bedfordshire clanger.

Speaker 60 Ooh, mushy smoosh.

Speaker 73 Oh, the Scunthorpe squirts.

Speaker 68 Overcooked meat products.

Speaker 48 Mmm.

Speaker 45 Those sound

Speaker 16 regional.

Speaker 33 Yeah, they weren't great, to be honest.

Speaker 62 Most of those ingredients, they're now sold direct to pet food places, if I'm honest, but I still am a bit peckish.

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Speaker 31 All right, guys, yeah, thanks.

Speaker 38 Oh my God, what was that?

Speaker 13 Sorry, sorry. My computer exploded again.
I should have warned you guys I was unboxing it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, man, you gotta hit the claxons when you interact with technology.

Speaker 13 Yeah, sorry, sorry. I know the rules.

Speaker 4 Right there on the board.

Speaker 80 What's up, everyone? We're Angel, Diego, and Jason, and we're the host of a Gustavaba podcast, where we talk all things in the world of regional Mexican music.

Speaker 80 And recently, we had Julio Cesar on as a guest. Check this out.

Speaker 18 And what would he say is the biggest thing you learned from watching Ivan Cornejo perform?

Speaker 81 The way you carry yourself, I think that's something that I try to watch a lot, and how there's different styles of it. For example, you have like Peso comes out, and he's just screaming energies up.

Speaker 81 I've seen Peso do that, but Ivan's kind of like, I don't know, he just kind of walks around.

Speaker 30 He's like, they just kind of see my face.

Speaker 26 He's just like, he's like mellow, huh?

Speaker 81 Yeah, he walks like a little, so he has a little sketch.

Speaker 81 i'm like okay so there's different styles i realized that like you kind of choose your style on stage you kind of choose your style the same way you choose your style of music and you go with it and the number one thing is confidence this has been brought to you by sprite obey your thirst ago so far releases new episodes every single monday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your podcast.

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Speaker 4 And we're back.

Speaker 4 When 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.

Speaker 4 Also, something about like science publishing or spreadsheets or whatever.

Speaker 26 What's next, Marsh?

Speaker 68 So, yeah.

Speaker 33 Bear in mind, this is the late 1940s, and the world has just seen how important science could really be.

Speaker 50 So the US, they've dropped the atomic bomb on Japan and then they've paperclipped some rocket scientists out of Germany.

Speaker 20 And it's clear that whatever future is on the horizon, it's going to be built by nerds in labs.

Speaker 28 Yeah, no, you see nerds vaporize enough sand and you lose your urge to kick it in their faces, I think.

Speaker 21 And so the thing is, those lab nerds, they're going to need somewhere to publish all of their work.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 35 Springer had this vast wealth of 50,000 cutting-edge science books, but nobody was willing to buy from them.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 4 Oh man, remember when deals with Nazis were like a secret spy thing that you would have to hide

Speaker 4 in business.

Speaker 13 Oh, man.

Speaker 67 So at the time, science journals were often operating at a loss.

Speaker 13 As opposed to the money printing machines they are now.

Speaker 47 But Maxwell instinctively understands just how much money there is in the doing of science.

Speaker 48 Because there's grants, there's government contracts, philanthropy, bequeathments.

Speaker 24 all sorts of revenue streams though.

Speaker 7 Joe Rogan is getting so wet right now just hearing this.

Speaker 1 And while all the science was well funded, the publishers who make the findings available, they weren't getting a taste.

Speaker 41 And that is where Robert Maxwell comes in.

Speaker 49 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 Rosbaugh.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 73 Decades later, a former British intelligence officer claimed that MI6 actually set Maxwell up with the cash, but that is unconfirmed.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 10 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 51 They were Nazi teeth.

Speaker 28 I could tell that they were Nazi teeth, but yeah.

Speaker 43 Maxwell and Rossbot have changed the name of the company to Publio.

Speaker 28 Of course, he fucking changed the name. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 55 Right, exactly.

Speaker 20 And it actually went on to become one of the biggest academic publishing houses in the world.

Speaker 41 And a large part of that was Maxwell's complete lack of scruples.

Speaker 49 So he'd turn up to academic conferences and offer bewildered scientists fairly large financial incentives to sign exclusive publishing deals with him.

Speaker 57 Cool.

Speaker 4 He was like Chug Knight with vanilla ice of his time.

Speaker 67 He'd also persuade scientists that what they were doing, the science they were doing, was so unique.

Speaker 74 It just couldn't go in a regular journal.

Speaker 28 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 that's a weird

Speaker 41 shift easing in before we get to the evil stuff

Speaker 46 so that proliferation of science journals that 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

Speaker 41 and the more journals he created and published the more those institutions would be forced to collect.

Speaker 19 And the more subscription fees Pergamon could therefore charge.

Speaker 46 And this would change the face of scientific publishing as we know it.

Speaker 7 There's an app to tell you all the scientific journals subscriptions that you don't use. It's called Nazi Rocket Scientists.

Speaker 41 Okay, just to say this out loud back to you, Marsh.

Speaker 13 He seems to have revolutionized the business model here by,

Speaker 13 let me check the notes, charging money for them.

Speaker 30 Yes, he did. Yes.
He was a genius.

Speaker 13 That was what he came up with out loud.

Speaker 28 The tragedy of the commons was that nobody owned the damn thing. Don't worry.

Speaker 17 Capitalism solved it.

Speaker 41 And then what's more, he had all those connections to the East.

Speaker 47 And that also boosted his value because during the Cold War, Pergamon became the sole publisher of Russian scientific information into the West.

Speaker 43 In 1964, Pergamon floated on the stock exchange for £4 million

Speaker 50 then.

Speaker 47 That's over 70 million pounds in today's today's money.

Speaker 28 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,

Speaker 54 I feel like he was overcharging, right?

Speaker 10 Yeah, maybe, maybe.

Speaker 53 Still, by now, it was the 1960s.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 49 So, as an attempt to gate crash the British upper classes, he bought himself a mansion in Oxford, the Headington Hills Hall Estate.

Speaker 66 And living in a 200-year-old stately home is like a kind of cheat cord for entering the establishment.

Speaker 53 And he parlayed all these new connections into actually becoming the MP for Buckingham in the 1964 and 1966 general elections.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 57 Well, hold on, hold on.

Speaker 7 You're saying he had the cash. Do you need like a good resume to be rich in England?

Speaker 55 What are you talking about?

Speaker 55 Absolutely.

Speaker 4 there's a names to war crimes ratio that's considered like proper and one that's considered

Speaker 28 outside of that range yeah no whoever heard of a person who committed war crimes excelling in british politics i mean

Speaker 50 we normally get rid of them after the war crimes to be fair

Speaker 42 look unsurprising 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's self-defined as a socialist, albeit

Speaker 78 a billionaire socialist with a captain's rank and a 200-year-old rank.

Speaker 15 So he wasn't a very good socialist.

Speaker 10 He really wasn't

Speaker 62 natural not to see the conservatives in the 1970 election.

Speaker 60 He failed to win it back in either of the two elections that we had in 1974.

Speaker 70 Yes, we had two elections in 1974, despite the fact that Labour, his party, won the latter of those elections.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 49 Unwanted, sadly, in the world of politics, Maxwell turned to the next best refuge for the power-hungry billionaire.

Speaker 35 the mainstream media.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 7 Jesus Christ, guys, been here 15 fucking minutes.

Speaker 13 He's already calling Dibsies like a snow-covered Chicagoan with a shovel and a lawn chair in his hand.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 55 Isn't that one of the topic?

Speaker 6 If you want to tell us about the news of the world, Tom, you're welcome.

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 55 So the family who owned

Speaker 46 the family who owned the newspaper just simply point blank refused to sell it to a sorcerer's Czechoslovakian immigrant.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 66 Let us keep it that way.

Speaker 47 And then later that same year, the newspaper was sold to Australian Media Morgan.

Speaker 7 When I was in Manchester, I called Yorkshire Pudding a muffin and I thought the server was going to kill me.

Speaker 57 Okay. They've got pudding as the general term for all the desserts,

Speaker 4 a specific dish called pudding.

Speaker 17 It's pandemonium.

Speaker 15 It's impossible to follow.

Speaker 18 You know how we don't have a dessert called New York City dessert?

Speaker 25 It's also not even a dessert because that'd be insane.

Speaker 10 It's like.

Speaker 46 So despite some big acquisitions, cracks were starting to appear in the Maxwell business world by this point.

Speaker 41 But unscrupulous as ever, Maxwell just papered over those cracks with his customary amoral attitude to the rules.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 50 Meanwhile, profits of Pergamon were on the decline.

Speaker 19 And so the company shares were suspended from the London stock market.

Speaker 28 Try changing the name. That usually works.

Speaker 47 And as a result of these various fiscal shenanigans, Maxwell was ousted from the Pergamon board.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 11 The inquiry concluded:

Speaker 47 notwithstanding

Speaker 47 Mr.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 13 Okay, I like that they lead with the compliment, though.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 34 Can we put a pin in embezzlement, Tom?

Speaker 79 Because we will get there.

Speaker 41 So this not the right person to exercise stewardship of a publicly owned company, that lasted all of three years, because Lise Corp managed Pergamon so badly that by 1974, their price had completely tanked.

Speaker 27 And

Speaker 26 Maxwell was able to borrow enough money from people apparently willing to lend him money despite all of the financial shenanigans.

Speaker 35 that he was able to buy his company back.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 32 This socialist.

Speaker 7 And then he used his blood emerald money to buy plans for an electric car company, right?

Speaker 40 He tried to buy Clive Sinclair's failing home computer company, Sinclair Research, but the deal was aborted in August 1985.

Speaker 26 Lucky?

Speaker 13 29 states in the U.S., he'd be forced to go through with it.

Speaker 13 Just kidding. He's a man.

Speaker 51 He can do whatever he wants.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 28 And hey, not for nothing, Marsh, but don't you dare try to call dibs on Uncle Clive on it.

Speaker 51 Okay.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 10 That's excellent.

Speaker 16 That's pretty fucking good.

Speaker 10 That's so good.

Speaker 28 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it really can't. It really can't.

Speaker 20 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 does do.

Speaker 6 He used profits from the Daily Mirror to buy Israeli newspapers and to majorly invest in pharma and tech companies in Israel.

Speaker 70 And rumors emerge of Maxwell being a spy for Mossad.

Speaker 1 And you can kind of understand why he's been a spy before multiple times for multiple different countries by this point.

Speaker 4 100% certain he's a spy for all these punches at this point.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 1 Though it is worth pointing out, that isn't proven.

Speaker 47 And Mossad also had other contacts in Britain feeding him information too, so maybe it wasn't him.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 1 That's awesome.

Speaker 64 One source called him a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia.

Speaker 26 Maxwell denied all of this and he doggedly sued anyone who made those accusations.

Speaker 28 Marsh said after making those accusations on our show.

Speaker 15 Yep.

Speaker 4 Okay, here's the thing. If you ever get caught being a spy, you just add one to your agent number.

Speaker 26 Like if I'm secret spy, I'd be announcing my like.

Speaker 4 double triple cross at every moment to the people like i'm gonna go do the triple cross now but saying everything in like air quotes like i'm gonna now i'm gonna, you know, triple cross us, uh-huh, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah, just sarcastic tone, the whole thing, plausible deniability.

Speaker 31 Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 40 I feel it, it's got to be an odd number.

Speaker 58 I think it's got to be an odd number.

Speaker 41 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.

Speaker 55 Steven cancels, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 30 Interesting. So,

Speaker 27 1988, Maxwell was personally worth over £3 billion.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 53 The latter, which was acquired for $2.6 billion

Speaker 49 in 1988.

Speaker 42 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 46 Macmillan, for example, was actually worth less than $2 billion when he bought it, even then.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 61 this time to publishing rivals Elsevier for £440 million in order to cover his debts.

Speaker 74 But then he used some of that income to buy the New York Daily News, which was a tabloid completely mired in debt.

Speaker 66 And it didn't end well for him at all.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you can't lay newspapers on the ground to soak up other newspapers. That's not an approach.

Speaker 62 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 loans, 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.

Speaker 66 And that was the last that anybody heard of him.

Speaker 47 And a few days later, his body was found in the Atlantic ocean.

Speaker 58 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 port.

Speaker 4 Just like eight different spies from eight different countries, they see each other all swimming up to the yacht at the same time.

Speaker 4 You're going to do like rock, paper, scissors.

Speaker 57 What are we doing?

Speaker 13 The police investigating. So did the deceased have any known enemies? Yes, I'll wait.

Speaker 55 All eight of us over here.

Speaker 10 We had to do rock, paper, scissors.

Speaker 47 After his death, his empire just completely collapsed.

Speaker 38 The banks that he borrowed from desperately tried to recall their loans, only to find the coffers were completely bare.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 47 And even then, there was still a three-quarters of a billion pound financial black hole in his records.

Speaker 66 In the ensuing financial meltdown, his sons Kevin and Ian were declared bankrupt with debts of £400 million,

Speaker 64 and the family stability that he claims to have spent his life trying to provide was comprehensively destroyed.

Speaker 27 Only his favorite favorite daughter, Ghelane Maxwell, survived the collapse of his media empire unscathed.

Speaker 10 Don't Google it.

Speaker 39 Didn't he get bailed out by the, you know, ethical and responsible Lehman brothers for that amount of money?

Speaker 63 Cool. Fun times.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 26 You can commit literal war crimes and still not be the worst member of your family.

Speaker 15 Either that or never trust anybody who goes by a pseudonym, Heath.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And are you ready for the quiz?

Speaker 1 If I'm not, then I've defrauded all those pensioners for nothing.

Speaker 57 All right.

Speaker 13 A lot of people in Jelaine's orbit end up dying in ways that are,

Speaker 13 A, obviously very chill and cool. B, perfectly normal, nothing to see here.

Speaker 13 C, actually, maybe we should be suspicious of you.

Speaker 55 D.

Speaker 13 No, I'm just taking the piss.

Speaker 57 Because he was peeing off the side of the bed.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 58 And I'm going to be damned if that work was in vain.

Speaker 10 It's on B.

Speaker 31 Come on.

Speaker 70 You don't think he got murdered by spies on that pad?

Speaker 7 I can't tell you how many times Heath has looked over at me across from with a glass of wine in his hand and be like, come on, though.

Speaker 57 come on, come on, just it's just us, be honest.

Speaker 32 Come on, really?

Speaker 43 Heath, is it the black spy versus spy, or the white spy versus spy?

Speaker 8 That's another question.

Speaker 28 You know, you know, with Heath, it's the white spy, you know, Heath is spy.

Speaker 30 Okay, let's move on.

Speaker 57 Pennsylvania, 9-11, and that's the time Marsh was just like, Yeah, all right, man, I don't know, just don't talk about it. It's probably that, but he's just don't tell me.

Speaker 30 Nothing can be gained from asking those questions, Heath.

Speaker 25 You're just pissing on heroes.

Speaker 55 Okay.

Speaker 7 All right, Marsh. What was the name of the spy movie about Robert Maxwell?

Speaker 15 A, Dr.

Speaker 32 No, you need a subscription.

Speaker 57 B,

Speaker 7 lowborn identity. C, kosher salt.
D, Lancet Link, or E,

Speaker 7 publishing license to kill.

Speaker 60 Okay, well, according to a lot of dead Nazis, it's got to be E, publishing license to kill.

Speaker 10 Correct.

Speaker 32 Publishing license to kill.

Speaker 51 All right.

Speaker 28 I have an obvious question for you, Marsh. Why isn't Eli here today?

Speaker 28 A, all this talk about family fortunes built on corruption, bad investments, and mounting debt hits a little too close to home for him.

Speaker 28 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

Speaker 28 C, he just doesn't like you.

Speaker 10 Okay, right. Well,

Speaker 47 I'm going to go secret answer D.

Speaker 24 The last time I saw him, he was going for a piss off the side of the milk, and I have no idea what happens to next.

Speaker 4 I read that Robert Maxwell enjoyed doing that specifically naked. Like he would be completely naked and then his hobby was to be on the side of the boat.

Speaker 55 Elevated to hobby.

Speaker 10 No, that is. But, you know, I'm saying he also was not a well man at all.

Speaker 30 He was under his hobby and he was under a lot of stress.

Speaker 76 I think it was a hard attack. Yeah, I think it was that we did.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 Noah wins.

Speaker 28 All right. So I would like an essay from Tom next week then.

Speaker 15 All right.

Speaker 15 All right.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Distance, No Rogan Experience, Skeptics with a K, Dear Old Dads, Godolph Movies, The Scathing Atheist, The Skepticrat, and DD Minus.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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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