Robert Maxwell still haunts England. Nobody forgets notorious crooks like Madoff and his Ponzi scheme nor Maxwell who fraudulently appropriated 440 million pounds from the pension assets of Mirror Group Newspaper. Money which rightfully belonged to the worker’s pension fund. I should think his disreputable plundering of Mirror company’s pension funds to the tune of £440 million was simply a continuation of his own belief that he was simply grabbing a handrail to prevent his falling down the cellar stairs of financial ruin.
Maxwell was a typical 1960’s character. A flamboyant liar and rogue whose aim was to make a life away from the Holocaust and the earth floored shack of his childhood. Hired by the British intelligence service at the end of the war he seeded disinformation to Soviet contacts. Later he got hold of a huge catalog of German scientific research which enabled the launching of his publishing empire. A sleazily father who fathered Ghislaine Maxwell, a sleazily daughter who supplement the fraudulent money Maxwell had stashed away in a foreign account for her by pimping for her partner Jeffery Epstein. She did get her come-up-pence when charged with the crime of sex trafficking underage girls. While Maxwell likely threw himself overboard from his yacht to avoid being arrested and Epstien just as likely committed suicide to avoid prison.
Milos, my London garment salesman in the 1960s claimed Maxwell was his onetime friend and collaborator. The story was they had both been Czech freedom fighters during the war and had taken part in the Normandy landings. Milos was a version of Maxwell, but without Maxwell’s power. He worked as a salesman for me while doing odd financial manipulations for others—likely spying and money laundering. Milos always had some wicked story to tell about his and Maxwell’s nefarious Czech deals in the early collaborating. days. His stories would often finish with his disappointment that he was now excluded from present deals: “Gad Karen every crumb-bum knowin’ what he be a doin’ and nobody be blowin’ them whistles.
It is a puzzle how Maxwell a crook and corrupt man became a media-publishing baron, British parliamentarian, and was accepted by the social elite of London. By all accounts honesty was alien to Maxwell’s nature. He was suspected of being an alleged spy for several nations, a publisher of work, often stolen, to avoid paying royalties. It was rumored he never gave anyone a square deal if he could avoid it. no doubt well paid Maxwell facilitated the distribution of PROMIS, a bugged software to national governments and global financial institutions including the most important nuclear research and national security facilities in the United States and other countries which enabled Israeli’s mass spying. In 1969, Maxwell’s double-dealing and lies about the financial status of Pergamon Press came to a head, and he was pushed out of the parent company. Amazing that he somehow worked his way back in when it didn’t do well without him. In 1984, he bought Britain’s top tabloid, the Daily Mirror a stanch Labour party support. Milos would have liked to be Maxwell. He was not a particularly straight guy, and I had to keep an eye on him. One of their mates was Dr. Northman who flitted about London in a government paid limousine connected to some sort of shadowy hospital job. A very mysterious character to say the least. I was astonished to hear he had ferried George Whitman, my friend from Paris and owner of the Mistral bookshop (now known as Shakespeare and Co) around London looking for a buyer for an unpublished work by Samuel Beckett. A document I imagine unsalable except on the black-market. Milos continued working under my watchful eye until he became ill. One evening on my visit to the hospital Northman arrived distressed to the point of collapse. He pleaded with Milos to tell him how he had organized numerous double-dealing/financial swindles; certainly, things not exactly kosher. Milos lay looking at the ceiling gently waving Northman away, “I’m dying. What do I know? What do I care?”
Maybe as Maxwell drown, he was thinking the same thing. His death is still inconclusive. In 1990, while sailing off Tenerife, he fell off the deck of his lavish yacht and drowned. Was it suicide by a man ensnared by his crimes, or was he murdered by one of the several intelligence agencies that he was hassling or did his own sons finally just push him overboard. Conspiracy theories abound that Maxwell despite his long-term as an Israeli Intelligence agent, was blackmailing his former paymasters. Frantic for cash he is supposed to have offered Shining Path in Peru, Israeli weapons in exchange for strategic cobalt, all wrapped up in other complicated deals. The rumor is when Israel refused to go along with Maxwell, he threatened to go public about being an Israel spy. Did that the cause his demise. This all seems ripe for a TV series especially as this is just one of the theories behind his death. And now with his daughter going to prison for pimping for the notorious Jeffery Epstein and the missing client list it is only a matter of time before we see it on Netflix.
