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Robert Maxwell had hit rock bottom when I first met him in spring 1973. Damned by government inspectors as a liar and fraudster, he had lost his seat as a Labour MP, had been ejected from Pergamon Press, his lucrative scientific publishing business, and had been cast into the wilderness as a pariah by the City and Wall Street. Few public figures had been so humiliatingly mocked as Captain Bob, otherwise known as the Bouncing Czech. ‘I wonder if I can help you?’ I said to Maxwell as we sat in his makeshift office in Headington Hill Hall, his vast Oxford home acquired for a peppercorn rent from the local council. ‘What do you have in mind?’ growled the man famed for his girth, intimidation and brazenness.

As a twenty-seven-year-old BBC TV producer, I had been tasked to film a fifty-minute documentary about the rise and fall of Britain’s most infamous tycoon, politician and multi-millionaire. ‘Well,’ I replied to the wartime refugee who had been awarded the Military Cross by Field Marshal Montgomery for charging a machine-gun post in Germany in 1945. ‘I wanted to make a film about your remarkable life and achievements. It might help your resurrection.’ As the fifty-year-old pondered the offer, I threw in that my father was also a Czech refugee. That connection sealed our fate. ‘Done,’ he said, and committed himself for the next six weeks to share his life with me and Max Hastings, the reporter.

As we trawled through Maxwell’s astonishing life – the peasant boy who escaped the Holocaust, established his fortune as a black-marketeer and thief while serving as a British army officer in post-war Berlin and, while working for both British and Russian intelligence, became a rich publisher and politician – we encountered an obstacle. ‘Mr Maxwell,’ I said, ‘in the interests of fairness and objectivity, I need to find someone who will say something positive about you. I’ve found lots of your critics but no supporters. Can you suggest someone?’

‘I understand,’ he replied without surprise. ‘Let me think.’

Eventually, Maxwell proposed his former parliamentary agent. ‘I don’t know why you expect me to say anything good about Bob,’ the hapless agent responded.

Universally loathed as a crook, Maxwell unsurprisingly hated the finished film, which portrayed him as the megalomaniac Citizen Kane. His attempt to stop it being broadcast by bribing a BBC employee to steal the soundtrack from the Lime Grove editing suite during the night before transmission failed because fortunately a duplicate soundtrack was stored elsewhere.

Maxwell’s many enemies loved the film and, not surprisingly, our relationship was abruptly terminated. Maxwell appeared destined to be forgotten. Except that fifteen years later, in 1988, his resurrection was complete.

Like Lazarus, the Bouncing Czech had risen from the ashes. Maxwell had not only recovered Pergamon Press, but had created a global media empire which rivalled Rupert Murdoch’s. Once again enjoying fame and fortune, he was regularly photographed with all the world’s leaders – including Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev – brokering deals, dispensing advice and establishing himself as an unchallenged billionaire. True to his habits over the previous forty-three years, the arch deceiver was once again looking with contempt at the deceived. That was the moment to write his biography. The first to be published.

At the time, I could not imagine the profound influence Maxwell would have on my life. Until then, despite his frequent use of libel writs and compliant judges to suppress the truth about himself, the pattern of his lies, frauds and lifestyle had been touched upon in newspapers, especially by the Sunday Times. But no one had established his true venality, and Maxwell intended to preserve that protective secrecy. The publication of Maxwell the Outsider in 1988 was marked by eleven libel writs issued by Maxwell’s lawyers to prevent the book’s sale. After it briefly hit number one, Britain’s booksellers withdrew the book rather than face Maxwell in court. Yet by then, many had read my prediction that his media empire would crash three years later.

On 5 November 1991, while sailing in the Mediterranean, Maxwell had a heart attack and fell dead into the sea. Within days, his empire was crumbling. Dishonestly and secretly, he had plundered the Daily Mirror’s pension fund to support his failing businesses and many of the world’s most famous banks were exposed as his co-conspirators. In total, about £2 billion was missing. Amid widespread anger, not least from thousands of innocent ex-employees whose pensions had been looted by Maxwell, the biography was republished with a major addition about his frauds.

Internationally, Maxwell became the archetype of a criminal tycoon. Britain demanded the prosecution of Kevin and Ian Maxwell, his two sons, who had been intimately involved in the management of his empire, especially the unauthorized use of the pension fund shares to raise loans. This book tells the astonishing story of Maxwell’s furtive activities during the last year of his life and the brothers’ trial.

The brothers’ acquittal in early 1996 sparked outrage. Although Kevin had admitted during his trial that he had lied to bankers and others, he would suffer no retribution for his admitted dishonesty. Instead of being convicted for orchestrating a cunning plot to defraud bankers, shareholders and pensioners to support his father’s fantastic dream of bestriding the world as a media colossus, Kevin successfully presented himself as a victim of his father’s tyranny. Along with his brother, he benefited from the lacklustre intellect of Britain’s law enforcers. Thanks to their incompetence, no one was found guilty for the theft of £2 billion, at the time Britain’s biggest fraud. Maxwell’s victims, the pensioners of his corporations, were bewildered by the failure of Britain’s judicial system.

Scandalously, after Kevin Maxwell’s acquittal, Mr Justice Buckley ruled that he should not face a second trial, for the theft of Berlitz shares worth £112 million from Macmillan Inc, a publicly owned company. There was no ‘public interest’, declared the judge, to launch the new prosecution. Buckley ignored Mr Justice Millet’s judgment about the same circumstances, given during a long civil trial, that Kevin was involved ‘in dishonesty’ and a ‘fraud’ regarding the disposal of the Berlitz shares.

Empowered by his acquittal and Buckley’s ruling, Kevin Maxwell now insists that his father too was innocent of any crime. Ever fewer these days recall the circumstances with sufficient clarity to prove convincingly the opposite. They will not be helped by a government investigation conducted by an accountant and a lawyer employed by the Department of Trade and Industry who finally reported on the saga in 2001, ten years after Maxwell’s death. The inspectors’ crowning achievement was their failure to name a single person involved in the frauds – lawyer, banker, accountant or Maxwell employee – who should be punished. Their salutary conclusion was that ‘high ethical and professional standards must always be put before commercial advantage’. The cover-up was complete. In his celestial banqueting chamber, enjoying his favourite Beluga caviar and Krug champagne, Robert Maxwell must still be chortling about his family’s victory over Britain’s justice system and over the establishment across the globe.

In the first days after his death, statesmen and clergymen praised the monster as a genius and near-saint. Even after the truth was known, legions of awestruck bankers, businessmen, politicians and journalists recounted their individual experiences of a unique man. By size and personality, Maxwell had dominated every room. Only those he could not buy won his respect. The rest were bullied. Among both groups, his death sparked endless speculation about the cause and the consequence of his death but never admissions of their own guilt.

Nearly thirty years after his death, Maxwell should not only be remembered as an extraordinary crook but also as one of an unusual breed of mavericks created in the aftermath of the Second World War. As an eyewitness to extreme suffering and multiple deaths, Maxwell was physically and emotionally courageous. Nothing and nobody caused him any fear. Like a savage, he inhabited and fought in a jungle. His survival instinct was a lodestar. His legacy was the exposure of corruption in the City, the professions and the media – all those who turned a self-interested blind eye to his crimes. In the aftermath, some were embarrassed by their profitable relationships with Maxwell. Reputations were shredded and jobs were lost. But most escaped with just a bruise.

Few will now remember that the Maxwell saga was the climax of the Thatcherite era, which featured staggering excesses of flamboyance, recklessness, nepotism, greed, sex, crime and shameless lust. The litany of spectacular City blowouts – Guinness, Polly Peck, Blue Arrow, BCCI and so many more – revealed sordid abuses by get-rich adventurers and charlatans. And then amnesia struck.

Bewildered spectators watched as so many guilty collaborators in those scams escaped justice while business continued as usual. The supremely ambitious and amoral counted, like Maxwell, on the weakness and vanities of those lesser breeds to climb the greasy pole, and to stay on top. None more than Lord Donoughue, a former Downing Street adviser to prime ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, whose lucrative services to Maxwell are described in this book. Donoughue was subsequently criticized by the government inspectors for failing to ask the right questions about how Maxwell was stealing the pension fund shares [DTI report, v1 p.316]. Pertinently, his employment by Maxwell has been expunged from his biography on the internet.

Maxwell’s success matches Edmund Burke’s observation: ‘For evil to succeed, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing.’ Good men, however, had repeatedly tried to halt Maxwell’s resurrection but their attempts were crushed by greed. Undaunted by prejudice, humiliation, morality and the truth, Maxwell bulldozed his way through any obstacle to fulfil his ambitions. Retribution was only delivered at the end. Friendless, alone and exhausted on his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, his fame and fortune had become worthless. The subversive unwillingly faced his Maker. Even in his last moments, death probably sparked no fear. Having suffered a heart attack while urinating over the side, he clung to the yacht’s railing until, unable to support his twenty stone, the muscles ripped under his arm and he fell dead into the sea. No water was found in his lungs by three Spanish pathologists and no bruises or cuts on his corpse. The heart attack, they concluded, had killed him. His legacy was borne by his children.

After their acquittal, Kevin and Ian Maxwell submerged themselves in a series of international communications and property ventures which ended in losses and occasional bankruptcy but from which, like their father, they always re-emerged. And by now, thirty years later, the Maxwell family would have been forgotten had Ghislaine Maxwell, the youngest of Robert’s seven surviving children, not burst into the spotlight.

At the beginning of 1991, Ghislaine was receiving a monthly income from Maxwell’s Liechtenstein trust through the Bank Leumi in New York. No one has been able to gain access to those Liechtenstein bank accounts or understand the flow of money to Ghislaine. After his death, at least £25 million remained unaccounted for from the debris of the Maxwell empire in New York and a lot more disappeared into unknown bank accounts in tax havens. Some of that money financed Ghislaine Maxwell’s lifestyle. The result was clear. Through her father’s considerable presence in New York, not least through his ownership of the New York Daily News, she had met most of the city’s financiers and power brokers. Liberated by Maxwell’s death, Ghislaine bought a house in Manhattan and burst into New York’s gossip columns as a brash, party-hopping socialite. Among those she met was Jeffrey Epstein, an investment manager for the super-rich. Undoubtedly, her attraction to a magnetic man with unusual sexual habits was influenced by her childhood. Rich, domineering men could seduce her.

Until Ghislaine, then aged thirty, arrived in Tenerife to inspect her father’s yacht after his death, she had been relatively invisible except when she disingenuously congratulated a London policeman after being stopped for drunken driving. Known in the Mirror building as arrogant, she was an aspiring status-seeker, enjoying lunch with Mick Jagger and other celebrities who instantly accepted her father’s invitation. Her life had been dominated by her father’s tyranny.

Betty Maxwell, Ghislaine’s mother, would recall that her youngest daughter had been woefully neglected since her birth in 1961. ‘I was devastated,’ Betty would recall of the occasion when her four-year-old daughter had exclaimed, ‘Mummy, I exist.’

During her childhood, Ghislaine had witnessed her father’s merciless bullying, especially at the family’s regular Sunday lunches. Maxwell would question his children about world affairs. In the event that they made a mistake, the meal was interrupted while he physically beat the errant child in front of the others. ‘Bob would shout and threaten and rant at the children until they were reduced to pulp,’ Betty Maxwell wrote about her husband after his death. If a comment in a school report was not perfect, Maxwell caned the child. ‘Remember the three C’s,’ he growled, ‘Concentration, Consideration and Conciseness.’ Ghislaine could expect little protection from her mother even in front of her friends at her birthday party. Betty, who had met Robert during the liberation of France in 1944, collaborated with the beatings of her children just as she connived in her husband’s financial crimes. Except that Maxwell could be particularly protective towards his daughter.

As a teenager, Ghislaine was once summoned to Maxwell’s office in Holborn while he was speaking to Roy Greenslade, editor of the Mirror. ‘What’s this about you nearly drowning?’ he asked his daughter. He had heard about an incident in the sea from Gianni Agnelli, the Italian tycoon with whom Ghislaine had been staying.

‘Oh, you don’t mean that little accident,’ replied Ghislaine. ‘There was no danger.’

‘You’re always taking risks, doing stupid dangerous things,’ said Maxwell.

‘Oh Daddy,’ she exclaimed.

Maxwell became serious: ‘I told you about jumping out of a helicopter with my skis on. It won’t happen again.’

Even while Ghislaine studied at Balliol, she succumbed to her father’s control over her boyfriends. Her reward in 1987 was to push the button for the bottle of champagne to crack on the bow of the newly built Lady Ghislaine, sealing her anointment as the mogul’s favourite child and his obedient servant. Her loyalty during the last year of her father’s life is described in this book. But does that oppression explain why she developed a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, a paedophile? Or that she seemingly became his pimp?

In 2013, I met Ghislaine at a summer party in a large compound overlooking the sea in St Tropez. The host was a London property developer. I had last seen Ghislaine forty years earlier while filming the BBC documentary. Not surprisingly, she knew nothing about that venture – or, curiously, about the two books I had written about her father. While we chatted over a drink she seemed uninterested in him. Similarly, she seemed oblivious to the presence inside the glass-walled bar of a naked girl, writhing to the music. Nor did she express any emotion when a rocket from the party’s firework celebration landed on Club 55 on the beach below, setting fire to a hut. The fifty-two-year-old woman was hardened and alone.

By then, her association with Epstein had become notorious and her friendship with Prince Andrew proven by a series of photographs. She did not want to speak about that except to say that her relationship with Epstein had ended years earlier. Subsequently, I was told by a member of her family that she had enjoyed two long-term relationships with other rich men after parting from Epstein in 2001. That was untrue. Their relationship had continued, even if it was not intimate.

In 2019, pursued by the media and women alleging that she had trafficked them on Epstein’s behalf, she disappeared in America. To protect her location, even her family can only reach her – by phone or email – through a third party. Ghislaine Maxwell is a hunted woman, undoubtedly a casualty of her father and mother. While one can declare a final verdict on Robert Maxwell’s life, her ultimate fate is yet to be written – an outcome which her father could not have imagined in 1991.

Maxwell’s death shocked the world. Few will forget the moment that the news was first broadcast. I heard it in Moscow while speaking to the former head of the KGB’s Department S, a man responsible for sending ‘illegal’ agents into the West. During his last months, Maxwell had been a frequent visitor to the Kremlin. Bizarrely, it later transpired that he was negotiating to sell blood donated by Russians in the West – a market inspired by the new HIV crisis. Even thirty years later, the end of Captain Bob’s life remains astonishing, and provides a lesson which should never be forgotten.