On this day, 5 November 1991, the body of Robert Maxwell was dredged up from the Atlantic Ocean. Eliot Wilson traces the rise and fall of the media tycoon

25 years ago, just after 6.00 pm on 5 November 1991, the body of a 68-year-old man was winched out of the Atlantic Ocean near Gran Canaria by a helicopter from the Spanish Air Force’s search-and-rescue division. The crew gave an immortal and pithy description of the 22-stone corpse: “desnudo, rígido y flotando”, naked, stiff and floating. The man had apparently drowned after falling from a yacht.

Robert Maxwell was a huge figure, in physical size and ego. He seemed invented, and was frequently compared to Augustus Melmotte, the villain of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.

He was. Maxwell would turn out to be the epitome of a self-made man who worshipped his creator. That element of fiction, of deceit and misdirection, would run through his life like a thread of fool’s gold.

The early years

He was born on 10 June 1923 in Slatinské Doly, in the then-new state of Czechoslovakia. He was from a family of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews: his father Mechel tried to register him as Abraham Lajbi Hoch, but the town hall clerk had told him he must choose Czech names. So Robert Maxwell first entered the record as Ján Ludvík Hyman Binjamin Hoch.

His parents were peasant labourers in the poorest part of Czechoslovakia, his father also serving as a shochet, a kosher butcher. But his mother wanted Ludvík, as her eldest son, to be a rabbi. He went first to a yeshiva, where he learned Yiddish, Hebrew and Czech, then to a state school where he added Russian, as well as German from his classmates.

By 13, he was juggling five languages, living in poverty unimaginable in Western Europe at that time, in a region of diversity and fragility: Ruthenians, Hungarians and Czechs lived alongside the Jewish community, with the Great Depression making life harder and the ever-present crackle of antisemitism always within earshot.

The hinge of Maxwell’s life was a four-day period, 15-18 March 1939. Nazi Germany annexed Czechoslovakia, but Germany’s ally Hungary collected a few scraps from the table. The Royal Hungarian Army occupied Subcarpathian Ruthenia, including Maxwell’s home town of Slatinské Doly, and a nightmare would slowly unfold.

Maxwell was 15, studying at the Pressburger Yeshiva in Bratislava. Hungary imposed increasingly stringent restrictions on Jews’ economic and public life. He had to get out so fled to Budapest then France, and finally to England. There were more new names, Ivan or Leslie du Maurier, when he joined the British Army.

He was lucky. Early in 1944, Hitler ordered the occupation of Hungary. In eight weeks, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and three-quarters were killed more or less on arrival. Maxwell’s pre-War life was essentially erased: his parents, his brother, three sisters, grandfather and more than 300 relatives were murdered. The Hoch family was gone.

Just 21, Maxwell served with the North Staffordshire Regiment from Normandy to Berlin, was promoted to sergeant, commissioned as an officer and received the Military Cross from Field Marshal Montgomery personally. After the War he stayed in Berlin for two years with the Foreign Office press section, was naturalised as a British subject and changed his name to Ian Robert Maxwell.

The creation of Robert Maxwell

The young man was created anew: Captain Robert Maxwell MC, tall, dashing, with a deep baritone voice and clipped, precise diction. He was an instinctive linguist, enterprising, persuasive and recklessly brave, decorated for storming a German machine gun position. That he was a work of his own art was not exceptional among the one in three European Jews who survived the Holocaust.

But Maxwell had a heart of darkness. By his early 20s, life had taught him critical lessons. He wanted enormous and conspicuous financial success, he wanted power, he wanted to be part of the Establishment (on his own terms) and he had a ruthless will to succeed. And he never wanted to be hungry.

Maxwell’s rise is a familiar story. He became the British and American distributor for specialist publisher Springer Verlag, then founded Butterworth-Springer, later Pergamon Press. He expanded it to a formidable scientific press, producing earnestly obscure papers and columns, and it gave him a platform of worthy respectability.

He became the Labour parliamentary candidate in Buckingham in 1959, having told the local party he was “of farm labouring stock [who], with only his army gratuity behind him, started a scientific publishing business”. Some of the words were true but missed his essence. He was elected in 1964 and held the marginal seat until 1970.

His energy and supposed familiarity with science chimed with Harold Wilson’s talk of technology, research and “the Britain that will be forged in the white heat of this revolution”. Yet ministerial office did not come and the backbenches of the House of Commons could not contain him. His zenith was as an efficiency-minded chairman of the Catering Committee: he sold off the House’s impressive cellar of vintage wine at knock-down prices, some bottles seeming to find their way into his own possession.

In 1969, Maxwell tried to buy The News of the World but was knocked back. He was also ejected from the board of Pergamon Press: a 1971 inquiry by the Department of Trade and Industry concluded he was not “a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company”.

Undeterred, he acquired Mirror Group Newspapers, publishers of The Daily Mirror and five other papers, in 1984. It was not yet an empire to rival that of his enemy Rupert Murdoch, but he had no intention of stopping there.

In 1987 he launched the short-lived The London Daily News. He had also acquired the Berlitz language schools, a half-share of MTV Europe and American publishers Macmillan Inc. In 1990, he launched an ambitious transnational newspaper, The European, attempting to capture the zeitgeist of the end of the Cold War. Then, in 1991, he bought into an ailing populist icon, The New York Daily News.

The beginning of the end

This eclectic empire was built on a flimsy pontoon of loans and theft, and it was beginning to sink. He was billions of pounds in debt, his private businesses owing around £1bn and Maxwell Communications Corporation anywhere between £1.4bn and £2bn. On top of that, it would transpire that he had been using assets belonging to his companies’ pension funds as collateral and shuffling funds between companies to maintain solvency. The futures of 32,000 members of various pension schemes were suddenly uncertain.

By October 1991, banks were demanding repayment or selling shares used as collateral. The end was coming. The night before he died, Maxwell had an argument by telephone with his son Kevin over a meeting with the Bank of England, concerning a default on a £50m loan. The unfurling saga of Maxwell’s financial chicanery, the theft of half a billion pounds from the pension funds, was grim.

Was Robert Maxwell a crook? Certainly. He had taken other people’s money to shore up his own position and left them in dire financial straits; even with substantial government assistance, pensioners only received half their entitlement. Was he a bully? Unquestionably. He tormented those over whom he had power, undermining their authority and bugging their telephone calls. He was also savagely litigious.

Essentially people were only important as allies or obstacles in his own rise. Everything was subjugated to his pursuit of success. His persona, as a fabulously wealthy tycoon, was only a veneer; it was a dinner jacket borrowed from a hire company. His rivalry with Rupert Murdoch (current fortune $25bn) was never really a match of equals. It had all been a lie.

Yet it had been a lie which many had chosen to believe. When he died, John Major and Neil Kinnock had paid tribute to him; Peter Jay and Alastair Campbell had worked for him and defended him. The circles in which he moved had accepted the word of a liar.

Are monsters born or made? Probably both. The pitiless harrowing of the Shoah may have killed any warmth in Jan Ludvík Hoch. After that his undoubted gifts and insatiable ambition drove him on, and there were many casualties. Perhaps it is in fact a trinity: monsters are born, made, and enabled.

Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian. He is a senior fellow for national security at the Coalition for Global Prosperity and a contributing editor at Defence on the Brink