by Tom Bower
In Moscow, President Gorbachov was complaining to Yegor Yakovlev of Moscow News that so many western businessmen had promised help but few delivered. Both laughed when Gorbachov called it the 'Maxwell Syndrome'. Elsewhere in that city, in the KGB's headquarters, General Alexander Karabainov, the agency's press chief, was discussing Maxwell's latest proposal that his organisation might publish a magazine containing reports from the KGB's archives.
At 11.10 a.m., on board the yacht, seven hours after Maxwell was last seen, the telephone rang. It was a call from New York where it was 6 a.m. The call was put through to Maxwell's bedroom but there was no reply. Rankin went down to his cabin. The door was locked which was not unusual when Maxwell was asleep. A master key opened the door. The room was empty. Maxwell's nightgown was on the bed. Rankin ordered the ship's crew to search the boat. When Maxwell was not found, he ordered another search and then a third search. Maxwell had disappeared.
Rankin's first call was to London. It was just before 11.30. The call was eventually put through to Kevin. His shock can be imagined. After telling his family, Ian summoned Ernie Burrington, the Mirror Group's managing director. 'Dad's missing, lost overboard,' said one of the sons.
Their composure was remarkable. Their determination to take command was impressive. Their fear of the perils was concealed from Burrington. For the moment, that was confined within the family. During that hour they were overwhelmed by their emotions.
The time was 12.25. Fifty-five minutes after Kevin first heard the news, Gus Rankin dispatched a satellite distress signal that his employer was missing. There has been no explanation why nearly an hour elapsed between Rankin's call to London and his distress signal. Within that time, Betty Maxwell and her son Philip sought a plane to fly to Las Palmas. But now, every minute, there were clear broadcast signals around the Canary islands alerting ships to search for Maxwell. He was mentioned by name. Fifty-five minutes of further agonised conversation continued in Maxwell's office - the emotional chaos successfully contained from seeping to the floors below and beyond - before a decision was made.
Kevin feared the effect on MCC's shares if the news leaked. It was lunchtime, an important moment in the City's day for intimate meetings. Desperately he sought Michael Richardson, but his father's trusted broker could not be found. Next, Kevin telephoned Samuel Montagu. Unable to reach Ian Mackintosh, he contacted Clive Chalk, also employed in the corporate finance department, who was in the bank's dining room. The banker was urged to come to Holborn immediately.
It was 1.05. Five minutes earlier, a short announcement had streamed across the Stock Exchange monitors that Goldman Sachs had reduced its percentage holdings in MCC. It was lunchtime and there was no reaction.
At 1.45 Chalk walked into Maxwell's office. Both sons were distraught. Richardson could still not be found. Chalk recommended that he call the Stock Exchange and request that both MCC and Mirror Group shares be suspended. Kevin agreed.
At 1.55 p.m., two and a half hours after Rankin's first message, Chalk telephoned the Stock Exchange's Quotation Committee. The banker confided to an official that Maxwell was missing and asked for the shares' suspension.
It was an unusual request. If shares were suspended every time a company chairman died, especially of such an important company as MCC, the market would be thrown into perpetual confusion. In principle, the officials also disliked talking to a banker. They preferred brokers. The official demurred to consider the option with three colleagues.
By 2 p.m. Richardson had been contacted in his car. Twenty minutes later he walked into the distraught atmosphere to find the brothers, whom he had known as small children, white faced: 'Dad's missing,' said Kevin. Richardson was clearly shocked. Controlling their emotions, their conversation was terse. Everyone knew about MCC's precarious state and the significance of Goldman's announcement. At that moment, Richardson's experience counted: 'They'll be a false market if trading continues.'
Richardson telephoned the Stock Exchange but the reply was still prevaricating: 'We have an obligation to all the investors,' Richardson was told. 'We need to undertake consultations.' It was the makings of the very farce which always provoked Maxwell's contempt for the 'has-beens' employed at the Exchange.
Within minutes of Chalk's first phone call, the news about Maxwell had leaked and shares were being sold. MCC's share price began falling towards a new low of 121p while the Mirror Group's fell to 77.5p. Within that hour, Kevin Maxwell had called his father's other important contacts. Among them was Eric Sheinberg.
At 2.58 p.m., the Exchange officially suspended trading of MCC and MGN shares. Those brokers who were not 'insiders' on the information loop, and had not quickly taken their money, believed the reason was the company's financial plight. Ten minutes later, the first flash announcement stated 'with deep regret' that Maxwell was missing at sea.
Maxwell's employees in Holborn had been already summoned. The news was given by Richard Stott, the Mirror's editor. Clearly concerned about the image which would be conveyed to outsiders, departmental heads had already been warned to caution staff about their behaviour. 'He didn't want them all in the boozer that night telling Maxwell jokes,' recalls one employee. That night, the British media, already in overdrive, would find difficulties obtaining sound bites and quotes from the staff.
At 4 p.m., to calm City fears, Ian and Kevin Maxwell were appointed by the respective boards as acting chairmen of Mirror Group and MCC. By then the Spanish air-sea rescue service had dispatched three helicopters and a light airplane to search the area. Ships also joined the search. At 5 p.m. a fishing boat reported sighting a body which was confirmed at 5.55 p.m. by Madrid Air-Sea Rescue. The position was given as about twenty-eight miles of the coast of Gran Canaria, about a hundred miles east of Tenerife. The co-ordinates, later confirmed, were 27 degrees 46.6 north, 16 degrees 0.6 west.
At 18.46, a Superpuma helicopter hovered over the recognisable corpse. 'It was naked, stiff and floating face up, not face down which is normal,' reported one of the rescuers. Guided by a searchlight, the crew struggled to winch the twenty-two stone remains on to their craft.
The news was flashed to London. At Mirror headquarters, both sons, remarkably composed, appeared before excited journalists to pledge that they would manage their father's 'wonderful publishing business'. 'Love him or hate him,' stated Kevin Maxwell, 'he touched the lives of many millions of people.' Observers later suggested that the sons' apparent lack of emotion was possibly unconscious relief that the burden of their father's omnipotence had been finally lifted. Kevin, aged thirty-three, would become acting chairman of MCC while Ian, thirty-six, became chief of the Mirror Group.
At that moment, Robert Maxwell was being transported by helicopter in the darkness to Gando military airport, on Gran Canaria. Wearing black, Betty and Philip Maxwell landed at the same airbase at 8.30 p.m. and were met by the British vice-consul Campbell Livingstone. Together they waited for Jose" Fernandez, the duty judge, before going to identify the body which had been moved to the Salon de Juntas, a room in the airport building reserved for important meetings. 'They were trying to do their best for somebody whom they knew was important,' Livingstone recalls.
Betty's husband, whom she had met forty-seven years earlier as a poor, handsome, idealistic and courageous soldier, lay on the helicopter's stretcher on a table. At 9 p.m. the mother and son walked towards the corpse covered by a heavy, orange, plastic sheet.
There was silence in the room as the plastic was lifted and Betty nodded. No tears fell as she murmured, 'He's a colossus lying there, as he'd been in life.' Eyewitnesses say that she was 'composed, calm and dignified'. Tears fell from Philip. Betty was questioned by Dr Carlos Lopez de Lamela, director of the local forensic institute where the autopsy would be conducted. Asked whether Maxwell could have committed suicide, she replied, 'It is absolutely out of the question.' Lamela asked about Maxwell's medical history and the drugs which he took. Betty Maxwell revealed that her husband had been taking drugs to cou
nter his pulmonary oedema. Other tablets were mentioned. Twenty minutes had passed. 'As far as I'm concerned, we're done,' announced Lamela.
The formality completed, a local judge ordered the helicopter to deliver Robert Maxwell to the morgue in Las Palmas. Betty spoke to her two sons in London and flew to Tenerife. She decided against sleeping in a hotel and opted for the Lady Ghislaine. Gus Rankin and some members of the crew would then be taken for questioning by the civil guard.
Throughout that night, Betty was on the telephone discussing the funeral arrangements. Earlier that year, on a journey to Jerusalem with her husband, they had stood on the Panorama promenade beneath Jerusalem's Intercontinental hotel overlooking the cemetery on Mount Olives, the holiest of Israel's burial grounds. Maxwell had mentioned that he had told his lawyer Yakov Neman two years earlier that this was the site where he wanted to be buried. 'I want to be near my parents,' he told Betty. He was referring to a plaque in the Yad Vashem memorial engraved with the name of his village, Slatinske Doly. The tragedy of the Holocaust had by then completely permeated his life. 'I cannot ever forget it. I can't forgive it,' he murmured about his parents' murder. 'I was my mother's favourite.' Within that tormented tyrant was a small boy wanting to return home.
Nothing had been arranged to implement Maxwell's wish to be buried in Israel. As a Christian, Betty naturally was ignorant of the requirements. That night, one of her children telephoned Yakov Neman, the lawyer, seeking help. 'Under Orthodox law, the body must be here before Shabbat,' Neman explained. There were less than sixty hours to complete the formalities in Tenerife and fly the body to Israel, a Herculean undertaking since the pathologists wanted to keep the corpse until the tests were complete, three weeks later.
While the family marshalled their lawyers and advisers to dragoon the Spanish authorities into line, Neman began planning his movements for the following day, 6 November. His first task would be to find a grave to bury Maxwell's body. No preparations had been made. At daybreak, Neman would contact Chananya Chachor, the cemetery's administrator. Then he would need to call in every political debt to produce a memorable funeral. It would be a pleasure to succeed.
In Tenerife at noon, three pathologists, Dr Carlos Lopez de Lamela, Dr Maria Ramos and Dr Louisa Garcia Cohen began their initial autopsy, called an 'opening of the cavities'. As they proceeded, they recorded finding a little water in the lungs, a graze of the forehead, a fissure behind the ear. They also took samples from the lung, kidney, pancreas, stomach and of the blood for further tests to be carried out in Madrid. Those tests would establish the presence of toxic substances, Maxwell's medical history and the presence of minuscule traces of algae which would have entered the bloodstream through the lungs to determine how long Maxwell spent in the water. As a routine procedure, scrapings were taken from beneath the nails to discover any fragments which would disclose whether Maxwell had clutched at an object or a person as he fell.
After three and a half hours, the pathologists reported to Judge Luis Gutierrez that their work was completed. Gutierrez told a local radio station that there was 'no evidence of criminality. We are treating it as a simple accident.' Suicide was clearly ruled out because there were no marks of how Maxwell would have killed himself. Death could not have been from drowning because there was no water in his lungs. 'The initial forensic reports suggests a natural death before Mr Maxwell fell into the sea,' Gutierrez told Betty Maxwell, who by then was clutching a bible. When she emerged from his office, the widow said that she believed that death had been due to natural causes. Other doctors spoke of a 'cardiac or cardiovascular attack'.
By daybreak, Samuel Pisar had, with the help of friends in Madrid, appointed Julio Claverie as the family's lawyer on the island. Claverie had two tasks. Firstly, to persuade Isabel Oliva, the thirty-one-year-old investigating magistrate to complete the formalities to allow the body to be flown to Israel; and secondly, to oversee the pathologists' and magistrate's report.
Judge Gutierrez had originally said that Maxwell was dead before he fell into the water. The mystery was how he fell over the one-and-a-half-metre solid rail around the decks. The only place where a fall was possible was at the low, metal cord barriers at the rear of the yacht on the lower deck. Strung between the thin, three-foot chrome rails, were wires. It was a place where Maxwell often stood and from where he could easily have toppled over and slid into the sea. The crew, watching from the bridge, would have neither heard nor seen him.
Since that was the only place from which he could have fallen, there remained for the Spanish investigators one critical question: was he pushed or did he fall? If it was murder and he was pushed or thrown into the sea, then, since the boat was sailing on an unscheduled course, only members of the crew could be responsible. The yacht's course was not predetermined so a second boat could not have met the Ghislaine at sea. The crew, reported Livingstone, the British vice-consul, were 'shocked and depressed' when they sailed back to Santa Cruz. They would be eliminated from the inquiry after one week.
If Maxwell had fallen, there were two options. Either he had suffered a heart attack on board the boat and had then fallen into the water; or he had fallen alive into the water and had suffered an attack while swimming in the sea, watching his boat sail away. Few in Britain had much confidence in the competence of the Spanish police to establish the truth.
Those were the questions which concerned a handful of individuals in the surreal setting off the African coast. But in the metropolis where Maxwell had sought to impose his writ, the deceased was subject to the attention he had devoted his lifetime seeking.
Momentarily, within minutes of publication of the news, the course of the world's events had changed. Broadcasts in every language mentioned Maxwell's death and began reciting his achievements. Like the assassination of John Kennedy and the resignation of Margaret Thatcher, many would remember forever where and how they heard the news. Tributes flowed from world leaders praising his character, wide-ranging interests and humanitarian activities. Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, declared his death 'robbed Britain of one of our most colourful and energetic figures'.
The obituaries, not surprisingly, were mixed. The Daily Mirror published Maxwell's own assessment of his greatest achievement that he was the 'man who saved the Mirror’. The Independent called him a 'liar, a cheat and a bully [who] did more than any other individual to pervert the British law of libel'. In the Daily Telegraph, Maxwell Hastings commented, 'The nation's headlines will be much the poorer for his passing, and the length of his journey from the place and circumstances of his birth demand respect from all of us who have had to travel much less far, to rise much less high.' But according to The Times he was 'an egoist and a monstrously improbable socialist'.
Elsewhere Matthew Evans, the chairman of Faber, was confidently asserting knowledge about the cause of death: 'It was directly linked to fresh allegations which will be made in the next few weeks. Of course there is a link. A story is going to break which would have made his position untenable.' Referring to Hersh's claims that Maxwell was a Mossad agent involved in gun running, money laundering and directly responsible for Mossad discovering Vanunu, Evans added that neither he nor Hersh 'would be surprised if he had committed suicide. There is a lot more involved in this story than has come out.' From Washington, Hersh claimed, 'We are in possession of a considerable amount of evidence in relation to Mr Maxwell and we are deciding what to do with it.' Hersh then revealed the existence of a video. It showed, he claimed, Mossad agents discussing finding Vanunu and mentioning Maxwell. 'I'm a predator,' boasted the American, 'and I'll milk the story for every last drop.'
From Sydney, Ben-Menasche also free from restraint of libel proceedings, added that he suspected that Mossad agents possibly had murdered Maxwell because the publisher was involved in massive arms deals. 'Since 1985 I used to meet him in the Mirror building . . . He was the one who opened the door for us [Israel] in the Eastern bloc' Both Hersh and Evans confirmed Ben-Menasche's claims
. That was the substance of Evans' assertion of 'a lot more to come'.
While Hersh basked in the glow of media attention, the Maxwell family were discussing their father's funeral. Neman had secured a plot on the Mount of Olives. He had paid $5,000 to Chananya Chachor and was satisfied with the deal. His telephone calls to the offices of the president, prime minister, and other leading politicians had reassured him that Maxwell's parting from the world would be marked as an important event. His client would have been proud of his lawyer. 'We must show how we value Jews who return to Israel', was the message which passed around Jerusalem's corridors of power.
In Liechtenstein, Dr Werner Keicher seemed relaxed. Speaking for the first time, the Maxwell trust's lawyer told inquirers that he was not expecting any telephone call from London. Maxwell's bastion of secrecy seemed secure. The impression was that everything was working as arranged which seemed contradictory to Maxwell's pledge in 1988 that 'my children will not inherit a penny. Everything will go to charity.' Like so much else from that source, the truth was the opposite. In London, both sons spent the first day after their father's death locked in discussions with bankers negotiating to maintain their new inheritance said to amount to at least £2.5 billion in debts. The British bankers, owed about £950 million, had seen their own share prices fall that morning because of the risks which they faced.
On Thursday morning, 7 November, the suspension of share dealings in MCC and Mirror Group was lifted. With the juggler absent from the stage, everyone knew that the balls would crash while others suspected that some of the balls would be missing. MCC's price plunged from 121p to 74p, reducing its value by £150 million. Mirror Group's rose from 77.5p to 106p in the expectation that the family would have to sell its controlling interest and that without Maxwell the business would make better profits. The gyrations compelled the family to increase the collateral for their father's debts. To reduce their burden, the remainder of Berlitz was sold for £149 million ($256 million).
