by John Preston
Guest was even told that his life might be in danger if he carried on digging. None the less, he confided to a banker friend that he was determined to slug it out. ‘He said he would see it through even if he ended up in a one-bedroom flat.’ According to his wife, Beverley, ‘He was extremely concerned and frustrated, but he wouldn’t give up; he was like a dog with a bone.’
On 21 October, Guest ordered an internal investigation into the missing funds. Later that day, Maxwell took another £50,000,000 from the Mirror Group. A few days later Guest went to see him again to ask for an explanation of what had happened to the missing £38,000,000. He was so concerned, he admitted, that he couldn’t sleep.
‘Don’t worry,’ Maxwell told him again. ‘You are losing sleep and that’s not right. You will receive everything. Don’t worry . . .’
However, Guest had long passed the point where he could stop fretting. Richard Stott noticed he was ‘in an appalling state; his hands were shaking and he was chain-smoking’. At home, Beverley Guest did her best to relieve the tension: ‘He never shouted, not once, but I used to shout on his behalf and that seemed to make him calmer.’ Convinced after a series of apparently inexplicable coincidences that his phone was being bugged, he started using public phone boxes to alert the other directors of MGN to what was going on.
Even now Maxwell couldn’t stop spending money, as if one new deal, one new venture, might magically put everything right. In New York, he launched an American edition of his latest newspaper, The European, with a party at the United Nations building. Six hundred guests drank champagne, listened to Frank Sinatra Jnr belting out his father’s old hits, and discussed the prospects for closer European integration with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Midway through the party Maxwell disappeared. The European’s Editor, Ian Watson, went to try and find him. ‘Eventually I came across him sitting on his own in a room. I said, “Bob, I really think you ought to come back to the party.”’ By way of a reply, Maxwell pulled up the legs of his trousers. Watson was appalled. ‘His legs were all black and swollen and his ankles were literally hanging over his shoes.’
A doctor was called who recommended an X-ray. The next day Maxwell went to see Dr Alfred Rosenbaum, a radiologist suggested by Dr Henry Kissinger. ‘He had chest pain and I understood he had coronary artery problems,’ Rosenbaum recalled. ‘This might have been a sign of an angina attack.’ Although X-rays revealed that Maxwell’s heart wasn’t swollen, as Rosenbaum had suspected, he might have a blood clot, or even pneumonia. To make sure, further tests would need to be carried out.
It wasn’t only Maxwell’s physical state that was causing concern. While he was in New York, Maxwell asked Jules Kroll, the head of Kroll Associates, America’s best-known firm of private investigators, to come and see him in the Helmsley Palace Hotel. During a two-hour meeting – which Maxwell insisted took place on the patio as he was convinced his suite was bugged – he repeatedly told Kroll that people were trying to destroy both his business and his life. ‘It’s one thing for people to speculate whether I’m over-leveraged financially,’ Maxwell told Kroll, ‘but this is going far beyond that.’ The meeting ended with Kroll asking him to compile a list of people who might want to ruin him. Maxwell warned it was likely to be a long list, but promised to let him have it within a fortnight.
Before Dr Rosenbaum could conduct any more medical tests, Maxwell flew back to London. There, he learned that the Finance Director of MCC, Basil Brookes, was threatening to resign after discovering that £255,000,000 had disappeared from MCC accounts. Despite being given repeated assurances that the money would be returned, Brookes had lost all faith this was ever going to happen.
When George Wheeler came for his fortnightly appointment to dye Maxwell’s hair, he found him in a maudlin mood and drinking from a bottle of port.
‘He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “You know, Mr Wheeler, you are my oldest friend.”’
Wheeler was in no mood to be sentimental.
‘I replied, “Mr Maxwell, I am your only friend.”’
Glumly, Maxwell agreed he was right. Before he left, Wheeler told him that he had decided to sell all his MCC shares. By then the bottle of port was empty.
Maxwell now owed more than one billion pounds. Between them, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs were owed £250,000,000. Swiss Bank – owed £57,000,000 – was threatening to summon the Fraud Squad. Maxwell was caught in a trap from which there was no escape; the more he took from one part of his empire to prop up another part, the more he was hacking the ground from under his own feet. The foundations had been removed, the cracks were widening.
The whole edifice was starting to fall.
At the beginning of September 1991, Carolyn Hinsey, Maxwell’s ‘Cultural Ambassador’ in New York, asked him if she could take the evening off. She wanted to attend the memorial service of a friend of hers who had died recently in tragic circumstances. Maxwell said he wanted to know all the details before he would decide whether to let her go.
‘I told him that my friend, Helen O’Connor Tracy, had been on board a sailing boat with her husband, Tom, when they had become caught in a hurricane – Hurricane Bob.’
At this point Maxwell accused Hinsey of making this up. ‘I promised him that I wasn’t. The hurricane really was called Bob.’
Hinsey went on to tell him that the Tracys had set off early one morning from Jupiter Point in Connecticut intending to sail to another port further up the coast – a journey they had assumed would take around four hours. Although weather reports had said that Hurricane Bob wasn’t due to hit the area until later, they soon got into difficulties. One of the waves was so big it knocked them both overboard. As well as wearing life jackets, they were carrying flares and mini-strobe lights.
By now it was one o’clock in the afternoon. The couple decided they would be safer if they tied their life jackets together. As Tom Tracey later recalled, ‘I swam for a couple of hours and we got within a mile of Horton Point. I could see houses. We had whistles and we blew in unison.’ No one heard them. ‘We had six pocket flares. They were sealed, but only two worked. We set them off.’
There was no response.
When night fell, they turned on the strobe lights. ‘As it got late, about 10 p.m., Helen got a little panicky. She worried that it was the end. She asked me for a sweater. I tried to explain to her that I couldn’t get her a sweater.’ Tom told Helen to put her arms around his shoulders and he would try to swim towards the lights in the distance.
‘In the hours before dawn, Helen succumbed to delirium. She said, “Let me go. I want to die.” I said, “No, you can’t die. Lots of people love you.” But, by morning, you could tell she was in distress. She was breathing, but humming as she breathed. Her head was supported by the life jacket. I was trying to tow her.’ At around nine o’clock a wave washed over her. A few minutes later, Tom Tracy realized that his wife had drowned. More than twenty-fours after they had been swept overboard, the couple were spotted by a cabin cruiser, their life jackets still tied together.
When Hinsey had finished telling Maxwell what had happened, he carried on staring at her for some time. Then he shook his head and said, ‘That will never happen to us, will it, Tiny?’
32.
A Long Way Down
There were few events in Maxwell’s calendar that he enjoyed as much as the annual Labour Party Conference. It was an opportunity for him to talk political turkey, press some important flesh and generally make his presence felt. But not everyone found it so pleasurable. The Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, always regarded the prospect of spending time with Maxwell with a mixture of gloom and apprehension.
‘While I knew I couldn’t afford to lose his support, I knew too that he could change in an instant; it was like walking on eggshells. His skin was awful bloody thin for a big guy like that. I once asked Maxwell why he had to prove how important he was the whole time. Why couldn’t he be a bit more humble? I remember he wouldn’t answer t
he question; he just ignored me.’
But the Robert Maxwell who arrived at the Metropole Hotel in Brighton at the beginning of October 1991 was a changed man from the Maxwell of old – sickly, despondent and under siege. Two weeks earlier he’d met up with the most famous lawyer in the country, George Carman. Over the years Maxwell and Carman had seen a lot of one another. Whenever Maxwell issued a libel writ – something he did on an almost weekly basis – he would turn to Carman to represent him. In the past Carman always came to Maxwell’s office if they needed to talk. This time round, though, Maxwell went to see Carman in his chambers. As far as Carman was concerned, it was a hugely symbolic moment.
‘I know my father was very flattered,’ his son Dominic recalls. ‘He felt it was a sign of respect on Maxwell’s part. But I strongly suspect there was another motive – Maxwell knew he was likely to face criminal charges and he wanted to talk to my father about it away from his office. I know there were discussions about strategy – about what Maxwell should say if the police asked him such-and-such a question.’ Their meeting ended on a defiant note. ‘One of the last things Maxwell said to my father was, “You and I, George, we’ll nail those fucking bastards.”’
On the second day of the Labour Party Conference Maxwell asked Joe Haines – now retired as the Mirror’s Political Editor, but still writing leaders for the paper – to come to his suite at the Metropole.
‘I went to see him and straightaway he asked me if I was loyal to him.’
Something made Haines hesitate.
He replied that he was loyal to the Mirror – but this wasn’t what Maxwell wanted to hear. ‘He said again, very insistently, “Are you loyal to me personally, Joe?”’
Again Haines hesitated.
‘I wasn’t prepared to give him my word because I feared by the nature of the request that something illegal was afoot. So again I said, “I’m always loyal to the Mirror, Bob.”’
Maxwell didn’t take this at all well, Haines remembers. ‘He was very crestfallen. I felt that he had something weighing on his mind that he wanted to share. He needed a confidant, someone he could lean on.’ Although Haines couldn’t possibly have known it, it would be the last time he saw him. ‘Ever since then I’ve looked back with some sorrow because he was clearly hurt, but I don’t see what else I could have done.’
The same day there was a buffet lunch for senior Mirror staff at the hotel. Among the guests was the paper’s new Political Editor, Alastair Campbell. It was soon clear to Campbell that something was wrong. ‘At one point Maxwell asked me to walk out on to the balcony with him because he didn’t want anyone to overhear what he was going to say. That struck me as odd because I must have been the most junior person there. It was an extremely small balcony up on the top floor and we barely fitted on to it. He started to tell me how everyone was out to get him. How I had to understand that if these people destroyed him, they would also destroy the Labour Party.
‘He was really ranting. He kept saying that it was vitally important that I made sure that Neil Kinnock understood that. I remember there was a very narrow balustrade on the balcony and I had this feeling that Maxwell sort of wanted to tip over. It even half crossed my mind that I was going to have to reach out and grab him.’
That evening there was a large party at the hotel hosted by Maxwell. Alastair Campbell invited a friend of his to come along – a man who happened to suffer from bipolar disorder. ‘My friend was going through a particularly manic phase at the time. He ended up having a chat with Maxwell at the party and I remember afterwards he said to me, “My God, that guy is off his fucking head.”’
A week later, Maxwell asked John Pole to give him a transcript of any phone calls Lawrie Guest had made from his office phone. Among them was one in which Guest said simply, ‘It’s all going up.’
The next evening – Saturday, 12 October – Maxwell called Guest at home.
‘I hear you’re not happy,’ he said. ‘We’d better meet.’
In the morning, Maxwell told Guest that all the missing money had been returned, and reinvested in gilts. ‘You’ll get the contract notes for the gilt deals soon,’ he said. ‘The money will be back within two weeks.’ Worn out with worry, Guest, against his better judgement, allowed himself to believe him.
Physically, Maxwell was in a worse shape than ever. Breathless and still dogged by pains in his chest, he’d been unable to shake off a persistent cold. ‘He couldn’t breathe,’ recalled his chauffeur, John Featley. ‘He couldn’t talk properly. He had a sore throat. If he’d been a horse, you would have put him down.’
In New York, Carolyn Hinsey could see how much strain Maxwell was under. On Saturday, 26 October, they spent the day together at his suite at the Helmsley Palace. ‘He was in the worst mood I have ever seen. All day he screamed at me, “Get that dickhead on the phone”, and I would say, “Which dickhead?”’ At one point Maxwell told Hinsey she was a ‘fucking idiot’ and threw a telephone at her head.
Three days later, on Tuesday, 29 October, one of MGN’s non-executive directors, Sir Robert Clark, informed Maxwell that there were grave concerns about unauthorized investments. ‘It’s all a mistake,’ Maxwell said airily. ‘I’m going away for a few days to get rid of this cold. I’ll explain everything when I return.’ Clark told him that the MGN board wanted to convene an audit committee as soon as possible to investigate. Maxwell seemed unperturbed, although he must have known that any investigation would reveal that he’d drained the pension funds dry.
‘Go ahead,’ he said.
All the time the blows kept raining down. Deciding that they had waited long enough for the $60,000,000 they were owed, Goldman Sachs quietly sold off 25 million MCC shares. Citibank was also about to sell shares in an attempt to recover its $40,000,000 loan. Meanwhile in New York, Lehman Brothers were threatening to sell their shares unless their loan – $100,000,000 – was repaid in full.
And so it went on. Five other UK banks demanded that the £60,000,000 they were owed between them be repaid immediately. Although Maxwell managed to raise £80,000,000 by mortgaging various London properties, it was too little, too late. Still waiting for their £57,000,000, the head of Swiss Bank felt he had no alternative but to alert the relevant authorities to ‘suspected breaches of the law’.
The next day – Wednesday, 30 October – at around 7.45 in the evening, Maxwell asked his press officer/general factotum, Bob Cole, to come and see him. Over the years Cole had soaked up more punishment from Maxwell than anyone, with the possible exception of Peter Jay. Now, to his astonishment, Maxwell embraced him warmly, kissed him on the cheek and thanked him for everything he’d done. ‘That was the last I ever saw of him,’ Cole recalled. ‘And looking back on that meeting now, I can’t help feeling that somehow he knew it was to be our last.’
33.
Lost
On the night of Thursday, 31 October 1991, Gus Rankin, captain of the Lady Ghislaine, was eating a curry at an Indian restaurant in Gibraltar when one of the yacht’s stewardesses ran in. She had just heard some very alarming news: Robert Maxwell was flying out to Gibraltar early the next morning. Apparently he intended joining the Lady Ghislaine for what were described as ‘a few days’ rest and recreation’.
Normally an unexcitable man, Rankin was just as shocked. His first reaction was to assume it must be a practical joke. Leaving his meal, he rushed back to the yacht and called Maxwell’s home number in London. There was no reply. He then called one of his secretaries on her home number.
When at last she picked up the phone – she had already gone to bed – Rankin learned that Maxwell would indeed be arriving at 9.30 the following morning. There was nowhere near enough time to make everything ready, he protested. No food had been laid in and the yacht had just been prepared for a transatlantic crossing. In anticipation of rough weather, the portholes had been covered and anything breakable stowed away.
To make matters worse, the chief stewardess was on leave, so there were only ten crew on board
instead of the usual eleven. As Rankin knew only too well, the smallest thing was likely to set Maxwell off and this seemed sure to spark a major conflagration. But, even as he was talking, he realized he was wasting his time. If Maxwell had made up his mind to come, there was nothing he, or anyone else, could do about it.
The next morning, Rankin was waiting at the airport to meet Maxwell’s private Gulfstream jet. The first thing he noticed as Maxwell came down the steps was that he was travelling alone – normally he was accompanied by several staff, including his butler. Eankin was also surprised by how little luggage he had with him – just one suitcase along with five large boxes of files. He was, however, relieved to see that Maxwell appeared to be in uncharacteristically good spirits. Not only that, he was plainly making an effort to be on his best behaviour.
After apologizing for giving him so little notice, Maxwell said he would fit in with any plans Rankin might have. He explained that he’d been suffering from a heavy cold and was taking a short break to try to shake it off. Previously, Maxwell had asked him to sail to New York, where he intended spending Christmas. When Rankin said that he’d been planning to stop off in Madeira, Maxwell told him that was fine. As for the food, he would eat anything the staff could rustle up. Then Maxwell repeated that he had no wish to cause any fuss – ‘I’m just here for the ride.’
Later that morning, the Lady Ghislaine set sail. Over the next two days Maxwell remained in the same relaxed, jolly mood as he’d been in when he arrived. ‘I would say he was very happy,’ Rankin recalled. ‘He seemed healthy. He ate and drank well.’
In retrospect, the only thing that struck him as odd was that Maxwell did almost no work while he was on board. Usually, he spent several hours a day poring over papers. But now ‘it was if he had decided to drift, to just let everyone else get on with it’. Instead he passed the time by listening to his favourite Mozart operas, watching old James Bond videos and sitting on deck gazing out to sea.