Part Two: Robert Maxwell: How Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad Ruined Science

Robert Maxwell makes a full heel turn in this episode, going from badass killer of the SS to not so badass corporate ghoul who murdered science and also spied for Israel and the UK.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Alsome Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Ah, we're back. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about terrible people. And in part one of the story
of Robert Maxwell killing Maxwell's dad, he was pretty fucking rad.
And unfortunately we're now going into part two where it's
wild that this is like an episode where our bastard
commits several war crimes, and we're not angry about the

(00:26):
war crimes really like, it's the other stuff he's gonna
do that sucks well and with us once again is
the great Adam Conover. Adam, welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
I'm just so excited to hear more stories of our
cool friend Abraham Robert Ivan, private, private, private, yes, oh
oh oh. The best one was Leslie Leslie, yeah yeah.
And he's just a he's just a great guy. He's
just murdering a few more Nazis than you should. Yeah,

(01:01):
it's not great, but you know, you know, he's taking
his revenge.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
It's forgivable, yes and understandable. Part two is going to
be less so, although don't worry, he still does get
to kill one more Nazi, so we've got that going
for us. So the immediate aftermath of the Big Dub
Dub Dose was a busy time for Robert Maxwell. He

(01:28):
taught himself Russian, assuming spycraft would be a lucrative part
of his future. He's like, number one, I'm pretty good
with languages. Number two, I bet living in Berlin knowing
Russian is going to be lucrative very soon. And he
is correct about that. And then he kind of goes
he takes like a break from his like like a
leave of absence, and travels alone to war torn Prague

(01:50):
to try and track down the survivors of his family,
and he gets nothing but bad news. Really, he is
particularly scarred to hear that his nineteen year old sister, Shinya,
had been arrested in Budapest and likely shot and then
tossed into the river. One older and one younger sister survived.
His younger sister was actually rescued directly by Raoul Wallenberg,

(02:10):
who we've covered in our one of our Reverse Bastards episodes. Yeah,
Wallenberg in Budapest was like writing, I think Swede. I
think of Swedish Swedish visas for everyone on every Jewish
person under fifteen, and just like lying, it's like they're
all citizens, like every one of them.

Speaker 4 (02:25):
Oh my god, there's many Swedish people here.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Wow, a lot of Swedes in Budapest right now. And
he saved I mean he again, We've talked about this.
He saves like one hundred thousand people, and one of
them is Robert Maxwell's younger sister. So this is obviously
about as devastating a road trip as you can go on,
traveling through like the battle scars of Eastern Europe to
find out basically no one lived in your family. And
this is kind of the last time that he directly

(02:50):
acknowledges his Jewish roots for decades. When he returns to
occupied Berlin to work as an interrogator, he fully inhabits
Robert Maxwell, British officer. He's promoted to a captain at
this point, and it's not like hidden, like he doesn't
try to cover up his origins, but he doesn't tell
people he starts meeting now about them, and the vast

(03:10):
majority of people who know and work with him have
no idea that he's Jewish, that he grew up, you know,
in eastern Czechoslovakia, and he you know, it's one of
those things I don't think he was ever religious. So
I think Judaism was never like his his faith in
a meaningful way, because I think he's just kind of
a natural atheist. And I think after this, acknowledging that

(03:31):
that's his heritage is just too painful because his family
has been annihilated, right, and so he just really doesn't
for decades. He does take care of his sisters. He
sends them both to the United States, he sends his
younger he pays for his younger sister to go to college.
So he continues to take care of his family. He
just I think it's too painful for him to kind
of acknowledge his background in any way.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
What kind of like documentation would one even have at
this point, you know, like how like what you know,
what is he a citizen of? And is there any
such thing as like given what's happened in.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
Europe, Yes, so, but he is lucky for a lot
of people there aren't, right because of how many states
are destroyed and how chaotic the movement is. But he
enters the UK as part of the Dunkirk Landing, so
he has number one papers from France because he's enlisted
in the French Foreign Legion. And then he gets papers
because he enlists in the British military and so he
is an official citizen and he is able to get

(04:24):
papers for his family as a result, because he's now
a captain. He's fairly influential. He's good at meeting and
knowing people. He's a war hero, and he's able to
take care of his family because number one, his legal
status is super clear and he's a hero, right, and
he does take care of his family, though what little
is left of it. Now he is an interrogator now

(04:45):
in Berlin, and it is unlikely that his job as
an interrogator always stuck to the letter of international law,
by which I mean he probably tortured people. Right, this
is the start of the Cold War. He is in
Berlin interrogator people, and initially a lot of former Nazis.
But like, one has to assume there's some ugliness to

(05:05):
this job. Now, this is also a time nineteen forty
six when a foreign occupier could behave more or less
any way they wanted to among the captive German population,
and Maxwell certainly did for idea of like how because
everyone's starving in Germany, and also most of them had
been Nazis, so like for example, my grandpa is in
this at the exact same period of time and basically

(05:28):
the same area I have in my house, like two
grandfather clocks that he bought for like fifty cents each.
He bought like a shitload of these, like one hundred
and fifty year old grandfather clocks from starving Germans and
just shipped him back to the US because he was
as a poor Oklahoma boy. He's like, yeah, I'll take
all these formerly rich Europeans grandfather clocks for pennies, fuck them,
like hard to blame anybody for that. I consider them

(05:51):
more booty and Maxwell's Maxwell does the same thing, but
with so much more panache because so because he's he's
got this job where he's like interrogating old Nazis, he
meets Hitler's former dentist, which is first very weird connection. Yeah,
and so Hitler's old dentist tells Robert Maxwell, you know,

(06:13):
I know the guy who bred Hitler's beloved German shepherd Blondie.
That's the dog that he like like fed Cyanide to
when the bunker, like this is his pet. And there's
this dude who's like the dog, the Kinnel operator who
bred the dogs that like were Hitler's dogs, and so
Robert Maxwell's like I got to meet this motherfucker. So
he visits this guy.

Speaker 4 (06:33):
Hitler must have just like the number of people.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
Yeah. I was Hitler's optometrist. Yeah, yeah, you know I
used to scrub Hitler's pool.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, a lot of a lot.

Speaker 4 (06:44):
Of personal services the guy needed done.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah yeah, yeah, a lot of people working with Hitler
one way or the other.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (06:50):
I set up his aquarium. It was like really complicated.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
Then he needed me to come out every two weeks
to clean Hitler's aquarium.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
My aunt when she was like hitchhiking through Germany and
like the fifties, got picked up by a guy she
later found out was Hitler's photographer. Like, we have a
bunch of photos he gave her, like he just picked
her up on the.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
Road photos of Hitler.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yes, we have like a lot of weird Hitler photos
in my family that she was just like I didn't
know what to do with him.

Speaker 4 (07:17):
You gotta go on antiques road show and.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
With my Hitler picks, my god, yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
They never have the good shit on there. You got
to go on with the Hitler picks at the Grandfather clocks.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah, yeah, I prefer the Grandfather clocks to the Hitler picks. So,
but Maxwell's story is so much cooler. So he finds
Hitler's dog breeder and this guy is like on the
edge of destitution. Obviously the war was not good for
Hitler's dog guy. And he has one breeding male left, right,
this like one German, and he's his hope is that

(07:47):
like I can rebuild my business with this male, right,
you know, and maybe get my feet back on.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
And it's like just like a guy that man, you know,
that downfall the Third riis and like the Holocaust and
all that really bad for my dog breeding business, Yes,
horrible for guys who sell German shepherds. Yeah, you know,
I sold German Hitler. I thought it was a good
bed at the time.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
I thought it would keep going.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
Seemed like he was on the way up. You know.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
It was the MySpace of its day. How could it
have failed?

Speaker 5 (08:18):
Go?

Speaker 3 (08:19):
Why don't anybody think of how this affects dog breeding businesses?

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, fucking Eisenhower kept awake at night. We never thought
of the dog breeders. So Maxwell, his biographers always say
that he buys the dog off this guy and reading
between the lines. I don't think he gave the breeder
a choice, right. I think he was like, I'm a
British officer, I have a weapon, I'm taking the dog.

(08:45):
And I believe this because within days of him taking
this guy's last dog, Hitler's dog breeder commits suicide.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
And this story is so bizarre.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
Maxwell he tells his like comrades, his like fellow soldiers this,
and he's like, ha in this fucking funny and they're
like horrified that he kind of killed Hitler's dog breeder.

Speaker 3 (09:08):
Well, I mean, also, this man, his entire family was
murdered in the Holocaust. It's like and.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
There the morality of this is, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
Hitler's dog breeder sounds like a side mission from Wolfenstein.
You know of someone you go murder, Right, you.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Gotta kill Hitler's dog breeder. He's got four arms and
like a Cerberus. Yeah, you need the mini gun for
that level.

Speaker 4 (09:30):
So is it Hitler's dog? Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 2 (09:33):
No, No, no, this would have been I think it was
like the sire of Hitler's dog, maybe at least related
to the sire Hitler's dog.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
No, No, this wasn't Hitler's dog. No no, no, no no,
this was the sire of Hitler's Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, I stole Hitler's dog's dad.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
Every Nazi owned dogs who were sired by this dog.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yeah yeah. It's so funny that he's like, this is
a bragging point for him that I destroyed this man
and his like his colleagues are like, that's kind of
fun up.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
And I also just have to say, if your biographer
is like starting a paragraph with and then he met
a dog breeder and arranged to purchase a dog, it's
not a good dog purchase story, Like.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
There's not any of those really, Like a breeder dog purchases.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
Don't make it.

Speaker 4 (10:18):
I mean, yeah, you know, like Nixon's biography doesn't.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Spend a lot of time on checkers, you know what
I mean.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Right, So, yeah, he couldn't kill Hitler, but he got
the guy who made Hitler's dog. I guess wildlife.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
He owned the dog, what do you do with the dog?

Speaker 2 (10:36):
By all accounts, he cared about. He liked the dog, obviously,
not the dog's fault.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
He takes revenge on literally everybody who had anything to
do with Nazi, just people who were just hanging around
in Germany for a day.

Speaker 4 (10:51):
He slaughters them, but he's like the dog.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
I like the dogs, the dog Bitler's dog's dad. That's
a Nazi I'm okay with.

Speaker 2 (10:59):
Yeah. Yeah. So Maxwell kind of around this period has
a fairly He works as a spy. He's kind of
like a contractor for six probably it's one of those
things where we don't know exactly who he's working for
one hundred percent because it's spy stuff and because of
some other things he does. Because he's always a little

(11:21):
involved in this world of espionage. This will be mythologized,
but what we can confirm is really cool, which is
that he befriends a Soviet colonel because he speaks Russian
really well, and you have to imagine they're very drunk.
He convinces the Soviet colonel to break into Georgie Zukov's
office so they can photograph his papers. Like so much

(11:43):
vodka has to have been part of this story to
get this colonel to like, yeah, fuck Zukov, insane. Yeah,
it's nuts. He also carries out clandestine surveillance of his
old homeland, Czechoslovakia, which is where he gets noted by
the Czech like foreign service is looking like a hotter

(12:04):
Clark Gable. He's also described by many who knew him
as being a bit of a dick. An article in
The Guardian at this time describes him as tall, brash
and not at all content with his already considerable success.
An acquaintance at the time recalled him confessing his greatest
desire to be a millionaire. So you know what else
is there after killing every night? Literally getting down to

(12:26):
the fact that you're down to Hitler's dog breeder, so
you got no more Nazis to kill?

Speaker 3 (12:30):
Yeah, I mean it just war affects everybody so differently.
You know, I would think that if I escaped the
miserable poverty of Central Eastern Europe and you know, and
the worst war in the history of humanity, yeah, killed
a bunch of people, managed to not die in either
the Holocaust or the fighting, Yeah, and then achieved a

(12:52):
position of social prominence, I'd say, you know what, maybe
I'll take a summer off, you know, maybe I'll just
like be content to be.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
Alive, take a break, go to the sea. But ambition, man, Yeah,
like that he is like this ambition is and maybe
you know, he would never have admitted this, maybe there
is a degree that it's like, given what he's experienced,
he has to just keep moving right, like you can't.
You kind of can't just sit with what what's got

(13:19):
happened to you and what you've done. And that's certainly
like what one's left to interpret from where his life
goes next. So he talks a lot at the time
about how he's going to become a millionaire, and he
talks about specifically, I'm going to find a great unexploited
resource and find a way to put myself in the
middle of the distribution chain. Right. So again he has

(13:39):
this kind of eye for business, and he doesn't know
what he doesn't want to do anything in particular other
than find the next great resource and make himself key
to it.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Right.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
He's probably thinking this way because both oil and uranium
have gotten way more valuable in very very recently as
a result of some things. But the resource that Maxwell
is gonna lasso and used to make his fortune is
more dangerous and more valuable than either of those. Raw knowledge.
So science is a discipline is given how crucial it

(14:11):
is to World War two by the time that war starts,
Like the concept of science as like a professional field
that like people go into is still pretty new, and
in fact, even in like forty five forty six, some
of the senior scientific minds in the world had grown
up and started their careers at a time when science
was something gentleman hobbyists did.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
Right.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
It wasn't like the product of a national educational and
an industrial apparatus, right, this was something like men who
are like the earl of such and such, and my
hobby is figuring out how heredity works or whatever. Like
that's kind of how things had worked not all that
long ago. And obviously things have professionalized a lot prior
to World War Two, but the field is still really

(14:52):
new and people are still figuring out stuff like how
are we going to disseminate and spread new discoveries around
the world. What is that infrastructure going to look like?

Speaker 3 (15:03):
Right?

Speaker 2 (15:03):
And the Manhattan Project is a major part of that. Right,
there's suddenly this understanding that like it's kind of dangerous
for countries to not be completely up to date on
what's happening scientifically, right, Particularly the British government is kind
of caught off guard a little bit by the success
the US has with the Manhattan Project and the scale
of the achievement, and even though like they're on our

(15:25):
side during this, they're like, well, fuck we are. We
do not have a scientific industry that's capable of competing
with the Americans in the way that we need to.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
They're like, ah, we've been chemically castrating mathematicians. We got
shit over here.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Oh fuck, we really should probably stop doing that. Huh yeah,
stop poisoning our smart guys. As The Guardian writes, quote
top British scientists, from Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, to
the physicist Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin. We're
concerned that while British science was world class, its publishing
arm was dismal. Science publishers were mainly known for being

(15:59):
inefficient and constant broke journals, which often appeared on cheap,
thin paper, were produced almost as an afterthought by scientific societies.
The British Chemical Society had a month's long backlog of
articles for publication and relied on cash handouts from the
Royal Society to fund its printing operations. So there is
no money in scientific publishing. It's like they barely even

(16:19):
consider It's like, oh yeah, you figured out how nuclear
energy works. We should probably write about that at some
point in a place other people can read it, but
not a priority. You know, we'll just let that happen whenever.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
Uh huh, you're writing each other handwritten letters and shit, gone,
I discovered something.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah nukes, Yeah yeah yeah. So by late summer of
nineteen forty six, Robert Maxwell has talked himself and to
maybe the sweetest gig anyone gets during the Allied occupation
of Germany, which is he starts running the press section
of the Public Relations and Information Services Control Organizations. So obviously,
right after we occupy Germany, we're not letting the Germans

(16:58):
have newspapers of their own again that they're running, right,
because that didn't go well last time. Yeah yeah, German
media got a little out of pocket. So he is
basically put in charge of all German print media, right,
so as these as newspapers start up again, he is
like both the censor, so he's like approving everything that
goes out, but he's also figuring out how to make

(17:21):
these profitable. And he just turns out to be really
good at it, Like he's shockingly good at knowing how
to make a newspaper work financially. He probably got that
because he has no experience in this. He probably got
the job because he was trusted by the intelligence services.
You know, he's in with MI I six, and they're like,
probably good to have a guy who is with us
running the papers in post war Germany. But he launches

(17:44):
his first big paper as a social democratic paper that
like becomes wildly successful and makes a huge amount of money.
And it's like it's really hard in Germany, which is
devastated to get enough like ink and paper, and somehow
he manages to and no one really knows how. The
assumption is a mix of like bribery and his connections
with like organized crime, and just he he's also like

(18:07):
people will say, like he was scary. He'd killed dozens
of men and he was huge. So if he needed
something and he couldn't get it through other reasons, he
would just threaten to beat the shit out a few wow,
And yeah, I probably wouldn't have wanted to fight. Nineteen
forty six Robert Maxwell.

Speaker 4 (18:22):
His articles are all like, it's great to murder Germans.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
Actually pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (18:27):
Blowing a mayor's brains out is a tank fired at
you is a heroic deed.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
I wrote a poem about it. This paper, the first
paper that he's a social democratic paper that he starts,
is owned by a company, a publisher called Springer verloc.
You've heard of Springer if you've ever read an academic
publication or like, I think they do textbooks too, you
have seen Springer on a publication. Yeah, yeah, and this

(18:54):
is that company, right, and he gets to know the
owner of the company, an elderly man named Ferdinand Springer
quite well. Now, pre war, Springer had been the world's
largest publisher of scientific literature because Germany had been the
scientific center of the planet in many ways prior to
Hitler's rise to power. But once the war starts, science
kept going because obviously the Nazis still funded science, but

(19:18):
Germany was a pariah state and so they weren't publishing
anything for the rest of the world, and so papers
would continue to be written like sort of collecting the
whole history of like all of these scientific achievements being
made during the Nazi period, and they were just building
up in a warehouse that Springer had that he was
trying to keep, you know, far enough away that it
didn't get blown up by Allied bombs. So at the

(19:40):
end of the war, Ferdinand Springer is broke, but he
has sixty three thousand books filled with like the science
of rocketry, which the Nazis had developed to a massive extent,
and like advanced metallurgy and medical like all of this
really important, crucial science that's going to be a big
part of the space race. It's just sitting in springer warehouse, unpublished, right.

(20:02):
And Maxwell becomes this guy's friend, and so while they're talking,
Ferdinand explains to him how scientific publishing works. And he's like,
you know, so governments fund scientific research, as do universities,
and there's grants, and there's grants come from you know,
sometimes from governments, from different funds, from wealthy philanthropists, and
they pay for the science. And then the scientists produce

(20:23):
these papers about their findings and then publishers basically get
them for free. And Maxwell's like, wait a second, free,
the most like important valuable resource in the world. People
aren't even really charging for it. I got a motherfucking idea.
And yeah, part of his idea is that Springer can't

(20:46):
do anything with all these papers because German nationals are
not allowed to ship things overseas right now, Like, there's
a limited quantity that you can mail outside of Germany
as a German for obvious reasons. But Robert Mack can
mail whatever the fuck he wants, right Well, so he's
found his great resource and he's about to start exploiting it.

(21:07):
He starts a company with the goal of shipping Springer
scientific publications over to the UK and finding journals to
publish them. Right, he gets Springer, who again is broke,
hands him the worldwide distribution rights to all of German science,
right as long as he can find a way to
move it. Now, he maxwell's comfortable at this point, but
he's not rich, and sixty three thousand books worth of

(21:30):
stuff is you have to be rich to ship that somewhere.
We don't actually know how he pays for this, like
because it's expensive. He has no real customers. Initially for
years he'll have kind of claimed that, like, oh, my
wife's family has some money, so I use my savings
and theirs and that funded this. But his family is like, no,
he didn't really give him. We didn't like him, Like,

(21:52):
we didn't give him anything. Because his wife comes from
like kind of a bougie family and they do know
that Maxwell's like a poor Jewish kid from nowhere. They
don't care that he's like a war hero now so
we find out years later. We don't learn this until
after Maxwell dies in the year two thousand. A former
m I six officer claims that British intelligence, literally the

(22:13):
James Bond Agency, funds Maxwell's startup because he had been
working undercover for them and they considered it a potentially
valuable venture. M I six is intelligently like, probably good
to have a hand in all of scientific publishing. That like,
that might that might work out for us. Actually, here's
some money. And the the m I six officer who
reveals this says it's the only time m I six

(22:35):
ever like completely funded a startup. Maybe that's true, maybe
that's not. I don't credit a literal m I six
officer with necessarily being honest about everything.

Speaker 3 (22:47):
Yeah, all those uh startups that make Jim's Bonzil.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Gadgets right right right, Yeah, there's gotta be a couple
of those, right, Q's gotta have some gotta have some
companies he's working with. So so, as noted earlier, Maxwell
start shipping the stuff to the UK, and while he's
doing this. His plan right now, His business is just
I want to get this over to the UK and
I'll figure out a way to make it work financially,
because there's obviously a hunger for this material. But the UK,

(23:14):
this just adds to the problem the country has, which
is the scientific publishing in the UK can't handle the
UK's backlog of unpublished science sixty three thousand books worth
of added stuff. It's just over massively overloaded the system
right per the Guardian quote, the British government solution was
to pair the venerable British publishing house Butterworths with the

(23:35):
renowned German publisher Springer. To draw on the latter's expertise.
Butterworth's would learn to turn a profit on journals, and
British Science would get its work out at a faster pace.
The Butterworth's directors, being ex British Intelligence themselves, hired the
young Maxwell to help manage the company, and another X spook,
Paul Rosbaud, a metallurgist who spent the war passing Nazi
nuclear secrets to the British through French and Dutch resistance,

(23:57):
as scientific editor. When Butterworth's decided to abandon the fledgling project.
In nineteen fifty one, Maxwell offered thirteen thousand pounds about
four hundred and twenty grand today for both Butterworth's and
Springer's shares, giving him control of the company. Rose Boud
stayed on a scientific director and named the new venture
Pergaman Press, after a coin from the ancient Greek city
of Pergamen featuring athena goddess of wisdom, which they adapted

(24:20):
for the company logo, a simple line drawing appropriately representing
both knowledge and money. So what starts as a British
program to like get scientific publishing up winds up entirely
in Maxwell and rose Boud's hands, because the company that
the British government contract with is like, ah, there's probably
not a lot of money in this. Yeah, we'll take

(24:40):
thirteen thousand pounds for now being in control of all
of scientific publishing for Germany and the United Kingdom. That's
where Maxwell's made himself. He's not thirty, Like.

Speaker 4 (24:53):
He's not thirty years old yet.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
No, No, he would have been. So he's twenty three
in the war ends, who'd have been like twenty eight
or twenty nine? Right now, I think, Wow, he's doing well.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
I'm forty two and I haven't like murdered anybody.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Haven't murdered dozens of ss men.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
I haven't killed any mayors. I haven't taken over the
scientific publishing of two entire nations yet, right, yeah, like
the last generation was just stronger and better.

Speaker 2 (25:17):
I'm sorry. Yeah, the energy this guy had.

Speaker 4 (25:20):
Because of the cell phone.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
You know, that's why I haven't haven't murdered any Germans yet.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
It's the cell phone I had had. A Robert Maxwell
secretly invented adderall. He was just keeping it from everybody
for a while, jumping it into his leg. Yeah yeah, yeah,
it's his only food. So while this business was starting
off with a bang, Maxwell is still a serial entrepreneur,
and most of his attempts at business don't work quite

(25:46):
as well as Pergaman does. A great example of this
would be a business deal he sets up in the
early fifties. So he gets in bed with his German
chemist and this chemist has set up a deal to
exchange chemicals shipped from Germany for glass China and goods
manufactured elsewhere. Right, because Germany doesn't have a lot of
stuff at the end of the war except for some
raw materials. A decision is made midway through the process

(26:09):
that we should probably send all of the stuff through
Argentina because Argentina can pay with pork bellies. Now, Like,
I'm not an economic expert, I don't know why this
made sense to them, but they decide like, oh, yeah,
pork bellies, that's better than cash. That'll really work out.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah, these settlers of Katan logic.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yes, And I know someone might be saying, well, pork
belly futures is probably what they were talking about. No,
no literal pork bellies. And this becomes obvious because when
they try to exchange these pork bellies to the British
government for cash, the British Government's like, well, these have
gone rancid. These are all rancid pork bellies. We don't

(26:51):
really want these, So maxwell they keep going. He keeps
trying to sell these rancid pork bellies to different countries,
and he finally finds a country that's like starving to death, Austria,
and Austria's like, yeah, we will literally take anything it's rancid. Fine,
we'll make it into sausage. We're doing so badly right now,

(27:12):
toxic pork is the best Austria can do, thanks Hitler. Yeah. Again,
there's like a if you've been to Berlin, you've had
like curry worst, right, which is like a Berlin dish,
and it's like curry on a sausage or a hot dog.
It got started because in this period of time they're
like sausages were like more than a fifty percent sawdust

(27:32):
and they had curry powder because the British were there.
So it was like people won't notice the sawdust as
much if we put curry on it.

Speaker 3 (27:40):
Every time we eat a curry worst. Do you think
of Maxwell and his quest to take over all of.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
Publishing, all of publishing in the rancid pork business?

Speaker 3 (27:50):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
My favorite side fact about this is that they get
Austria to buy this rancid pork by pretending the meat
had come from a fake country called Oceania, and nobody
in Austria, like in the trade part of Austar or whatever,
recognizes that he just made up a country. This is
not real. Yeah, that sounds real to me.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
Again, we just got out of the Nazi period, not
super knowledgeable about the rest of the world.

Speaker 3 (28:15):
Here, you guys don't even want to know what's what
happened in South America. Man, there's Oceania's taken over. They
make the best pork bellies.

Speaker 4 (28:22):
Really want some.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
The freshest pork bellies.

Speaker 4 (28:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Wow, So in nineteen fifty five, back doing their pergaman business,
we're out of the pork belly thing. Maxwell and his
partner rose about it. I also just have to say
the fact that like this scientific publishing starts with like
the guy who murdered a significant portion of the SS
and the guy who smuggled nuclear secrets to the French resistance.

(28:47):
You'd think this would have ended cooler than it does.

Speaker 4 (28:50):
Yeah, these guys sound awesome.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
They are at this point, and they're arbitraging pork bellies
instead of money. By the way, maybe the first that
they're not as smart as we think they are that
they were like, hey, we could you don't be better
than being paid in money, being paid in pork belliesceiving
the pork bellies, and then having to travel around Europe
set reselling your rancid pork bellies for Austrian money. The

(29:13):
Austrian money can't be great.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah, that can't have been like a great profit margin. Right. Yeah,
So in nineteen fifty five, Maxwell and his partner Rose
Baud show up at the Geneva Conference on Peaceful Uses
of Nuclear Power. And this is kind of we've talked
about this before, one of like the inciting events to
what becomes the Plowshare program, where the US is like,
we should be using nukes to dig big holes and

(29:37):
hydraulically frack, you know. So they show up at this
big conference because there's all these scientists who are presenting
papers on like cutting edge nuclear research. So they run
an office nearby, and Maxwell spends the whole trip. He's
just like crashing seminars and luncheons and dinners and finding
every scientist he can who's got a paper out and
is like, hey, man, sign an exclusive contract with me.

(29:59):
I will give you money in exchange for the rights
to everything you publish. Right, And this isn't a lot
of money for him. I think he's giving these people
like hundreds to thousands of dollars. But these are like
scientists aren't like Richmond traditionally, especially in this period, and
paper publishing had never really been worth money before, so
they're like this is a great deal, right, you know, suddenly,

(30:20):
finally someone values my work. So Maxwell is just like
he's like he's basically just going door to door finding
every scientist and being like, what'll it take to sign
you right now? Right, Like, He's like, he's like a
Hollywood agent. But for nuclear physicists.

Speaker 3 (30:34):
Going around the open MIC's handing that, handing out five
dollars bills.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Right, exactly, yes, And no one had ever done this
in the field of science, right, this is still a
gentleman's endeavor. And journals tended to be focused on what
they were interested in publishing, right, So they didn't like
seek people out. You know, if you were a nuclear
physicist and you had a paper, you'd go to the
journal that did that, and you would send them the
paper and maybe they'd get to it eventually. So Maxwell's

(30:59):
coming up with a fucking that shocking to people, right.
Don Frank, a competing publisher, considered this dishonest, but it worked.
What made pergam And so profitable was the fact that,
and this is something that he realizes as a result
of his conversations with Ferdinand, every university and every government
scientific organization in the entire Western world needs access to

(31:22):
all of the relevant research in their field as it's
being published. This means subscriptions to every relevant journal are
a necessity.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
If you're a college and you have a bunch of
different scientific programs, you're going to be subscribed to basically
every journal there is, right. And the first thing Maxwell
realizes is like, well, they'll pay whatever I charge. Right,
If I have exclusive rights, no one else can publish
these things. I can charge as much as I want.
And obviously, once he makes money, competition enters. Other companies

(31:52):
start figuring this out. But he makes another prediction, which
is that this will work the opposite of the way
most things work. The more publishers there are putting out
more journals, the more money we will make, right, because
they can't not subscribe to everything, because all of the
research is unique, and in order to stay up to date,

(32:13):
they have to buy everything. And at this point in time,
all of these universities, all these government they're just being
funded by these massive amounts of like Cold War era
defense cash. So the money is unlimited, right, And that's
really what he realizes, Like, I can charge whatever I want,
I can put out as many journals as I want,
and there will be an endless amount of cash for me.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
And this is not like a huge part of the
budget of any one university anyway. Now, So you could
charge you could charge an arm and a leg. Yeah,
but it's just gonna be some like the library has
to pay for a little bit of It doesn't cost
them as much as their mortgage.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
It's one hundred dollars instead of ten dollars, right, yes,
And we're getting all this defense money anyway, because the
US government needs physicists right right now. It was his
business partner Rosebaud who had the idea that would truly
make Pergaman into a force to be reckoned with, and
Bob Maxwell rich beyond his wildest dreams. Per the Guardian quote.
As science expanded, he realized that it would need new

(33:11):
journals to cover new areas of study. The scientific societies
that had traditionally created journals were unwieldy institutions that tended
to move slowly, hampered by internal debates between members about
the boundaries of their field. Rosebod had none of those constraints.
All he needed to do was convince a prominent academic
that their particular field required a new journal to showcase
it properly and install that person at the helm of it.

(33:33):
Pergaman would then begin selling subscriptions to university libraries, which
suddenly had a lot of government money to spend. So
you're literally walking up to guys and saying, hey, what
you do seems new? You should have a journal, And
suddenly every college in the western world subscribes. Immediate profits
right there are so a really good magazine is working
on like a ten to fifteen percent profit margin, right,

(33:56):
and that's a magazine that's doing very well. His profit
margins on these journals are over fifty percent. Wow, Like,
it's insane how much money they make off of this.
Speaking of insane money, help us get some of that,
you know, so we can subscribe to scientific journals. No,
we use sy hub. Everyone use sy hub. Fuck these people,

(34:17):
fuck scientific publishing as an industry. Steal it not legal advice,
and we're back. Sihub is a website that collects most
of the journals you might want. If you like, find
a journal that's paywalled, you go to syhub. Google it.

(34:37):
There's a bunch of different mirrors. Put the doi number
or just the URL link to the study you want,
and syhub will generally return it for free. It's great anyway,
I'm pretty sure I'm not. That's not illegal for me
to say.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
I mean, I think pretty much every grad student in
the world is using.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
It right, right, right, and they should be and all
of this should be free.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yes, yeah, because it's oh, you mean, a scientific knowledge,
the birthright of mankind that our tax is paid for,
the only, in fact, the only uh permanent and important
thing humanity does on the entire planet to discover how
the universe around us works. Yeah, that should probably be
a free public resource.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
It should probably be everyone's property. Yeah, the collective genius
of mankind. I don't know anyway. So Roseboud he has
this idea which is very mercenary, but he also has
like a conscience. He is a scientist, and he starts
to feel ashamed as Maxwell runs with it and is like, ah, man,
I really don't I don't feel good being in business

(35:37):
with you and doing this. I maybe contributed terribly to
a great evil. And he leaves, and so Maxwell's in
sole charge of Pergama now, and once he grasps Rosebaud's idea,
he runs with it like fucking Ussane Bolt. He's launching
new journals off the strength of like somebody he's having
like drinks and some guy mentions a new idea and
he's like, bam, journal motherfucker if a researcher. Yeah, like that,

(36:01):
Like that's literally how it's happening. By the late fifties,
he brought us sort of sleazy. He's like the first
eighties guy, Like he's amazing, and he brings this energy
to scientific publishing. And the fact that he is this
way is so out of time that it's shocking to
his new peers. So who show up at these scientific
conferences in like these fine tailored Italian suits. He's got

(36:23):
his hair slicked back like a gangster. He described the
journals that he owned as you lambs and himself as
King David, like cutting them up for parts. Basically that's
such a Again, this is why Rosebaud quits in fifty
six is he's like, I don't know, maybe this feels gross.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
I also have to say, like there's been a lot
of talk in the last twenty years about you know,
for profit journals and you know, all the problems in
scientific publisher I always thought that that profit motive was
relatively recent. I didn't realize it was rapacious even at
the dawn of this shit.

Speaker 2 (36:55):
Yes, and it Maxwell invins it. Now obviously would something
similar mayby, but like it's him, He's the one who
starts this.

Speaker 3 (37:03):
And presumably somebody could have started a version of academic
publishing that didn't work this way. That was like, you know,
a lot of people say, like, what if Jimmy Wales
had not started Wikipedia, right, we would have maybe had
a different business model. There could have been a business
model that went a better way.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you just don't know. And you know,
I think we're probably doing better with Wikipedia than most
things on the Internet these days.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
I mean, that's a good example. If that hadn't existed,
something bad it could have taken its place. There could
have been a better version of scientific publishing.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yeah, yeah, cost one hundred dollars a month or some
shit or whatever. Yeah, and it tells you that Elon Musk,
you're gonna get a hyperloop in your city soon or whatever. Yeah.
So the next Geneva conference, now working alone, Robert Maxwell
rinse a mansion on the lake and he starts whining
and dining the best minds of the scientific world. Again.
He's taking these guys who have spent their whole and

(38:01):
ladies who have spent their whole careers with their nose
in a book generally don't have much money begging for grants,
and he is treating them like movie stars or pop musicians.
Like at one point he gets a bunch of these
guys together to start a journal, and he puts them
on a chartered boat tour of the Greek aisles to
figure out how to make the journal. Like it is
like classic Hollywood erashit right where you're like, go go

(38:24):
hang out in Italy for three months and write this
movie together or something like that. Like that's what he's
doing with these scientists, and like yeah, they they're like
this is much better than being a poor scientist.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
This would work on me. Yes, yes, of course if
I was a scientist, I'd be like this guy is
so great. He's treating me the way I deserve to
be treated. Of course, I mean, I study ants, but
of course I should go on a free, all expenses
paid trip of Europe.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yeah. And one thing people say, to be fair to Maxwell,
he introduces the mercenary capitalism to this, but he's always
centered on the science. And one thing the scientists he
work with will say is whenever we had a disagreement,
he would always ultimately side with the scientists. Right. So
it's after him that things do get much more evil.
And it's with another company, el Selvier, where things get

(39:10):
a lot worse. But he makes that process inevitable, even
though he is he is really dedicated to the scientists
in this period of time. And also I just want
to add to what Adam said, if anyone wants to
put me on a chartered boat tour of the Greek
Isles to start a journal, I'm in. You've got me,
you bought me, I'm paid for like yeah. So he

(39:34):
told his deputy director at Pergaman, we don't compete on sales,
we compete on authors, right, So this is a talent
driven business. And that's what again, it's very much it
feels very similar to like Hollywood, I don't like, at
least at this time. I don't know how much that's
an influence to him, but he is kind of working
that way. His attitude is that like drawing in more
authors exclusively means like more journals that he owns, and

(39:57):
thus more sales. In nineteen fifty nine, Pergama had forty journals.
By the mid sixties it would publish more than one
hundred and fifty, which is like almost like ten times
as many as el Selvier, which is again the most
evil of these companies today, but at this point is
just barely keeping up as like a competitor to Pergaman.
Maxwell is not like a particularly patriotic businessman. He does

(40:20):
not see national borders. He has really good connections with
the USSR. It's always considered weird and part of why
people are wondering about his spy credentials. Whenever he visits Moscow,
the Soviet government like puts him up in a mansion
like they really like him, and I think, I mean,
he definitely is doing some spying, and I'm sure they're
also putting them up in the mansion because it's like

(40:42):
wired and they want aspire out of him. But he
has really good connections too. He speaks really good Russian.
He knows a lot of prominent people in the Soviet Union.
And the evidence for that is that when like the
USSR launches Spudnik, he negotiates within days an English language
deal with the Russian Academy of Sciences to become the
exclusive English language publisher of like Russian science, right, all

(41:05):
of like these. Yeah, so he is connected.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
He sounds like a blast to spend a weekend with.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
He sounds like a shitload of fun. Yeah right, there's
so many quotes about this guy, Like all of the
scientists who work with him are like he was a
piece of shit. A lot of fun though, Like, yeah,
he was an asshole. Great parties, Yeah, like I really
enjoyed spending time with this guy who sucked. Yeah. Now,
obviously Maxwell does not make this, as I said, as

(41:32):
evil as it becomes, but the downsides of what he
starts are very obvious. Today. The modern field of scientific
literature is cripplingly expensive for institutions like libraries and colleges,
the latter of which passed their costs on to students.
And while Maxwell initially wowed scientists with promises of payouts,
by the mid sixties he'd helped to normalize a system
where individual researchers were more reliant on journals than journals

(41:54):
were on them. Per the Guardian, scientists create work under
their own direction, funded largely by guff and give it
to publishers for free. The publisher pays scientific editors who
judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar,
but the bulk of the editorial burden checking the scientific
validity and evaluating the experiments. A process known as peer
review is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis.

(42:15):
The publishers then sell the product back to the government
funded institutional and university libraries to be read by scientists who,
in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
It is as if the New Yorker or the economists
demanded that journalists write and edit each other's work for
free and ask the government to foot the bill. And like,
nothing works like this industry does. And that is, by

(42:35):
the way, description of how it is.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
Now, that's an incredible summary of how it works. And
like peer review, you know, we're taught in college anyway
that this is a good thing. Yea. The fact that
it's free labor, and not just free labor for science,
but free labor for the journals themselves. Like it begs
the question, like what exactly is the publisher even doing

(43:00):
other than you know, hitting start on the printing press. Fuck,
which which is the easiest part. Like that's the like
fucking random house does that shit? Like, what what is
the what is the power that the that these companies have?
Like why why wouldn't a university system just start their
own journal and do this themselves?

Speaker 2 (43:21):
Yeah, well, I mean they do. There are some cases
of that, but like you also you, I mean, it's
just how kind of everything works in capitalism. There are
economies of scale. By the time this gets underway, the
big companies are so big you and your dinky journal, like,
they'll probably just buy you, right, And if the college
gets offered money for our journal, well it's money.

Speaker 3 (43:40):
Right.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Everyone's thinking short term about shit like this, not how
it fucks you in the long run, you know, And
again like, no industry works the way scientific publishing does.
It is such a fucking grift. It's all the grift.
It's a huge, fucking evil grift.

Speaker 3 (43:56):
God, Dad, you got me mad. This is the kind
of thing I normally do segments about you got me
mad about it.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
You can find very good quotes in articles about this,
including some of the world linked in the show notes,
where there are science like prominent scientists being like the
primary barrier to scientific progress is the way scientific publishing works, right,
Like it's I mean, maybe not right now, more administration's doing. Yeah,
these are a little older articles, but it's a massive problem.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
Now.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
The ultimate result of the system that Robert Maxwell built
is one in which, as long as the government maintains
a priority in funding sciences, the industry is super profitable,
right the US or whoever pays for research, YadA, YadA, YadA.
And so we'll see what happens to publishing now that
some of that's starting to change. But uh, yeah, it's
it's it's interesting.

Speaker 3 (44:43):
It's also such a classic example of you know, rent seeking,
as economists you call it, because again, the government is
funding it, the journals are making money off of it.
Like Maxwell made so much money that his daughter is an.

Speaker 2 (44:56):
Heiress billions, billions.

Speaker 3 (44:59):
And so profiting off of it, but they do not
put money back into the system, like absolutely, Now they
are making money off of the production of science, why
not fund some fucking science. But they don't do that.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Yeah, yeah, why would they do that? Why would they
give any money to anybody that's not That's not what
they're going to do. They're going to take it to
as Maxwell's about to do, buy a palace. And again
he's the least he's not as bad as the guys
who replace him, right, because he does ultimately he makes
a lot of times he will make decisions that cost
him money because a scientist says it's the right thing

(45:30):
to do, and he does ultimately side with his scientists,
and there's and he's able to do that because there's
so much flex there's so much extra profit he can
afford to. But the guys who replace him aren't aren't
even going to have that little level of scruples, right,
They're just not going to give a fuck. And this
is going to disrupt the timeline of these episodes a
little bit. But in order to talk about kind of
where things are today with scientific publishing, I want to

(45:52):
quote once more from another Guardian article. The publishing business
is perverse and needless. The Berkeley biologist Michael i And
wrote in a two thousand and three article for The Guardian,
declaring that it should be a public scandal. Adrian Sutton,
a physicist at Imperial College, told me that scientists are
all slaves to publishers. What other industry receives its raw
materials from its customers, gets those same customers to carry

(46:13):
out the quality control on those materials, and then sells
the same materials back to the customers at a vastly
inflated price. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends
on being published, and professional success is especially determined by
getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow,
nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential
scientists of the twentieth century is no longer a viable

(46:34):
career option under today's system. The father of genetic sequencing,
Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades
between his nineteen fifty eight and nineteen eighty Nobel prizes,
may well have found himself out of a job. That's actually,
I think a really important point is that so many
of the foundational discoveries of modernity as we know it

(46:55):
were not the result of like a team of people
working in for for a company in order to make
a thing. It was the result of a scientists to
had an interest and kind of in a meandering way,
pursued it for decades until he changed life for every
human being. Right, Jonas sal Ketty personal crusade against polio.

(47:15):
You know, like that doesn't happen. It can't happen. And
this is part of why right, and that's really bad
for all of us well.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
And part of it is the is the social or
career pressure of having to publish, which is an I'm
gonna guess is an entirely different problem like that. That
is the what scientists careers are based on, is the
pressure to publish. But it feeds again back into this system,
like you don't last long in a tenured position if

(47:43):
you never publish anything.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
Right, exactly, Maxwell, we're back to him now. I just
I really felt we should go to like, yeah, this
is how bad things end. Yeah, right, But that's after
his death. So Maxwell moves out of London. We're still
in this in the sixties. Here he purchases the Headington
Hill whole estate in Oxford, which had been built in
eighteen twenty four and become one of the most iconic

(48:05):
residences in the country. I'll of Sophie pull up the picture.
The noble family who had to live there sold it
off in nineteen fifty three, and Maxwell buys it in
part because like again, he's not English, he's not naturally
part of high society, but by buying this palace he
can kind of force himself to be right. Now he
can throw these kind of parties that everyone in high

(48:26):
society will show up at. And he makes this both
his home and the headquarters of pergam And Press, right,
and you know, that's kind of the way things work
in the UK. I think still to this day that
like you can skip a bunch of levels of the
social hierarchy if you buy the right house.

Speaker 3 (48:41):
You know.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
He and Betty had nine children ultimately in nineteen and
this is his life is never his personal life is
never easy like this. For all that he's like a
wealthy monster, he really has a tough life. In nineteen
fifty seven, he and Betty lose their three year old
daughter to leukemia. In nineteen sixty one, their oldest son, Michael,
is in a car crash that leaves him comb abound

(49:05):
for seven years. He dies finally in nineteen sixty eight,
and that nearly a decade, And this is during his
most productive period as a businessman. His son is just
in a fucking coma die. It just it kind of
breaks everyone. Like his family is sort of ruined. As
a result of this, he and Betty stop talking really
like they don't. Their relationship is never the same. And

(49:28):
normally when we say that for a man this rich
it's because and he does cheat on her a bunch,
but like in this case, it's because, you know, it's
just this just breaks their relationship and it breaks their
ability to kind of care for their other kids, Like
he stops talking to his surviving children until And I
hate to make anyone sympathetic to Gilan Maxwell, but in

(49:49):
nineteen sixty one, his youngest daughter, Gilan, at age three,
tells her mother, Mummy, I exist in an attempt to
get attention because like after this accident, they're just ignoring
their kids so much. Like she has to like state
to her parents, I'm a person at age three.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
So I reported this.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
This was in his biography by Preston, and I believe
this was reported by one of the Maxwell brothers. And
again this is this is well before the scandal, so.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
No, no, I know, I'm just like, well, Gillan wouldn't
remember this, and the parents don't know the kids exist,
so they probably wouldn't remember it.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
His brothers are old.

Speaker 3 (50:26):
One of the brothers like, oh man, that was a
real bummer when our three year old sister said, Mummy,
I exist.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
Yeah, that really fucked us all up.

Speaker 1 (50:32):
Actually, yeah, I still don't bad for.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
Yeah, I'm not saying you should feel bad for her,
but this this should tell you, like how bad things
are in his personal life.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Not great, still not for a bad for yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
Yeah. He does start to smother her with affection from
this point forward, right partly as a result of this,
and she's kind of the only one in his immediate
family that he acts with love towards. After this, he
will lash out at his son's and at his wife
for the rest of his days, but he never really
does it Gillen. She becomes coddled and is obviously his favorite.

(51:05):
So again, there we go, There we go. Sympathy ended.
We're good now, don't have to think about that sad
three year old anymore. Now. If you recall, Maxwell had
promised his future wife Betty that during the war he
would one day be rich and become the prime minister.
He had obviously already become rich, and in the mid
nineteen sixties he starts to work towards political power. In

(51:25):
nineteen sixty four, he runs for Parliament in the constituency
of Buckingham and he wins as a member of the
Labor Party. And this is a weird side He identifies
as a socialist his entire life.

Speaker 4 (51:36):
Really, he identifies as a socialist.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
Yep, he strongly identifies as a socialist.

Speaker 3 (51:42):
So he thinks that like public goods should be available
to the public at low or no cost, subsidized by
the government.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Yeah, here's the thing.

Speaker 4 (51:53):
But not scientific research, not scientific research.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
That doesn't count. And also unions don't count. I think
he identifies as a socialist because his mom did and
he he isn't one. He never acts as one. But
I think that's just a part of his ego. Is
like he doesn't he knows his He probably knows his
mom would not like what he's done with his life
at this point. But yes, he is, and he is

(52:19):
a part of the Labor Party, and he is a
He plays a role in the switch from Labor to
New Labor Right, which is when the British Labor Party
jettisons the unions right, like Robert Maxwell is part of
that process. How what does he do we'll talk about that.
We'll talk about that. Speaking of things, we'll talk about
here's ads. So Robert has now gotten himself into parliament,

(52:50):
is part of Labor and you have to remember again
he's a socialist and he's also a business owner though,
and so he hates unions because they compete with his power.
And so when interviewed after the election, he tells everybody,
I come from a very far humble farm laboring family
and would rather cut off my arm than betray my class.

(53:10):
And it's true that he does come from a humble farm,
laboring family, but there is no bigger class trader than
this fucking guy. His political peers who knew him claim
that he also told them he wanted to become Prime Minister,
and one colleague, cited in the book fall later quoted
him as having admitted, well, of course I'm conservative, but
I'm not a member of the establishment, so I've got
to become labor, which is a very Trumpian comment, right that, Like,

(53:35):
I'm not a member of the establishment. I'm a billionaire,
I own all of science, but I'm not part of
the establishment fundamentally. So I'm a conservative, but I'm with labor, right,
I'm actually a progressive somehow. It's like an Elon Musk statement.

Speaker 3 (53:48):
Yeah, it's an in group out group thing. I were
mean to me growing up. I'm not a lord. I'm
not a lord and lady. I'm not invited to social functions.
Therefore I must join this party.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah yeah, And he also considers so a big thing.
Once he gets into labor is he telling He starts
telling everyone else we have to modernize the Labor Party.
And what he means by that is our pro union
attitudes are outdated. We have to stop being pro union
right now. This is not initially super popular. A lot
of unions voting in this period of time. Still they

(54:21):
have not been crushed by Thatcher entirely. Eventually, he switched
out his chauffeured Rolls Royce for an old land Rover
to try to portray himself as a man of the people.
And like, Buddy, a land Rover is still an expensive car.
Like that's like, no, I'm gonna trade my Maserati for
a Lambo so people know I'm a working man, right,

(54:43):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
Man, is that chauffeurd? Now I just row over the
peasants under my own power.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
Yeah yeah. So this did not have the intended effect,
and although he was re elected in nineteen sixty six,
he ultimately lost his seat in nineteen seventy and failed
to win it back during the next cycle. Still, Adam,
you'll be happy to hear this. He achieved the goal
of every politician in the sixties and seventies having an
awkward photo taken with Henry Kissinger. Just look at the

(55:09):
two of them. Just look and Maxwell's over in the
corner there, he's just like smiling in the corner, looking
like a mob boss next to Kissinger. Eh, I love
this picture.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
That guy's a wheeler dealer. He's drunk already. He's like
I can smell him based on this photo. Does that
make sense?

Speaker 4 (55:27):
Almost like mothballs and vodka.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
Yeah, my end. Maybe a little aqua velve in there too.
Oh yeah, yeah, he smells like the back room of
an Italian deli that's actually a mob front.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
He's going, how you're doing, sweetheart? He's like pat and
the waitresses ass like this guy is such a piece
of shit.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
It's shocking to me again that he's like he's like
a Czech Ruthenian Jewish guy. Because if you had told
me this man was the most Italian fellow ever, I'd
be like, yeah, that guy is Italian as shit. Look
at him like he has the face of a mob boss,
Like you could have put him in the soprano.

Speaker 3 (56:02):
It really is the twentieth century dream, right, Yeah, of
starting in this you know, little backwater and becoming a
sort of like poly national wheeler dealer, billionaire player asshole.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Yeah, he does it all, and he is, like again,
a monster, but the only guy I've ever heard of
who you can really say like, yeah, he is kind
of less a self made billionaire, like he did come
from nothing, Yeah, and then destroyed science.

Speaker 3 (56:32):
Great, I think there's more. I think that was more
possible after an event like World War Two, where everything
gets scrambled and you can rush in and pick up
the pieces. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Well, I mean yeah, I mean think about it. Both
Maxwell and Kissinger really are both like they both start
their lives as like shrapnel from this horrific conflict, persecuted
by the Nazis, and then the world of possibilities that
opens up in the wake of the Second World War
allows both of them to reach these incredibly high levels
of power. So yeah, I mean, I think you've got
a really good point there that, like the way the

(57:04):
world opens up after World War Two makes a lot
of these guys as improbable lives possible.

Speaker 3 (57:11):
I can't wait for World War three.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
It's gonna be great. It's gonna be thinking.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
About just think about all the new billionaires we're gonna get,
and I'm gonna be.

Speaker 4 (57:17):
Like, I wish I was a younger man.

Speaker 3 (57:18):
Yeah, I wish I was just trying to get my
start after World War Three, you know, after the Boks
go off and I could build the nuclear mitigation business.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
Yes, yes, but maybe we'll maybe we'll get a chance
to fight some SS guys on a farm, you know.
You know, at least there's that Adam that happen It
could happen here. Yeah. Through the late nineteen sixties, Maxwell
repeatedly tried to expand his empire into news media. He
attempts to buy News of the World in nineteen sixty
eight and The Sun in nineteen sixty nine, and Rupert

(57:49):
Murdoch beats him both times. This enrages him. He considers
himself Rupert Murdock's nemesis. Rupert Murdoch is always like, oh
I I've never even heard of that guy. Who are
you talking about? Nemesis?

Speaker 3 (58:00):
Nah, but not making him less sympathetic.

Speaker 2 (58:04):
Though by this part nativism does play a role in
him losing News of the World because an editorial when
he's trying to buy it declares, this is a British
newspaper run by British people. Let's keep it that way.

Speaker 4 (58:17):
What was he considered at the time He was British.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
They knew, yeah, but they figured they found out he'd
been born Yon. He hadn't been born Yon, but that's
what they thought.

Speaker 3 (58:25):
This guy's a Ruthenian.

Speaker 2 (58:27):
He's a Ruthenian. Yeah, So his political career is uneven
at best. Business seemed to be a welcoming place for him,
at least until late nineteen sixty nine, after he negotiated
which should have been a great deal to sell pergam
And Press to a wealthy American investor, Saul Steinberg. Unfortunately
for our boy, Maxwell illegally concealed the true value of
the company, basically pretending it was a lot worth more

(58:48):
than it was via what writer Robert Philpott calls smoke
in mirrors accounting practices. He gets removed from the board
of directors in the UK starts an investigation in his
activities that concludes in seventy one after finding huge amounts
of fraudulent payments, moved from one department to another to
hide the cost of other investments that went bad, and
prop up segments of his business that were struggling. The

(59:09):
report concluded, Robert Maxwell is not, in our opinion, a
person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship
of a public company. And at the end of the story,
right obviously you know. Yeah. Now five years later he
takes control of Pergament again. He's running it all and
his sudden rise and fall earns him the nickname the

(59:30):
bouncing check like Czeh, which is not bad. It's not bad,
great work the British press good at some things. Yeah,
I love that shit. And for the next ten years
after this unprobable rise back, he goes from strength to strength.
He buys Europe's largest printing company, he becomes owner of

(59:51):
The Mirror, that Britain's largest left leaning paper. And now
that he finally owns a paper, this is how he
really plays a major role in the shift to new
labor because he starts using it the biggest left leaning
paper in the UK, to attack union organizers. He runs
what Socialist Worker what the Socialist Worker described as a
smear campaign against Arthur Scargill, head of the mine Workers union.

(01:00:14):
This is during a big fight between the mine workers
and Thatcher. I believe quote Scargill and the socialist values
he represented were seen as a barrier to the modernization
of the Labor Party. The vile attacks, which lasted for
the better part of a year, were baseless, yet they
did terrible damage. And he does this over and over again. Right,
he has like a one man war against the unions
in the UK, wielding the left wing paper to execute it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
He just has animus for unions because he's a business owner.
And that's the way the wind is blowing.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
And that's the I think. The way the wind is
blowing doesn't hurt. I think he is a personal I
should be able to I know what's best. I should
be able to make all the decisions. And if you
got a union, the boss doesn't make all the decisions, right,
they're restricted to some extent.

Speaker 3 (01:00:58):
Now, that's what anti us is fundamentally about. It's about
anyone else having power. Unions are about workers having power,
and right, the people on top don't want them to
have the power.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
Right exactly, And Maxwell the socialist uses this big left
leaning paper as an engine to push labor against unions.
And unfortunately, while he does this, the paper grows in
circulation and becomes more profitable than ever because again he's
really good at the nuts and bolts of running a newspaper.
Like he's just he's like it's like he's like almost

(01:01:28):
like lebron right, Like he's just got this built in
skill he was bored with for knowing how to make
a paper profitable. I don't know why we.

Speaker 3 (01:01:36):
Could use a little bit of that right now, to
be quite honest.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Yeah, we need another one of those who's not evil.

Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:43):
Now he's got Bezos and Patrick soun Schong.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
Yeah. Right, So he buys more publications, he becomes a medium,
even on such a scale that Bob Bagdikian, the dean
of Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, declared, neither Caesar, nor
Franklin Roosevelt nor any pope has commanded much power to
shape information on which so many people depend. Wow, and
Murdoch is obviously his rival at this time. But this

(01:02:09):
is kind of before Murdoch has done most of what
he's going to get famous for. Like Fox News isn't
really a thing yet. And Murdoch to a degree cribs
a little bit from this guy's notes in terms of like, oh, really,
like he's taking some notes, not that he's not doing
any of this before, but he's influenced a little bit
by the degree to which Maxwell is able to turn

(01:02:31):
these publications he owns to push his own agendas. And
he is a famously terrible guy to work for. Per
a biography in the Times of Israel. He bullied and
humiliated staff, relentlessly calling his ludicrously titled chief of staff
at four am one Sunday morning to ask him the time,
and instilled a culture of distrust and rivalry. He bugged
his staff, by which I mean he bugged them with

(01:02:54):
surveillance devices, spending hours alone listening to the recordings for
evidence of disloyalty, and even had them followed. Thank Christ.

Speaker 3 (01:03:04):
Like, dude, you're obsessed with me. You're spending hours alone
listening to the recordings of me.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
Yeah, it's kind of flattering, you are.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):
What you're really pulling into focus now, is this man
is a long lost succession character?

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
Yes, yes, nailed it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
Where is the Holocaust surviving Ruthenian Czech Jew you know
who managed to survive and build an empire on that show?
That's a wonderful character.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
He would have He would have participated in boor on
the floor. There's no way.

Speaker 4 (01:03:32):
Yeah, yeah, he sounds like he created or on the floor.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
Yeah he is on the floor.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
Yeah, yeah, the floor. We missed a flashback scene if
you have machine gunning the ss alas. So this is
and again to kind of play on the succession vibes.
His sons are he puts in his business right, and
he fires them. He fires his son Ian Maxwell because

(01:03:56):
like he doesn't have he's not like waiting for him
when he lands on a plane one day. He instead
like sends a chauffe a vehicle, and so Maxwell fires
his kid. And Ian's first words when he gets fired
or thank Christ, I'm finally out of the madhouse. And
then three months later he hires Ian back on half
his salary. He's just such a piece of shit.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
Yeah, this is very success. You're in, you're out, you're up,
you're down. Yeah, Dad loves you. He doesn't love you.
You never know where you stand except you'll never be free.

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Yeah, yeah, I definitely will never be free. Now. That
quote comes from a massive piece on Maxwell in the
Times of Israel, and The Times of Israel's covering him
in particular because in the mid eighties, after decades of
really ignoring his Jewish heritage, he meets a guy who's like,
you should go to Israel, and he becomes all in
and starts investing massively in the Israeli economy. His wealth

(01:04:48):
gives him instant access to the Prime Minister, Yitzak Shmir,
and he announces his intention, I'm going to put a
quarter of a billion dollars into Israel. And he normally
lies when he says stuff like this, but he does that,
and he uses his profits from the Mirror in order
to do this, and I'm going to quote from his biography.
Over the next four years, thanks to his mere group profits,
Maxwell pumped millions into the country, buying newspapers, investing in

(01:05:11):
high tech and pharma companies, and in the process becoming
the largest single investor in Israel's economy. Maxwell also began
to pass on useful information to the Masad, and boy
is he useful to the Masad. In nineteen eighty six,
he tipped, so there's this scientist, this Israeli scientist, Mordechai Venunu,
who's part of like Israel's nuclear program, that Israel still

(01:05:32):
does not acknowledge that they have nukes. Right, we know
they like everyone knows, but it's like kind of them. Now,
I don't believe. I still don't believe they've officially acknowledged
their nuclear capacity. I should actually double check on that.
I know it took a long time, but they have
not at this point right like they it is not
officially stated. It's just kind of a thing everyone knows.

(01:05:54):
And Mordecai goes to the British press with insight info
about Israel's newke Clear program, and one of the papers
he goes to is The Mirror, and so he leaks
to Maxwell's paper, and Maxwell gives him up to the
Massad and he's jailed for eighteen years, which is like
in journalism terms, bad.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
Yeah, to give somebody up to a foreign intelligence service
and then they're.

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
Jailed, Yes, real bad.

Speaker 4 (01:06:23):
Yeah, usually they try not to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:27):
Yeah, bad publisher moved. Hey Robert here, and I just
wanted to come in and note that the story of Mordecai,
even who knew, was a lot more complicated than just
Robert Maxwell or The Mirror. The Mirror is not the
first publication that he linked to. I think he went
after the Sunday Times first, but Robert Maxwell is involved.
It's a little bit unclear. It seems like a situation

(01:06:49):
where web be more than one person kind of went
to the Masad about what he was saying. Uh, but yeah,
Maxwell definitely was involved when somebody else sold the story
to the Sunday Mirror and he went to the Masad
over it. So anyway, Mordecai is a very interesting guy, obviously,
very courageous guy. Story is really worth looking into. I
also did want to note because we had a question

(01:07:11):
about this earlier, Israel still does not officially admit that
they have nuclear weapons, although they're believed to have somewhere
between like one and four hundred warheads. It's that their
kind of official defense posture strategy is to neither confirmed
nor deny that they do. It kind of became clear
in the late seventies that they did, but this is
not something that is like officially admitted. So anyway, just

(01:07:33):
wanted to add that clarification. Now, there are allegations, unfortunately,
because he's involved in the Massad and he definitely is,
there's also insane allegations, right, like you can find every
conspiracy connected to this guy, and he's basically framed as
like having been a major massad agent, and that's just
really not accurate. One of the big things you'll hear

(01:07:54):
is that and this comes from the book Robert Maxwell
Israel Super Spy, which is say somewhat exaggerated. And they
alleged that he stole a piece of surveillance software called
Promise without an E, which was programmed to let law
enforcement agencies track criminals and having a backdoor installed in it.

(01:08:14):
And the Baltimore Sun sums up their argument. They report
that Maxwell sold the program to most of the important
government intelligence services in the world at a personal profit
of more than half a billion dollars. Into the program,
they write, Israeli technicians collaborating with Maxwell implanted an electric
trap door that allowed Israeli intelligence to tap many of
the highest state secrets of the Soviet Union, Britain, the US,

(01:08:35):
and other nations. And this is not true, and it's
also not true in a way that is blaming is
denying what the US government did, because Promise is a
real thing and it really was used to tap a
bunch of governments. But the US government was the inciting
agent here, right, this is one of ours. Now Maxwell

(01:08:58):
is involved, I'm going to explain what happened. So this
software was designed by a software developer in Washington called
inns Law, so prosecutors could monitor case records and keep
track of different people in the system. Right, Like, that
is the purpose, So prosecutors can monitor the progression of
cases against different acused criminals. It was developed under a
Department of Justice grants, so the dog was licensed to

(01:09:18):
use it. But the license said the government cannot modify,
create derivative versions of it, or sell it. And the
Reagan Administration's like, oh, fuck it, what do we just
do that anyway?

Speaker 3 (01:09:30):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:09:31):
Per an article in The New Statesman, Under the Ronald
Reagan administration's covert intelligence initiative known as Follow the Money,
that the NSA misappropriated promise for sale to banks in
nineteen eighty two, the version of promise sold by the
NSA had been espionage enabled through a backdoor in the program,
allowing the agency to covertly conduct real time electronic surveillance
of the flow of money to suspected terrorists and other

(01:09:52):
perceived threats to US national interests. A letter from the
US Department of Justice in nineteen eighty five, later obtained
by ins Law because the company suits the shit out
of the government for this documented more plans for covert
sale and distribution of the espionage enabled version of Promise,
this time to governments in the Middle East, which would
surreptitiously allow the US to spy on foreign intelligence agencies.
The letter outlined how sales of the software were to

(01:10:15):
be facilitated by the late Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mafus
and the arms dealers Adnan Koshogi and manuchre Gorbanafar. Promise
should be delivered without paperwork, customs or delay, it stated,
and all of the transactions paid for through a Swiss
bank account. So number one, this is on us. The
Massad does not start this program and they don't put

(01:10:37):
the back It's not Israeli technicians. You put the back door,
and Reagan's guys do, right, A bunch of the shadiest
op Now, Israel does get involved in this, and they
do profit from this, but it starts with us. A
bunch of the shadiest operators in the nineteen eighties are
allowed to sell privated versions of Promise. Basically, the Attorney
General under Reagan ed Meese will give you the like

(01:11:00):
basically license you to sell pirated compromised versions of promise
to foreign governments if you're his friend. Like, that's how
that's part of how this works. It's like a way
the Reagan administration is like rewarding loyal people. Is like, hey,
you've got a good Hey you did us good and
you've got a good connection over in you know, Ecuador
or whatever. Why don't we let you sell this to
their government And then we get a backdoor into the government.

(01:11:22):
And this guy gets to make some money, right and
one of the people who gets tapped as a result
of this program because they want to sell promise to Iraq,
Libya and several other Middle Eastern countries and this is hard,
so they enlist the help of a Masad guy named
Rafi Eitan, And that guy in the Massad is like,
maybe a guy at the Massad isn't the best dude
to sell to Iraq, But you know who can sell

(01:11:44):
shit to anybody? Bobby Maxwell, baby, And that's where he
comes into this. Right now, Gordon Thomas, who's the author
of that Israel Super Spy book, will claim he's the one.
He's the source of the claim that Maxwell makes half
a billion in licenses doing this. I don't know how
much Maxwell really makes, but he doesn't start like he is.
He's kind of a middleman in the process, and Thomas

(01:12:06):
portrays him as like at the core of the process.
But this is like fucked up, and he does sell.
He sells, i think to the Soviet Union, he sells
to a shitload of governments that allows the US to
spy on them, and he profits personally from this. So
this is like a lot of skulduggery it's involved in.
It's just a lot more centered on ed Meeson the
Reagan administration than some of these other claims make. And

(01:12:27):
obviously Israel profits from this too because they are using
Maxwell to sell it to countries that they want intel on, right,
So that is happening. That is a part of this story,
it's just not the start of it. Now. There are
numerous allegations of Maxwell's fingers in arms dealers that the
Israeli government found useful to and some of these are true,
but it's not. It's often portrayed as he is an

(01:12:50):
arms dealer. He's not. He is a guy who knows logistics,
and so when a friend is like, hey, we need
the shipment to get through this port, He's like I
know guys there, I'll make sure it moves right. He's
a you know, that's the kind of thing he's useful for.
And so's he is connected to the Masad because he's
a powerful, rich businessman who desperately wants to prove his

(01:13:12):
loyalty to the country, to like to Israel, and has
connections everywhere, and that's kind of his use. And there's
a much more accurate look at his spying and his
involvement in intelligence agencies in the book Foreign Body, The
Secret Life of Robert Maxwell by Russell Davies, and Davies
outlines the dimensions of these shady dealings in a way
that I think is a lot more accurate, because he

(01:13:34):
argues it's hard to imagine Maxwell himself doing an arms
deal directly, right quote, but he could certainly have been
of use securing the cooperation of foreign governments when it
came to routing illicit cargoes through their unadvertised and outlawed destinations. Maxwell,
he argues, would have been insulted to have been accused
of working as a common spy or agent, because again,

(01:13:55):
he is on first a first name basis with every
Prime minister of Israel during this period of time, right, like,
he's not like an employee of the Massade. He is
incredibly he's way he's so highly connected. By nineteen eighty eight,
Maxwell estimated his own net worth at about four billion dollars,
and the parties he threw, attended by everyone who was
anyone in UK politics, were legendary. John Preston describes his

(01:14:18):
nineteen eighty eight birthday an event that had to take
three days because more than three thousand people attended. There's
like tiers of guests in terms of like which day
you're allowed to be at. Wow, it's it's it's fucked up.

Speaker 3 (01:14:32):
It really seems like, you know, he did some bad shit,
but he wins me back with the parties. The parties
sound great.

Speaker 2 (01:14:38):
The parties sound great. The arm stealing, the spying on
every foreign government in the world, for the CIA and
the Massade. I don't love that. But the parties. There's
one like Margaret Thatcher gives a speech at his birthday
this year where she talks about how awesome she is
because he doesn't like her. They're like enemies in public,
but she's like, I think he secretly likes me, and

(01:14:59):
then explains all the ways that she thinks she's cool.
Like it's such a fucking Thatcher moment. Oh that said,
it is sick. I want to read a quote from
John Preston's book that sort of gives you a description
of the vibe of this party. On the night of
the first party, guests passed down a receiving line where
they were greeted by Maxwell, Betty, and all seven of

(01:15:19):
their children. Some of the guests arrived bearing birthday presents.
The broadcaster David Frost turned up with a five hundred
pound bottle of wine. Unaware of how much it had cost,
Maxwell chef later tipped it into a beef stew. As
guests sipped their drinks, the band of the Cold Stream
Guards marched back and forth across the lawn. Before dinner started,
Robert and Betty made their formal entrance into the marquis

(01:15:40):
to an announcement from the Master of Ceremonies, Ladies and gentlemen,
would you please welcome your host and hostess, Robert and
Elizabeth Maxwell, and a fanfare of Harold trumpetears. Everyone stood
to applaud a lot with a row of medals pinned
to his black tailcoat. Maxwell was wearing a large white
enamel cross on a chain around his neck. This was
the Order of the White Rose of Finland, a decoration

(01:16:02):
normally given to foreign heads of state and recognition of
outstanding civilian or military conduct. Betty Maxwell wore a dress
made of gold embroidered tul over yellow taffeta silk. So
like parties, parties like real rich people parties.

Speaker 3 (01:16:17):
See I missed the boat with World War two. If
I had just been able to murder a couple Germans,
a couple dozen Germans, I could have been on the
road to be being covered in silver taffeta. Yeah, and
having Margaret Thatcher sing my praises.

Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
Yeah, kind of, we'll sing her own praises at your birthday. Yeah,
classic Thatcher. Make it all about her.

Speaker 3 (01:16:38):
The greatest generation though.

Speaker 2 (01:16:40):
Yeah, definitely the greatest generation. There's like a really funny
moment from this where like one of his friends goes,
like during this party kind of like finds his way
walking around like the back of the house outside of
like the areas they're supposed to be partying in, and
notices that, like, well, all the furniture outside of like
the big public areas kind of looks like shit and

(01:17:01):
all of the books on his bookshelf for fake, Like
they're made out of cardboard. They're like fake books. Now,
Preston says, only the books concealing hy stereo system were fake.
I don't know, but this is kind of evidence that
as rich as he was on paper, and this is
the thing, he's worth four point four billion on paper

(01:17:22):
or something like that, he's not actually doing as well
as it seems, right, And nineteen ninety eight is nearer
to the end of his time in the limelight than
the beginning. That year, the same year as this fucking party,
he spends two point six billion dollars buying US publisher McMillan,
and that's a billion dollars more than its own shareholders

(01:17:43):
value it at. Like he kind of as a musk
where he's like, I'll offer you a two point six
billion and they're like, we were not going to ask
for that much, but oh fucking k right. Yeah, he
had to borrow from forty four banks to afford it.
And he does this not because again he's got profitable businesses.
Preston says, this is out of desperation because Murdoch is

(01:18:04):
buying more and more publishers and he's like desperate to win.
He doesn't want Murdoch to get McMillan, so he kind
of endangers his entire empire buying it in order to
beat Rupert Murdoch. And again, all Murdoch will say about
this guy is like, who huh what guy?

Speaker 3 (01:18:23):
That must make him even angrier. I don't know her,
says Rupert Murdoch.

Speaker 2 (01:18:28):
Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway, back
to being evil. In March of nineteen ninety one, he
started making a series of ill advised acquisitions in New
York media. He purchased the New York Daily News, which
was like the oldest daily paper in New York at
the time, but also in disastrous financial condition. There's like
a horrible strike going on. It is not a good bye.

(01:18:51):
It's such a bad buye. The owners pay him sixty
million dollars to take it, and they pay him that
because it's in a lot more debt than that.

Speaker 3 (01:19:02):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
Right, it's such a bad buy.

Speaker 3 (01:19:05):
So they're getting off scott free by paying a different
dude to own it.

Speaker 2 (01:19:08):
Yes, yes, please take this shit and all of its
debts off of our fucking hands.

Speaker 3 (01:19:13):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):
And again his assumption is because in the past. Every
time he's got a paper, he's been able to turn
it around right and make it soup. He's got this skill.
So he sails his yacht, the Lady Gillin, named after
his daughter, into the City harbor to take control of
the paper. He gives us like grand speech on the street,
and like there's all these articles in New York papers
being like the savior of New York media, you know.

(01:19:36):
And there's also a bunch of people who had worked
for him in different papers in the UK, being like
he's actually a giant dick. No one can stand to
work for him. This is not going to end well
for any of you, and it sure as shit doesn't. Right,
So the eighties comes to an end, sadly, I know
we're all still mourning that. And suddenly there's a big
economic pop, right, and interest rates skyrocket and all all

(01:20:00):
of this debt that he had taken on to keep
building this. He's always robbing Peter to pay Paul, like
a certain guy that we all know about right now.
Like he's always in debt to a lot of banks
for all this stuff. And suddenly it gets a lot
more expensive to service that debt. And so in nineteen
ninety one. He has to sell pergam and press in order,

(01:20:22):
and that's his baby, in order to keep everything else afloat.
And that's also the profitable part of his empire. So
he has now sold the golden goose to pay for
the shit that's horribly in debt that he can't make
a profit on. Not a great move. So what do
you do if you're a guy who sucks ass and
hates unions and hates your employees and suddenly you're out

(01:20:44):
of money and you need to keep funding all of
this debt? Where do you go when interest rates are
fucked and you simply can't take any more loans from banks?

Speaker 3 (01:20:55):
Racking my brain, where do you go?

Speaker 2 (01:20:58):
Well, you know where. There's a lot of money in
any given company that's been around this long with a
large workforce.

Speaker 4 (01:21:03):
The pension plan. He raids the pension plan.

Speaker 2 (01:21:05):
He raids the pinch. He steals nearly half a billion
dollars from the pension plan.

Speaker 5 (01:21:09):
Now I'm mad. Now I don't like him, Yeah, oh,
now I don't like him. He destroys so many people's
lives and retirements. He fucking robs this pension plan, right,
and it's not even enough because his debts are well
over a billion dollars. Banks are hounding him constantly. He
starts gambling and London casinos. All he'll do is like

(01:21:30):
gamble and then watch James Bond movies while leading takeout.
And this is kind of his mental state. He's in
this period of collapse. And also right around this time,
it becomes known that he is being investigated for war
crimes in World War Two because he wrote letters to
his wife and talked about him like to journalists about
like again I'm machined gun prisoners. Yeah, and again it's

(01:21:53):
the least bad thing he ever did. But so he's
got that too. He's got all these debts. Empire is
about to collapse. When he set sail on his yacht,
the Lady Gillen on November first, nineteen ninety one. He's
getting letters constantly from different banks being like, hey, this
is overdue. Can you even prove that you're solvent in anymore?

(01:22:15):
Swiss Bank is threatening to go public and it has
told the London police that he's broken a bunch of laws.
So he's in a lot of trouble. And around five
am on November first, I think it's November first, nineteen
ninety one, he falls overboard off the stem of his
yacht as it passes towards Tenerif, and his body is

(01:22:38):
fished out of the ocean about twelve hours later by
a Spanish National Rescue Service helicopter. Nobody knows precisely what happened.
The thing that you will encounter most commonly is that
the Masad had him killed. And I don't see any
reason to believe that. For one thing, he receives a
hero's funeral in Israel, like, attended by the Prime Minister

(01:23:02):
and the Israeli President Shimone Perez is there, right, They
give him like okay, so this is this is what
the Israeli president says at his funeral. Kings and barons
besieged his doorstep. He was a figure of almost mythological stature.
But there are like allegations that basically he tried to
blackmail the Masade to get them to pay him four
hundred million dollars, and it, I don't know, doesn't seem

(01:23:26):
like the kind of move he'd have made. Again, he's
a steal the pension plan guy.

Speaker 3 (01:23:30):
People treat these like spy agencies, as though like they
always have reason to kill anybody at any time. Yes,
that Like there's some they're like a dau Sex makina
that people use for a simple explanation to make themselves
seem smart, where like why would they why?

Speaker 2 (01:23:48):
Why? Like for what they Israel wasn't angry at him.

Speaker 3 (01:23:52):
It's the most annoying thing in the history analysis is
people making this claim, well the mesade Adam, why what
is that? You know?

Speaker 2 (01:24:01):
Again, he was the number one investor over there. He
was extremely popular there. He had destroyed the pensions of
huge numbers of people in the UK. Like, if anyone
wanted to kill him, it's a bunch of them. Yeah,
and he was about to fuck up a lot of
US publishing. But like, yeah, it's just one of those
things where there are three different coroner reports and they
don't agree, and so that'll often get like and none

(01:24:23):
of the coroners could agree. But what the coroners can't
agree on is did he have a heart attack or
did he jump in? And both are he's sixty, he
was in bad health. It's also it's perfectly possible either
he knew that he was fucked and he wanted to
die right or that he had a heart attack because
he was super stressed out in sixty eight and not
in good health, and he fell off his boat.

Speaker 3 (01:24:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:45):
Both of those are just likelier to me than like
the Masade poisoned him with an untraceable poison on his boat,
so it looked like he fell over. Why Like again,
he's being hounded by all of the governments. He knows
he's heading to prison. Maybe he kills himself. Maybe he
has a heart attack. I don't really have trouble bleeding either.
He is initially mourned as like this great figure because

(01:25:07):
all of this hasn't come out yet. But a few
weeks after his death, everything I've told you is published.
That he stole four hundred million pounds from pension funds,
that he there were seven hundred and sixty three million
British pounds missing from his companies. He has described as
the crook of the century by Newsweek magazine.

Speaker 3 (01:25:24):
Wow and not up.

Speaker 2 (01:25:26):
Yeah, maybe he's one of them.

Speaker 3 (01:25:29):
Like things finally caught up with old Bobby Maxwell, murdering
the shared people, no share, destroying scientific publishing. Nah, he's fine,
but stealing pension funds that'll get you, which does suck?

Speaker 2 (01:25:42):
Like that is really bad? Yeah, one of his worst things.

Speaker 3 (01:25:46):
Yeah, no, absolutely no, that made me up until up
until now he was sort of like debonair and air dwell,
you know, yeah, I was.

Speaker 4 (01:25:53):
I was enjoying the story. Now I'm now I'm pissed off.

Speaker 2 (01:25:56):
Now I'm pissed off.

Speaker 3 (01:25:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:57):
And so his sons, who are declared innocent of any
involvement in the conspiracy, maybe they were a part of it,
but I don't have trouble believing that he just didn't
respect his kids enough to tell them what he was doing. Right, Yeah,
of course they have to take over, and they're left
with like four hundred million pounds or so. They've got
to like figure out how to put together. His assets
are sold off, most of like the the what are

(01:26:19):
called the Maxwell pensioners, right, and these are the people
who lost their retirement savings, get half or less of
what they were owed, you know, as a result of
kind of this liquidation process. But Gillan stays comfortable for
a while, you know, a while.

Speaker 3 (01:26:36):
Well, I didn't think. I didn't think I could end
with a lower opinion of Gillan Maxwell. I didn't anticipate
that this.

Speaker 2 (01:26:43):
Is yeah shocking, right.

Speaker 4 (01:26:45):
Yeah, Oh, she's also a criminal nipple baby.

Speaker 2 (01:26:48):
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also didn't really call her
dad being so cool up until age twenty three, because
he's really knocking it out of the park up until.

Speaker 3 (01:26:57):
Age twenty three.

Speaker 2 (01:26:58):
Great first act, like yeah, yeah, it's like one of
those movies that like really falls apart in the second half,
like he could have used more editing. I was really
on board.

Speaker 3 (01:27:10):
Well, it's it's funny how much attracts sort of the
standard you know, the it's a citizen Kane or a
uh yeah, what's his face? From Succession style story where
it's like inspiring in the beginning, all turns wrong, you know,
larger than life, all these insane details. He's present at
every moment in history, like the sort of figure who
you know, if I read a novel about this guy,

(01:27:31):
I wouldn't believe it, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
No, no, no, no, yeah, it is like and again
he did lie about a lot of it unnecessarily. Yeah.
So uh that's uh, that's that's where we are, you know,
that's that's this guy's life. Thanks for sitting and learning
about it.

Speaker 3 (01:27:49):
Incredible, he's what a what a bastard? I'm now behind.

Speaker 2 (01:27:52):
Him, Yeah, yeah, we're now behind him. Well, got any
pluggables to plug. We've kept you here long enough.

Speaker 3 (01:27:59):
I do I uh once again in my podcast is
called factually I do uh do that on YouTube or
ELSEO do video monologues and uh yeah, you can check
out my stand up special Unmedicated on dropout right now.

Speaker 2 (01:28:15):
Yeah. Awesome, Uh well, awesome check out that. Check out
drop out. And you know, if you're going to machine
gun the SS, don't go on to destroy scientific publishing
and then hundreds of millions of dollars in pension funds.
That's my advice to our listeners.

Speaker 3 (01:28:31):
Yeah, and don't tell people you did it so proudly.
Don't be like I committed a war crime.

Speaker 2 (01:28:36):
Yeah, maybe don't destroy your whole life. Competing with Rupert
Murdoch and being a dick is such a weird way
to blow your life up. Oh, man, so funny.

Speaker 3 (01:28:49):
Competing in an asshole contest with Rupert Murdoch not a
way to.

Speaker 2 (01:28:52):
Go and not even being noticed. Man was like, it is.
I I don't want to ever give it to Rupert,
But there's some Some of the great hater moments are
just Rupert being like, care we talking about all right?
Well that's the episode everybody good night and good luck.

Speaker 3 (01:29:10):
Thank you so much for having me. This is awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:29:12):
Thank you, Adam really appreciate you. Can't wait to get
these episodes out and we're done, goodbye.

Speaker 1 (01:29:20):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:29:33):
Behind the Bastards is now.

Speaker 1 (01:29:34):
Available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe
to our channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the
Bastards