aggressive, thirty-year-old wife, whom he had met at Oxford and whose assertions of independence both before and since their wedding in 1984 had not endeared her to Robert. ‘What shall I call you?’ she had coldly asked Dick Cowley, the helicopter pilot, on first meeting. ‘You can call me Captain,’ he replied. Robert Maxwell was never able to establish that advantage over a woman he regarded as spoilt and foolish. For his staff, the defining moment of Pandora’s attitude towards her father-in-law had occurred one day when the Gulfstream was parked on the tarmac at Le Bourget airport outside Paris. Maxwell was fuming because Kevin and his wife were late for take-off. ‘Fuck them! Let’s go!’ he shouted eventually, sending Terry Gilmour, the chief steward, to deposit their passports at immigration. At that moment the couple arrived, only to be tongue-lashed by a furious Maxwell. To his astonishment, Pandora then turned on him and snarled, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ Silenced, Maxwell stared out of the window until touch-down in London. The relationship worsened as the financial crisis grew, with the helicopter being frequently dispatched to collect Kevin from Hailey, his Oxfordshire country home near Wallingford. Unintimidated, Pandora once mockingly threatened to ‘use a gun [on her father-in-law] if you disturb our life again’. Her outbursts won only temporary respite. Like most bullies, Maxwell retreated when challenged but soon resumed his egotistical behaviour, demanding total obedience to his needs.
By the autumn of 1990, Kevin had abandoned his New York residence and was commuting from London on the 9.30 a.m. Concorde to New York, cramming up to twenty-one meetings into one day before sleeping on the overnight British Airways 747 flight home, with a helicopter hop to Maxwell House at 6.30 in the morning. During that year, his use of conventional airlines within Europe had declined. Under increasing pressure, he flew on chartered jets, accompanied by Carolyn Barwell, his lively assistant – to Zurich for lunch, to Hamburg for dinner, or on one occasion overnight to see his father in Istanbul, returning the following day to London. He had also more or less abandoned watching his own Oxford United football club on Saturdays or playing with his children, Tilly, Teddy and Chloe. His regular cultural outings organized by Pandora – to the theatre, Covent Garden or the Festival Hall, followed by dinner in London’s fashionable restaurants – also tended increasingly to be cancelled, prompting frequent absences from their chaotic home in Jubilee Place, Chelsea. Despite Pandora’s shrill complaints about the working hours her father-in-law required from Kevin, she enjoyed the perks of Maxwell’s fortune. Even her family shared the benefits. John Warnford-Davis, her father employed by Maxwell, used the helicopter to avoid the traffic to Newmarket, while her brother Darryll, employed at brokers Astaire and Partners, regularly approached Kevin with ‘business propositions’ in return for monitoring and buying MCC shares.
Initially, Kevin had not complained about the pressure. No other man of his age in London could helicopter from the city centre to land alongside Concorde, receiving special dispensation from customs and passport control. Like his father, he revelled in the exercise of power, seeking acceptance from the establishment as befitted an old boy of Marlborough College and a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford. He even used a barber at the Savoy, a custom Robert Maxwell had adopted more than forty years earlier. He had not complained when his summer holidays in 1990 had been forsaken. While his friends were relaxing in expensive resorts, his August days had been filled by endless meetings with bankers, lawyers, accountants, analysts and staff. His most frequent visitors were Colin Emson, the managing director of Robert Fraser, a merchant bank chaired by Lord Rippon, an independent director of MCC; Neil Taberner, a senior partner of Coopers, the empire’s accountants; Scott Marden and Andrew Capitman of Bankers Trust; Michael von Clemm of Merrill Lynch, a friend anxious to win some of the business; Sir Michael Richardson of Smith New Court, MCC’s stockbrokers, and reputedly close to the prime minister; and Thomas Christofferson of Morgan Stanley. These men were unified by more than their financial profession and their proximity to the Maxwells. Individually, each was contributing to the Maxwells’ appearance of probity and financial security.
Another group of visitors, his employees, members of the inner sanctum, the heart of the operation, were probably more important. By the end of September 1990, to help him to cope with the financial crisis, they were being summoned by Kevin to daily meetings. All were men and women of unquestioning obedience and unremarkable technical competence, closely associated with the empire’s finances. The overriding criteria for their employment were their loyalty and their readiness to become beholden to their employer in return for their over-generous salaries. Among them were Deborah Maxwell, a thirty-three-year-old dark-haired lawyer who was not related to her employer, although outsiders sometimes mistakenly believed there was a connection; Mark Tanzer, a ‘poor man’s Peter Jay’; Robert Bunn, forty-two years old, an accountant and RMG’s finance director, of whom Maxwell irreverently joked, ‘I could order him to rob the Midland Bank!’; Basil Brookes, the acting finance director recruited from Coopers; and Albert Fuller, the head of the treasury.
As the crisis deepened, Kevin included in those meetings Michael Stoney, an ambitious accountant, and Jean-Pierre Anselmini, a forty-eight-year-old Frenchman and former director of Crédit Lyonnais, who in 1988 had helped to organize the $3 billion Jumbo Loan to the Maxwells and had been flattered by the subsequent invitation to join MCC as deputy chairman. Although blessed in Maxwell’s propaganda as ‘brilliant’, Anselmini was the fullest embodiment of his state-owned bank’s naivety. ‘The bank which could never say “no”’ had lent Maxwell $1.3 billion, its accumulated bad debts now totalling over £20 billion. For the Frenchman, wilfully ignorant of Maxwell’s past, his new employer was ‘a fairy tale everyone needed to believe in’, especially because he proclaimed himself a socialist while offering an entrée into the giddy world of the media. ‘I wanted to believe in Maxwell’s success,’ Anselmini later confessed. He was hypnotized by Maxwell’s ‘star quality, and I loved the Maxwell family’. That same warmth was reflected by Sam Pisar, Maxwell’s French lawyer and business representative engaged in deals in Russia and Israel and had become a close confidante: ‘We needed myths and heroes in those dark times.’
One of the recent casualties of that trusted group was Ron Woods, a director of MCC whom Maxwell had inherited as a tax consultant (just as he had inherited the deputy managing director Richard Baker) on his spectacular relaunch into business in 1980 when he bought the British Printing Corporation. The forty-seven-year-old from the Rhondda Valley fell under Maxwell’s spell and came to regard him with a mixture of awe and fear as a ‘hero and father-figure’. To his delight, Woods had discovered that his new employer was hyper-sensitive about taxation and wished him to deploy his skill to minimize the tax liabilities on the empire’s purchases, take-overs and disposals. Little pleased Woods more than to work on his computer to produce an innovative tax scheme. The empire, he knew, was ‘tax-driven’ and he more than anyone understood its complexity. According to a senior company auditor, ‘Only Woods could explain why it was so complex.’ The challenge, Woods would attest, was ‘very exciting’. It was also legal and ethical. There was no need to resort to the criminal evasion of taxes. Maxwell’s empire was ultimately owned in Liechtenstein, so few taxes were unavoidable and they could be neutralized if, by careful anticipation, MCC and the 400 private companies accumulated the appropriate debts and losses. When he bought Macmillan, $1.8 billion of the $2.6 billion purchase price was charged to Macmillan itself so that the interest charges could be offset against the profits, thereby avoiding all taxation. Indeed, Maxwell’s only serious liability was advance corporation tax (ACT) on dividends. ‘I don’t want to pay taxes,’ he had told Bill Harry, his American tax adviser, ‘but I don’t want to go to prison either.’ This was a reference to the fate of Leona Helmsley, recently jailed in New York for tax evasion, a poignant moment for Maxwell, who regularly occupied the presidential suite in her Manhattan hotel.
Although with hindsight Woods would regret his own simplicity, he had never suspected his employer, even though he personally negotiated with the two lawyers responsible for the Liechtenstein trusts: Dr Werner Rechsteiner in Zurich and Dr Walter Keicher in Vaduz, the principality’s capital. With awe, Woods retold Maxwell’s fanciful story of how, dressed in a British army uniform, he had met Keicher’s father in Zurich all those years before and had had the savvy to lay the foundations of his empire. The Liechtenstein Anstalts, the impenetrable trusts, Woods knew, did not contain any cash, only shares. Maxwell’s claim in 1988 at the time of the launch of his authorized biography