Original subtitles

♪♪

♪♪

-All right. Good morning, everybody!

And welcome back to "True Crime Loser."

I hope you're doing well.

♪♪

So I have an exciting new update

regarding the Ghislaine Maxwell case.

Her trial is right around the corner,

and it's time to find out

what's going to happen to old Ghislaine.

♪♪

This is a sinister-looking place.

This is where she's been,

out in Brooklyn, for the past year.

[ Indistinct shouting in distance ]

Listen to it. You can hear it --

people screaming and clapping and moving around.

Not where you want to be.

Ghislaine went from private jets all over the world,

private islands hanging out with royalty, academics, scientists.

Now she probably feels very alone.

♪♪

50 years this family has been in a scandal.

First, the dad, then it's the brothers,

and now here we are,

Ghislaine is on the chopping block.

Stay tuned.

♪♪

[ Dog barking in distance ]

[ Tape fast-forwarding ]

-Like I said, it's always sad when you lose a parent,

but you have to go on.

[ Tape stops, fast-forwarding ]

♪♪

[ Tape stops, clicks ]

-Married -- Happily married for 42 years.

[ Tape fast-forwarding ]

We have seven children.

We have seven children.

We're very proud of them.

We worship them. We're very proud.

♪♪

[ Tape fast-forwarding ]

I still have ambitions which I intend,

with God's help -- [ Tape rewinds ]

...with God's help, to fulfill.

[ Machinery whirring ]

[ Reel clicking ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-It's nearly 6:00 on Sunday, the 3rd of November, 1991.

And this is the last known image of Robert Maxwell --

alive.

♪♪

He's on the yacht named after his daughter,

the Lady Ghislaine.

♪♪

Sailing off the Canary Islands,

he's filmed relaxing by his staff.

♪♪

But across his vast media empire, the mood is different.

[ Line ringing ]

Something is worrying his senior executives,

which Maxwell knows...

[ Tape recorder clicks ]

...because he's secretly bugging their phones.

[ Line ringing ]

[ Line clicks ]

♪♪

-These recordings have never been made public.

They've been revoiced to protect identities.

[ Line ringing, clicks ]

♪♪

-What happens to Robert Maxwell over the next 48 hours

send shock waves around the world

And changes the destiny of his family forever.

♪♪

-I mean, what drives you on? Why did you do this?

[ Door opens ] Sorry.

-Jesus. No, that's unwelcome visitor.

Fuck off.

♪♪

-In the early hours of this morning,

a victorious Robert Maxwell emerged

from Reed International's London headquarters

after clinching the multimillion pound takeover deal.

♪♪

At last, he'd achieved his lifelong ambition

to own a Fleet Street newspaper, and he went straight

to the Mirroroffices to claim his prize.

-First thing that happens is, he calls all the executives

into the main executive restaurant at The Mirror,

saying, "I am your saviour. I'm a wonderful person."

He promised everything.

But that morning that Maxwell arrived,

we had none of us any idea

the way the whole thing was going to be shaken up.

-Lean this way. -Thank you.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

-I keep on repeating --

I'll say it for the last time.

I'm not on some ego trip.

-Could you look this way? -[ Laughs ]

-To be honest, I'd never met a man with a bigger ego.

But who could blame him?

A self-made millionaire, a brilliant businessman,

a former member of Parliament.

And to top it all, a war hero.

♪♪

If he moved into a room, the crowds parted like the sea.

He was extraordinary.

I mean, you would be on your toes all the time,

wondering what was going to come next

and from what direction it was going to come to.

♪♪

-Again, the subtitle is missing.

-It's been mislaid, I'm told.

-Bang bang. -I promise it, sir.

-Up to now, sales have been pretty dismal.

And he had his sights set on our greatest rival.

-[ Whistles ]

Could you come a little bit closer, please?

I am committed to getting The Mirroron top of The Sun.

I have set myself a target of two years to achieve the goal.

[ Applause ]

-We were all right behind him. We wanted to --

We wanted to win as much as he did, obviously.

And there was a great deal of enthusiasm for things

that he wanted to do.

♪♪

The Sunwas the biggest selling tabloid.

It was owned by Rupert Murdoch,

and Maxwell and Murdoch were sworn enemies.

-Fleet Street is caught up in its first all-out,

no-holds-barred circulation battle since the 1970s.

The proprietors of The Sun and Daily Mirrorare in sudden

and fierce competition for readers.

♪♪

-I don't know that I relish war,

but the public likes to see these fights,

and let's see how it ends.

♪♪

I intend to beat Mr. Murdoch fair and square

in the market-place.

-I mean, yesterday,

Mr. Maxwell called me a mouth-eating kangaroo.

Well, uh... [ Laughter ]

Never got quite to that stage.

♪♪

-He could see how it could be a big commercial success.

And he did make it a big commercial success,

and it was making a lot of money for him.

And his way of doing things was very different.

-Everybody who works in circulation

will have it as his or her duty --

Now, I'm astonished to see no woman at all,

by the way. Is that so?

-Yes, that is so, at this branch.

-Well, I do promise you that I will want to see women

recruited into this profession.

Why are there no women in this?

-Well, I think one of the basic problems is

that the number of occasions when a chap has to get out

early in the morning and lug bundles of papers about

to make good shortages, and it's a matter

of physical strength, more than anything else. And --

-Many women have been kept out of interesting jobs

on this notion, that they can't lift a bundle.

When did you last lift large quantities of bundles?

-[ Clears throat ]

-Before I went to The Sunday Mirror,

I'd worked for Rupert Murdoch,

and he used to ask me what it was like to work for Rupert.

And his whole life was a competition with Rupert.

-It's tiring and tough on the toil to the top.

But some women have already climbed aboard

the high-speed elevator to the executive floor.

Eve Pollard took command of The Sunday Mirror,

and she's got a masterful way with a meeting full of men.

-We're waiting for Tony Frost.

Thanks.

[ Telephone clicks ]

-You want to clear the door? -Yeah.

♪♪

It was certainly a brave decision to hire a woman.

It was my first newspaper editorship,

and editing the newspaper

is about the most fun you can have.

And he did not make my life difficult.

I think, being a woman, I got away with

slightly more than the men did

because it wasn't a challenge to his masculinity.

♪♪

It was his whole dream about being a newspaper publisher.

There was the image, you know, Rolls-Royces everywhere,

champagne at receptions, big events that he would have.

And he liked the part of king, Bob.

But of course, he was clever.

I mean, there's no doubt about it.

And of course, he was a crook, but I didn't know that then.

I mean, he was quite smart. He was interested in politics.

And he lived in Headington Hall, this great house in Oxford.

And it was a beautiful big old house.

Apparently, it belonged to the Council,

and he leased it.

never occurred to me to think that it was owned

by Oxford Town Council

and that he was just paying rental on it.

I just thought, "Well, obviously

done terribly well with the papers.

♪♪

It was sort of a mini Hollywood through Oxford.

It was not like a British family.

I mean, aristocrats of those times

lived in sort of houses,

slightly falling apart with torn sofas and loads of dogs.

That was not the life of Bob Maxwell.

-Hey! -♪ Happy birthday to you ♪

♪ Happy birthday to you ♪

-When you go to Headington Hall, at the root of it,

there is Bob's wife, Betty, and there are the children.

And they were there. I mean, Bob often, you know,

barely went home on the weekend

or went home for, you know, an hour or two

or half a day, and then would come back

to The Sunday Mirror on a Saturday night.

You think he'd stay in that lovely house with his children.

And that would have been quite hard sometimes.

I mean, you want your father to be this lovely, cosy father,

to love you unconditionally.

And also, he'd had a family where, you know,

children had died.

One child was in a car crash.

I mean, they'd had a lot of tragedy in that family,

and yet they kept going,

and the children all were well-educated,

obviously went to school and did well because Betty helped them.

And Bob, obviously, sort of rather insisted on it.

♪♪

I mean, I'm sure he loved his children.

I mean, I saw him be very fond of Ian and Kevin and Ghislaine.

♪♪

But it's the sort of love that can grab you by the throat

as well as by the heart.

And you never knew which way it would go.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

[ Line ringing ]

[ Line picks up ]

[ Line clicks ]

♪♪

-It's three days since Maxwell left London

and still his executives can't reach him.

[ Line ringing ]

[ Line clicks ]

♪♪

[ Tape recorder clicks ]

♪♪

-At around 11:00,

the Lady Ghislaineis 10 miles off the coast of Tenerife.

♪♪

The sea is flat calm.

♪♪

In the middle of the night,

Maxwell calls the crew, complaining about the heat.

♪♪

♪♪

The next morning, staff go to wake him up.

♪♪

But the cabin is empty, and the captain is concerned.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-Robert Maxwell has disappeared.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-Global communications and the information industry

is the world's most rapidly growing industry

because it supplies a universal need -- information.

The company is

Maxwell Communication Corporation.

♪♪

-Bizarrely, I was roped in from the Civil Service on secondment.

I had a call from my personnel department,

and the department said,

"Would you like to work for old Maxwell?"

And I couldn't believe -- "Rob?

Do you mean Robert Maxwell, the megalomania tycoon?

There must be some other."

"No, no, yeah, that one." "Oh."

-One name has become synonymous with this fast-paced industry.

One man and the company he founded

has done more than any other

to harness the communications revolution.

The man is Robert Maxwell.

♪♪

-When I arrived, Maxwell was trying to build

one of the world's biggest media empires.

But despite his success, he was so obsessed with Rupert Murdoch.

♪♪

Murdoch was running the most successful media empire

in the world at the time --

Sky TV, newspapers across the globe.

-Look at Mr. Murdoch's achievements and look at mine.

Both of us are candidates for one of the top positions

as a media company of the world,

one of the 10 slots.

He's doing very well. I'm not doing too badly.

The difference between him and me is

that he owes the banks $6 billion.

The banks owe me $1 billion.

People prefer the Maxwell version

to that of Murdoch.

♪♪

-He always saw Murdoch as the sort of alter ego, almost.

I mean, very, very different people.

But Murdoch was the success he wanted to have.

♪♪

-Competing with Murdoch,

Maxwell started buying up dozens of companies

in all sorts of different fields.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

♪♪

-[ Indistinct shouting ]

♪♪

-Get five and a half!

♪♪

-Cash! 88, 90, cash!

♪♪

♪♪

-And I believe you're -- you're interested

in purchasing various concerns in Bulgaria at the moment.

-That's right. -I have just announced

in Berlin today that I have bought

a major publishing company.

I now will help run two newspapers,

a daily newspaper in Berlin,

an evening paper, and a woman's magazine --

a real empire.

We already have one in Bulgaria and Hungary.

Hope to open a newspaper in the Soviet Union.

We are on the move.

-It must be quite a shopping list you go out

with in the morning when you leave home, isn't it?

"Buy three newspapers and a woman's magazine."

[ Laughter ]

-So, Maxwell had been buying all of these companies,

trying to compete with Murdoch,

but what shocked me was the absolute chaos

of his own office.

Complete disorganisation. There was no organisation.

It was anarchy.

-What are we now talking about?

This is the village. -This is --

No, this is a -- this is a piece of paper

which I'm having written,

by the Public Affairs Department,

which is the history of the company.

-It wasn't a normal corporation with layers of delegation

and boards of management. They were on paper.

But as far as he was concerned,

he didn't want people making decisions unless he made them.

Really, this is the biggest

one-man business you could imagine.

-I must see it again. -You will see it again.

-Nothing is dealt with unless I've seen it.

-And you're gonna see it again. -Right.

-Well, you've agreed the heads of agreement.

So now it's converting it into --

-No. You'd better show them to me again.

What time is this meeting? -2:00.

-Just up to instruct them. It's 3:00.

-3:00. -You'd better get up

on the phone and tell them so, not to try.

Saying quite different.

Get up on the phone.

-So his management team got scared of making decisions

about anything.

I mean, I remember one occasion,

somebody quite senior at Mirror Group

came to me wanting a decision on what colour

to paint the ladies loo on the fifth floor.

I said, "Ken, are you taking the piss?"

He said, "No, no, no.

I must have the publisher's decision on this matter.

Blah, blah, blah," and I said, "Paint them yellow."

Paint them yellow. Any problems, say I said

paint them yellow."

-Like if there's someone, like...

the great Mr. Halloran there. -The great Mr. Halloran.

Come on. Put your jacket on.

Yes, you're in the -- you're in the frame.

-It's going to be a two-shot now.

-Maxwell was also obsessed

with controlling his image and realised

that the best way of achieving that

was to have his own camera crew follow him around.

-Consider taking a shot. -I would --

I think we'll take you coming out of the front door

of this building. -Yeah, best one.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I can truly say

that we have a very exciting future.

We are well on the way to achieving our aim

to become one of the 10 global communication

and information companies in the world.

-May I stop you there? I'm sorry.

If you say, "Well, ladies and gentlemen..."

-Nine forty. -...it may sound

slightly inappropriate. Could I ask you to do it

just, "We have a very excit--

Well, we have a very exciting future"?

Would you mind? -Why?

-It sounded -- If you have the "well,"

if it was the "ladies and gentlemen,"

it would sound a little bit theatrical,

as if you're sort of on a stage, as it were.

You see what I mean?

If I could do it the other way, would you object?

-Well, we have a very exciting future.

-If you wouldn't mind, sir... -No.

-Let me ask you just to do...

-Let's get on with it, because these lights are really...

-Okay?

-Well, we have a very exciting --

[ Clears throat, coughs ]

Go back. -Go back to...

-Yeah. That's it.

-I'd like if you would do one more piece for me,

and that was the piece earlier, from...

[ Speaking indistinctly ]

-No, I don't want to do it anymore.

We'll leave it at that. I'm bushed.

Thank you. Goodbye.

[ Static ]

♪♪

-He didn't really trust anyone,

so as the Empire grew, more and more

he brought his sons, Kevin and Ian,

into the business, the upper echelon.

-Ian and Kevin Maxwell,

joint managing directors of Maxwell Communications.

-I look forward to working with my colleagues

and reaping the benefits of bringing together

the excellent acquisitions made in the last year or two,

together with the original publishing, communication,

and information businesses of Maxwell Communication.

-We recognise that the largest single market,

which will be of immediate opportunity

to our group, will be Europe.

-Ian I knew quite well, especially in the early days

and liked a lot. Very charming, very erudite.

Kevin I knew much less well

and always found rather frosty and remote.

Ghislaine was always floating in and out of the business,

so she would crop up from time to time in various capacities.

Often she'd be filling in for him at receptions,

again as his representative,

so we were only really on nodding terms.

♪♪

-They kept saying to me when Ghislaine left Oxford,

could I hire her.

And I said, "Bob, I'm running a newspaper,

and I don't think Ghislaine wants to be a journalist."

She was very beautiful when she was young,

and she was clever.

And it's always said that she was his favourite child.

-Ghislaine used to flit around the building.

I never forget, she would sit on the corner of my desk.

She had beautiful long legs. She was very glamourous.

And I remember one day

Maxwell wanted someone to work on the annual report,

and I was told to sit in his office in a cupboard.

And it was a cupboard. The doors opened

but had a chair and a computer, and I just sat there.

He was at his desk, and my back was to him the whole time.

So obviously I heard everything.

All the phone calls -- He had many phone calls,

of course, and he never, ever put the phone to his ear.

He's always on loudspeaker

because he was -- just couldn't be bothered

to hold the phone to his ear, so you heard everything.

-Okay, well, I'm in the study, at the moment, upstairs.

I'll be in touch with you. -Okay.

-But I was just there. He just forgot I was there.

Reception rang through and said, "Ghislaine, Mr. Maxwell."

And he says, "Put her on."

So the next thing I hear is, "Miaow."

And he went, "Miaow, miaow."

And she went, "Miaow."

And he was going, "Miaow, miaow."

And then this went on for, I don't know, about 10 "miaows."

And then he suddenly said, "What are you doing?"

and she said, "Nothing."

And I thought, "Yeah, that's about right."

He definitely had a different relationship

with Ghislaine, I think, than he had with the others.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-The search for Maxwell is three hours old.

And there's still no sign of him.

[ Line ringing ]

In London, his inner circle of executives

has heard he's missing.

[ Line ringing, clicks ]

♪♪

[ Helicopter blades whirring ]

♪♪

-With the search now involving boats and helicopters,

news is leaking out.

And journalists are calling the Lady Ghislaine.

[ Line rings, clicks ]

[ Line clicks ]

♪♪

[ Water splashing ]

[ Line ringing, clicks ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-I celebrate my 65th birthday.

We wish to make a major event.

♪♪

Inviting 5,000 people.

One dinner -- three dinners, two lunches.

Politicians, civil servants, ministers, businessmen.

♪♪

We want to really give people the feel

that this is a worldwide communications

family business.

♪♪

-I remember having a whole hour in my lunchtime to buy the dress

because I didn't have that sort of a dress,

didn't go to those things.

And I remember everybody but everybody you could think of

was there -- you know, politicians, bankers,

lawyers, people from TV, celebrities.

And it was packed.

♪♪

-His 65th birthday

was the most astonishing display of his success.

♪♪

I think there were 13 Lords there,

the former head of the Bank of England,

judges, lawyers, Harold Wilson,

all the old Labour leaders and everything.

♪♪

Maxwell was desperate to be accepted by the establishment,

and he loved it, of course.

[ Fanfare plays ]

[ Applause ]

-Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome our host,

Robert Maxwell.

[ Applause ]

-Everyone was believing that he was a renaissance man,

and I was asked to write a book about the truth.

And the point about Maxwell was that he was a unique man.

There's no getting away from it.

I mean, he was not just a polymath

in the sense of a multi-linguist and had a lot of interests

and was very intelligent and everything.

But he had a presence. He had a way of operating,

which was quite unique in London at the time.

[ Helicopter blades whirring ]

♪♪

I wanted to find out who Maxwell really was

and how he'd built such an empire.

♪♪

You know, Maxwell was keen to let everyone know

he was a decorated war hero.

But his life in postwar Berlin is where things got very shady.

He runs a very, very lucrative black market operation,

buying and selling cigarettes and nylons and all chewing gum,

food, everything.

He is the heart of taking goods from zone to zone

and putting the cash in his pockets.

♪♪

And Maxwell was someone who wants power,

who wants influence, who wants wealth,

who wants to change the world.

He goes across to the Russians, declares himself,

gets on very well with them,

and establishes good connections.

He becomes a KGB agent.

♪♪

-Maxwell was a special person. He was received in our spheres.

And now a balance, it was cold

and useful, efficient relationship.

So that meant that a foreigner

can be useful to us as a person

who would have an access to some information,

who would willingly or unwillingly share it with us.

♪♪

-At the same time, he presents himself to MI6,

and he says that he's established amazing connections

with leading scientists all over the world.

Unbelievably, what he really wanted

was MI6 to finance him

to start a publishing company.

-It was obvious that he'd been doing odd things

for MI6 in Germany already.

And he suggested that we should subsidise him

to buy a book business.

I don't know of any other case --

I was certainly never involved in any other case of MI6

buying a business for anybody.

♪♪

-He's both working for British intelligence

and Russian intelligence.

No loyalties other than to himself.

♪♪

After all this digging,

it was finally time to start writing my book.

♪♪

But of course, Maxwell knew exactly what I was doing,

and he did two things.

First of all, he hired several private investigators,

not only follow me but, extraordinarily,

set up secretly some sort of electronic device

at the bottom of my garden, in my home in North London

and be able to read what I was writing as I was typing it up.

And secondly, he commissioned his own book,

with the flattering hagiography.

-Why don't you quote Goldman Sachs when it says,

"If only all other British businessmen

were like Mr. Robert Maxwell"?

It's the best credit that you can get.

♪♪

-Well, I had no doubt, as I got towards

the end of the book,

that Maxwell tried to prevent it being published.

And so I persuaded the publishers,

without much trouble, that we should print it

out of England and import in into England

as a gardening book.

So it would say something like "Flowers of Britain"

or "Flowers of China" on the packaging

so that his attempts to steal it, intercept it

at the ports would be unsuccessful.

-Publishers have for years been after me,

asking me to authorise or write my own biography.

I've always refused.

In the end, one of those publishers

decided to hire somebody

who did a hatchet job on me, Mr. Bower.

Since I have to protect my reputation,

I'm suing these people for libel,

and any bookseller who handles the book

is in danger of having to pay huge damages.

-Then came the avalanche.

Maxwell issued writs like confetti.

-This week, Bower got what may prove to be

just the first writ.

-They were not only writs against me and the publishers

but writs against all the bookshops

and also writs against the distributors of books.

And like a pack of cards, they all collapsed.

The establishment was on Maxwell's side.

He used terrorist tactics to suppress the truth,

suppressed the book, and he won.

♪♪

♪♪

[ Telephone ringing ]

♪♪

♪♪

-It's now 5 hours since Maxwell was reported missing,

and news is spreading.

-The billionaire publisher of The Daily Mirror,

Robert Maxwell, has been reported missing

from his motor yacht off the Canary Islands.

-Robert Maxwell was last spoken to at 4:45 this morning

aboard his luxury yacht on which he was taking a few days off.

♪♪

-Across Maxwell's empire, panic is starting to take hold.

[ Telephone ringing ]

-The first hint that something was seriously wrong

came from the stock exchange,

where this afternoon, trading was suspended

in Mr. Maxwell's companies at their request.

It was a statement from the Mirror Group,

which first revealed that the company chairman

was missing at sea

and that a full search was under way.

-A sea and air search began

after three further extensive searches of the ship

found no trace of Mr. Maxwell.

Mr. Maxwell's family

were immediately informed of the search.

Weather conditions for the search

were reported to be good.

♪♪

[ Telephone ringing ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-America was everything to him.

I think that he loved power in America

and he wanted to be a captain of industry here.

He liked the idea of owning New York

'cause Murdoch was actually here in America

most of the time, too.

♪♪

-Robert Maxwell, the new owner of The Daily News,

started printing presses today after paying over $60 million

for the iconic New York paper.

Oh, The Daily News is one of those trophies of New York

where if you're gonna be part of the tradition

of Manhattan and New York City,

owning a newspaper company is a big deal.

And he was thought of as the white knight

for saving The Daily News.

-Thank you.

Lots of luck, Mr. Maxwell. -Thank you.

-But, you know, he was his best PR guy,

and he didn't trust anyone else, really.

So I was learning from him how to do it.

He was kind of brilliant at it.

♪♪

-He was an expert in something called soft power.

Soft power is a way of building trust.

When you meet somebody and face to face,

you build trust.

It's the idea that when people connect,

you have the right conversations with them,

that you are breaking bread with them

and you're toasting properly

and you're connecting with people,

because people care about the soft power

and the emotional stuff

more than they care about the other things.

♪♪

When we would do benefits and events,

we would spend hours working on the seating charts,

because he was a master at understanding

how soft power works

and how you should connect, how you should participate,

how you need to wear the costume

that's gonna be the biggest costume ever at a costume party,

like he did at the Malcolm Forbes event.

He knew how to do that. He knew those kinds of things.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

And using anger and happiness and sadness to manipulate

is one of the things he was a master at.

♪♪

[ Horn honking, siren wailing ]

-I met Ghislaine in one of the hottest nightclubs of the time

with a cluster of very bright,

super-achieving young Brits living in New York.

She was effervescent,

hilariously funny, self-deprecating,

and had a great line of dirty jokes.

She was a superb networker for her father.

She was there to kind of help him

navigate the power structures in New York.

And she's naturally gregarious,

so she didn't seem to have a particular job description,

but she was her father's daughter,

his gal on the ground,

name-dropping Henry Kissinger and various names,

people that she was hanging out with.

So it just seemed, you know,

the inexorable rise of Ghislaine Maxwell was happening.

♪♪

♪♪

[ Bell ringing ]

♪♪

-Although recessions have no official definition,

few doubt that the economy is now in a deep one.

The arguments are about how long it will last.

-This is a deep recession, which if it is not corrected,

will head towards a slump.

-This is a vote of no confidence in the British economy.

Profits are falling and prospects are grim.

♪♪

♪♪

-We had a long-term relationship with Maxwell.

We were his main bankers,

and he would pick up the phone

and expect us to jump and lend him money.

There was knowledge

that actually there were a few liquidity problems.

He didn't have the cash to run the business.

And if you haven't got the cash to run the business,

you had to go to the banks,

and the banks would give you the money,

provided the business is sound.

We felt with Maxwell Communication Corporation

that was a lot of good businesses,

but he paid too much for it.

And there was a recession at that time,

and it became very difficult to run it on a day-to-day basis.

And Robert acknowledged that.

His comment was that he had plenty of money,

but it wasn't cash.

It was in assets which he was selling.

-You buyers or sellers?

All off.

♪♪

♪♪

-We were in an era where it was go, go, go, go, go,

and then all of a sudden it wasn't.

So everything was leveraged,

so he had to, like, cut back.

And cutting back,

especially when it was dubious to begin with, was really hard.

-So, I don't want to sell us cheap,

so, and I want you to dig deep.

That's what we're going to talk about.

Bye.

-One of the attributes of Maxwell

was to exude confidence, even if he didn't have it,

and to even if he was struggling not to look like it.

And he didn't, and so he felt that,

you know, if you didn't want to show panic,

you didn't want to show fear,

you didn't want to give off the scent

that something was wrong.

♪♪

So what does he do? He keeps building his empire.

Buy, buy, buy.

♪♪

♪♪

-I met Maxwell when he came to Jerusalem.

I was interested in making a film about him

because Maxwell was an intriguing character to me.

And I was an Oscar-nominated director,

and that's the kind of man he would want to work with.

I was invited to his suite at the King David Hotel,

which is a very famous hotel in Jerusalem, for brunch.

He asked me, "Are you going to record this?"

And I took out a small tape machine and pressed record.

♪♪

He started by telling me where he came from.

He told me Robert Maxwell wasn't even his real name.

♪♪

-My surname was Hoch, H-O-C-H.

I was born in a small village in Carpathia, Ruthenia,

which is the eastern part of Czechoslovakia.

A very primitive village. I was one of seven children.

My parents were poor farm workers.

Was a Jewish family.

♪♪

Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia

resulted in my joining the underground.

-I was eventually captured.

I managed to escape, and after the collapse of France,

I landed in Britain in September 1940

with a rifle in my hand to help carry on the fight.

At the end of the war,

I discovered the fate of my parents

and my sisters and brothers, relatives and neighbours.

♪♪

-He told me that his family was wiped out during the Holocaust.

♪♪

The interview went well,

and we agreed to meet at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

They try to name every community

that was wiped out during the Holocaust.

And I wanted to take him there.

He was quite taken by it.

-There, at the bottom of this obelisk,

are named towns and communities from Carpathian Ruthenia,

where I come from.

And at the bottom, the shtetl Solotvina.

Some years ago, I visited it with my wife

to discover that not a single Jew was left in Solotvina.

It's as if we'd never been.

-And we got to the end, and I was satisfied,

but still lacking something.

And I just didn't have the heart from him whom I wanted,

any kind of open emotion.

And I asked him if he would just walk towards the wall

where his village was inscribed

and just touch it to touch the village for me.

And he did, and then we did another take.

And when he got there, he broke.

-I don't know what went through their mind

as they realised that they have been tricked into a gas chamber,

many of them.

But one thing that helped is that they will not be forgotten.

And this memorial in Jerusalem proves that.

♪♪

-I saw the change in him. He drew inward.

There were no other words, nothing exchanged.

I think that opened up

some crack in the armour.

♪♪

Having gone through what he went through,

to have your family wiped out,

there go your roots.

It's scarring.

It's baggage you never lose.

♪♪

And I didn't see him again until the night of the event,

"Yad Veshem," that was at the New York Hilton.

And when the film ran,

and when it finished, and I knew it had hit home.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

And then he went from there...

directly to his yacht, I believe.

I don't think he was ever public again.

♪♪

-I believe I was one of the last people to see him alive.

♪♪

♪♪

-Now back to tonight's main news,

the disappearance of the publisher Robert Maxwell.

Mr. Maxwell is feared lost overboard

from his yacht off the Canaries.

Within the last few minutes,

rescue services have reported finding a body.

[ Telephone rings ]

♪♪

♪♪

[ Indistinct radio chatter ]

[ Helicopter blades whirring ]

-Maxwell's body is finally found by a fishing boat

20 miles south of Gran Canaria.

♪♪

[ Telephone rings ]

♪♪

-The body of my husband was found

near Los Cristianos islands,

and it was taken to Las Palmas.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

-It's very sad news for me and my brother,

for my mother and our five brothers and sisters.

This paper has lost its publisher

and its chairman and its saviour.

♪♪

-But as his body is taken for postmortem...

[ Telephone rings ]

...the truth about Robert Maxwell

is about to be revealed

and the full scale of his crimes.

♪♪

[ Sighs ]

♪♪

-Tonight, a police van pulled out of Maxwell headquarters.

-Maxwell had stolen all the pension money,

£300 million.

-The Maxwell Brothers were arrested at 6:30 this morning.

-I am really looking forward

to being able to defend myself in a court of law.

-I ran into Ghislaine, and she said,

"I'm gonna introduce you to Jeffrey."

-Don't you feel insecure, scared from the future?

-No, I'm lucky. I get to start again.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪