Was Maxwell Smart?
Ghislaine Maxwell lived her life between two international crooks: Her father Robert Maxwell and sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein. Some people think they were spies.
“It is ten thousand times cheaper to pay the best spies lavishly than even a tiny army poorly.” – Sun Tzu
Was Ghislaine Maxwell’s father an international spy? Could she have brought Jeffrey Epstein and his global sex trafficking ring into this shadowy fold?
There’s plenty of speculation, and not a lot of evidence … but then why would there be? The spy business is supposed to be finger-print free.
What’s certain is that Robert Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were both wealthy thugs with powerful connections, who died under mysterious circumstances – and they both had Ghislaine Maxwell in common.
Apples don’t fall far from trees, as the old cliché goes. Especially, rotten ones.
The truth is out there, but it’s trickling out slowly with the Trump administration delaying the release of the Congressionally ordered Epstein files at every turn.
For now, please welcome Robert Maxwell to the Business Blunders Hall Of Shame.
Robert Maxwell – Mirror Group Newspapers
He left behind one of Britain’s ugliest scandals. Then his daughter got uglier with Jeffrey Epstein.
Robert Maxwell was a swaggering media titan who stole from his employee’s pensions, drowned at sea, and left behind one of the most notorious financial scandals in British corporate history.
He also spoiled his daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned co-conspirator with Jeffrey Epstein and his pedophilic sex-trafficking network.
He died falling from a four-story super yacht that he’d named “Lady Ghislaine.” In the end, neither his boat nor his daughter proved to be a lady any more than he proved to be an upstanding businessman.
Unlike most Business Hall Of Shame inductees, Maxwell was never charged with a crime. He died before investigators discovered that he had systematically plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his own companies’ pension funds to prop up his sprawling, debt-ridden empire.
Perhaps there’s some irony in running scandal rags like the Daily Mirror and the New York Daily News, and then spawning scandals even juicier than most tabloid headlines. Or perhaps it’s par for the course. Maxwell was commonly described as a shameless narcissist who would do anything in his bitter rivalry with Rupert Murdoch.
When accountants, regulators and Parliament pulled back the curtains, they found that at least £500 million had been diverted from Mirror Group pension funds into Maxwell-controlled companies.
His financial downfall came after he grossly overpaid for media properties, particularly, the Macmillan publishing house for $2.6 billion in 1988.
He’d borrowed with abandon from 44 different banks and financial syndicates. To cover his over-leveraged bets, he shifted assets, pledged pension money as collateral and manipulated financial statements.
Years of litigation, bankruptcy proceedings and recovery efforts followed. The UK Department of Trade and Industry later concluded Maxwell’s misconduct was “systematic and extensive.”
More than 500 pensioners were left wondering how a billionaire could treat their futures like a personal credit line.
Two of Maxwell’s sons – Kevin and Ian – were charged with fraud. Both were ultimately acquitted in 1996.
Then there’s Maxwell’s youngest daughter, Ghislaine.
She moved comfortably through London and New York high society, financed in part by her father’s borrowed and stolen wealth.
After his death, she had to turn somewhere to maintain the lifestyle her father provided. She reinvented herself in the United States and eventually hooked up with Epstein.
In 2020, a federal jury in New York convicted her of sex-trafficking minors, ensuring that the Maxwell name carried a second, darker legacy. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022.
The Trump administration and his enablers in Congress have consistently hindered the release of the Epstein files that the Department of Justices has gathered. But slowly, powerful politicians, business tycoons and celebrities are being exposed as having embarrassing relationships with the world’s most notorious sex offender.
Read More:
Networking With A Pedophile (Business Blunders)
Meditations With A Sex Offender (Business Blunders)
Winter Is Coming For Summers (Business Blunders)
Too Big To Jail (Business Blunders)
In a vacuum of information, speculations abound, including a spy theory and unproven claims that Epstein was running a honey pot operation. The game was to get powerful people in compromising positions and blackmail them into compliance – or so the theory goes.
Adding to this intrigue are similar allegations around Robert Maxwell. For decades, reporters and biographers have explored, and debated, Maxwell’s proximity to intelligence services.
Several investigations have suggested he cultivated relationships with Mossad, MI6, and even Soviet officials, using his media holdings and political access as leverage in the Cold War world of favors and information.
In 2003, journalists Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon published “Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul.” The book promo describes him as “ruthless, volatile, defiant; a man of gargantuan appetites, for food, wine, women, power, money.”
The authors argue that Maxwell occasionally acted as a conduit for Israeli intelligence, but the book is speculative. Other reporting is more careful, describing him operating in the murky overlap between business, politics and espionage.
None of these claims have been conclusively proven, but of course the spy business is designed to leave few if any traces. Many records remain sealed or inconclusive, leaving the truth partly hidden behind the same secrecy that defined Maxwell’s business life.
Conspiracy theories also abound regarding Maxwell’s mysterious death off coasts of the Canary Islands. But official inquiries concluded that he fell off the Lady Ghislaine while completely nude and taking a leak into the sea. From there, he had a heart attack and drowned.
“Money isn’t everything,” he is often quoted as saying. “I’ve got money and I’ve got everything, and they’re not the same.”
In the end, he left this world like everybody else. With neither.
Read More:
From wooden shack to global media magnate: The rise and fall of Robert Maxwell (The Times Of Israel)
Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain’s Most Notorious Media Baron (Book by John Preston)
"The old 'pretending to be trafficking minors to your boyfriend and his friends' trick, eh?"