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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Robert Evans?

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• 1:06Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:09Robert Evans?

  Ah, we're back. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about terrible people. And in part one of the story of Robert Maxwell, Gyllenhaal'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 war crimes, really? Like, it's the other stuff he's gonna do that sucks.

• 1:35Speaker 04

  So real, so real.

• 1:37Robert Evans?

  And with us once again is the great Adam Conover. Adam, welcome back to the show. How you doing?

• 1:42Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me. I'm just so excited to hear more stories of our cool friend, Abraham, Robert, Ivan.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  Private. Private.

• 1:54Robert Evans?

  Private, yes.

• 1:55Speaker 04

  Oh, oh, oh, the best one was Leslie.

• 1:58Robert Evans?

  Leslie, yes.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he's just a, he's just a great guy. He's just murdering a few more Nazis than he should.

• 2:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  That's not great, but, you know, he's taking his revenge.

• 2:09Robert Evans?

  That'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.

• 2:26Robert Evans?

  So, the immediate aftermath of the big dub dub dose was a busy time for Robert Maxwell. He 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 gonna be lucrative very soon." And he is correct about that. And then he kind of goes, he takes like a break from his, like a leave of absence, and travels alone to war-torn Prague 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 19-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.

• 3:11Robert Evans?

  His younger sister was actually rescued directly by Raul Wallenberg, who we've covered in one of our Reverse Bastards episodes. Yeah, Wallenberg in Budapest was like writing, I think Swedish, I think it was Swedish, Swedish visas for everyone, every Jewish person under 15, and just like lying and saying, "They're all, they're all citizens." Like, every one of them. Oh my god, there's so many Swedish people here. Wow, a lot of Swedes in Budapest right now. And he saves, I mean, again, we've talked about this, he saves like 100,000 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.

• 3:52Robert Evans?

  And this is kind of the last time that he directly 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 been promoted to a captain at this point. And it's not, 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 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, was never like his, his faith in a meaningful way, because I think he's just kind of a natural atheist.

• 4:34Robert Evans?

  And I think after this acknowledging that 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.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  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 records, given what's happened in Europe?

• 5:06Robert Evans?

  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, get 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 is, 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

• 5:50Robert Evans?

  now in Berlin and that is, 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 interrogating people and initially a lot of former Nazis, but like, one has to assume there's some ugliness to this job. Now, this is also a time, 1946, when a foreign occupier could behave more or less any way they wanted to among the captive German population. And Maxwell certainly did for an 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, the exact same period of time in basically the same area. I have in my house, like, two grandfather clocks

• 6:35Robert Evans?

  that he bought for like 50 cents each. He bought like a shitload of these like 150 year old grandfather clocks from starving Germans and just shipped them 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.

• 6:53Robert Evans?

  Hard to blame anybody for that. Uh, I consider them war 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. And so Hitler's old dentist tells Robert Maxwell, you know, I know the guy who bred Hitler's beloved German shepherd Blondie. That's the dog that he like, like fed cyanide to in the bunker. Like this is his pet. Um, and there's this dude who was like the dog, the kennel operator who bred the dogs that like were Hitler's dogs. And so Robert Maxwell's like, I gotta meet this motherfucker. So he visits this guy.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  Hitler must've just like, the number of people, yeah, I was Hitler's optometrist.

• 7:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, I used to scrub Hitler's pool.

• 7:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  A lot of personal services the guy needed done.

• 7:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people working with Hitler one way or the other.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. I set up his aquarium. It was like really complicated. Then he needed me to come out every two weeks to clean Hitler's aquarium.

• 8:01Robert Evans?

  My, my aunt, when she was like hitchhiking through Germany in like the 50s, 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 road.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  Photos of Hitler?

• 8:15Robert Evans?

  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 them.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  You gotta go on Antiques Roadshow.

• 8:24Robert Evans?

  With my Hitler pics? Oh, my God.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. They never have the good shit on there. You gotta go on with the Hitler pics and the grandfather clocks.

• 8:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I prefer the grandfather clocks to the Hitler pics. 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 like I can rebuild my business with this male, right? You know, and maybe get my feet back on.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  And that's like, just like a guy that, man, you know, the downfall of the third Reich and like the Holocaust and all that. Really bad for my dog breeding business.

• 9:08Robert Evans?

  Horrible for guys who sell German shepherds.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, I sold German shepherds to Hitler. I thought it was a good bet at the time.

• 9:14Robert Evans?

  I thought it would keep going.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  Seemed like he was on the way up, you know?

• 9:18Robert Evans?

  It was the MySpace of its day. How could it have failed?

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Why won't anybody think of how this affects dog breeding businesses?

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, fucking Eisenhower kept awake at night. We never thought of the dog breeders.

• 9:35Robert Evans?

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

• 9:58Robert Evans?

  This story is so bizarre. Maxwell, he tells his comrades, his fellow soldiers this, and he's like, haha, isn't this fucking funny? And they're horrified that he kinda killed Hitler's dog breeder.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, also, this man, his entire family was murdered in the Holocaust.

• 10:18Robert Evans?

  The morality of this is, I don't know.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Hitler's dog breeder sounds like a side mission from Wolfenstein, you know, of someone you go murder.

• 10:26Robert Evans?

  You gotta kill Hitler's dog breeder? He's got four arms and like a Cerberus, yeah? You need the minigun for that level.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  So is it Hitler's dog? Is that what you're saying?

• 10:37Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, this would have, but I think it was like the sire of Hitler's dog, maybe, or at least related to the sire of Hitler's dog.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  No, no, no, this wasn't Hitler's dog. No, no, no, no, no. This was the sire of Hitler's dog.

• 10:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I stole Hitler's dogs, Dad.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Every Nazi owned dogs who were sired by this dog.

• 10:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. It's so funny that he's like, this is a bragging point for him that I destroyed this man. And his colleagues are like, that's kind of fucked up.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 11:17Robert Evans?

  Like, there's not any of those, really, like from a breeder.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Most dog purchases don't make it, I mean, you know, like Nixon's biography doesn't spend a lot of time on checkers. You know what I mean?

• 11:31Robert Evans?

  So yeah, he couldn't kill Hitler, but he got the guy who made Hitler's dog, I guess. Wildlife.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  And he owned the dog. What did he do with the dog?

• 11:41Robert Evans?

  By all accounts, he cared about, he liked the dog. Obviously not the dog's fault.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  He took, 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. He, he slaughters them, but he's like, the dog I like.

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  The dog's fine, the dog's fine.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  Hitler's dog's dad, that's a Nazi I'm okay with.

• 12:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:07Robert Evans?

  So Maxwell, kind of around this period, has a fairly, he works as a spy. He's kind of like a contractor for MI6 probably. It's one of those things where we don't know exactly who he's working for 100% because it's spy stuff. And because of some other things he does, because he's always a little 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 I, you have to imagine they're very drunk. He convinces the Soviet Colonel to break into Georgi Zhukov's office so they can photograph his papers? Like, so much vodka has to have been part of this story?

• 12:51Robert Evans?

  To get this Colonel to like, yeah, fuck Zhukov.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  Insane.

• 12:58Robert Evans?

  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 as looking like a hotter Clark Gable.

• 13:11Robert Evans?

  He is 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 not, literally getting down to the fact that you're down to Hitler's dog breeder? So you got no more Nazis to kill.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it just. War, war affects everybody so differently, you know?

• 13:40Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  I would think that if I escaped the miserable poverty

• 13:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  of, of Central Eastern Europe, um, and, you know, and the worst war in the history of humanity.

• 13:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Killed a bunch of people, managed to not die in either the Holocaust or the fighting.

• 13:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  And then achieved a 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 alive.

• 14:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Take a break, go to the sea.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  But ambition, man.

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  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 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, 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 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. Right?

• 14:54Robert Evans?

  And 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 going to lasso and use to make his fortune is more dangerous and more valuable than either of those. Raw knowledge. So, science is a discipline, is he, given how crucial it is to World War II. 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 45, 46, 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. Right?

• 15:37Robert Evans?

  It wasn't like the product of a national educational and industrial apparatus. Right? This was something like men who were like the Earl of such and such, and my hobby is figuring out how heredity works. 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 II. But the field is still really 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, right? 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?

• 16:21Robert Evans?

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

• 16:39Speaker 04

  They're like, ah, we've been chemically castrating mathematicians. We got shit over here.

• 16:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, fuck. We really should probably stop doing that, huh? Yeah? Stop poisoning our smart guys.

• 16:50Robert Evans?

  As The Guardian writes, quote, "Top British scientists, from Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, to the physicist Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin, were concerned that while British science was world-class, its publishing arm was dismal. Science publishers were mainly known for being inefficient and constantly broke. Journals, which often appeared on cheap, thin paper, were produced almost as an afterthought by scientific societies. The British Chemical Society had a months-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 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.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  People are writing each other handwritten letters and shit going, "I discovered something."

• 17:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Nukes!

• 17:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So by late summer of 1946, Robert Maxwell has talked himself into 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 Organization. So obviously, right after we occupied Germany, we're not letting the Germans have newspapers of their own again, not that they're running, right? Because that didn't go well last time.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:08Robert Evans?

  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 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 the, 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 MI6 and they're like, probably good to have a guy who is with us running the papers in post-war Germany. But he launches,

• 18:49Robert Evans?

  his first big paper is 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, 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 of you.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 19:21Robert Evans?

  And yeah, I probably wouldn't have wanted to fight 1946 Robert Maxwell.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  His articles are all like, it's great to murder Germans, actually.

• 19:31Robert Evans?

  Pretty cool.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Blowing a mayor's brains out because a tank fired at you is a heroic deed.

• 19:36Robert Evans?

  I wrote a poem about it.

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  This paper, the first paper that he, his social democratic paper that he starts, is owned by a company, a publisher called Springer Verlag. 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. I can picture the logo. Yeah, yeah. And this 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 Germany was a pariah state. And so, they weren't publishing anything for

• 20:26Robert Evans?

  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 end of the war, Ferdinand Springer is broke, but he has 63,000 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, it's gonna be a big part of the space race, it's just sitting in Springer's warehouse, unpublished, right? And Maxwell becomes this guy's friend. And so, while they're talking,

• 21:11Robert Evans?

  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 those 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 these papers about their findings, and then publishers basically get them for free. And Maxwell's like, wait a second. Free?

• 21:38Robert Evans?

  The most like important valuable resource in the world? People aren't even really charging for it? I got a motherfucking idea. Um, and yeah, part of his idea is that Springer can't 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 Maxwell can mail whatever the fuck he wants, right? Whoa. So he's found his great resource and he's about to start exploiting it. He starts a company with the goal of shipping Springer's scientific publications over to the UK and finding journals to publish them, right?

• 22:20Robert Evans?

  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, Maxwell's comfortable at this point, but he's not rich. And 63,000 books worth of 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, we didn't really give him, we didn't like him. Like, 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.

• 23:05Robert Evans?

  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 2000, a former MI6 officer claims that British intelligence, literally the James Bond Agency, funds Maxwell's startup because he had been working undercover for them and they considered it a potentially valuable venture. MI6 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 MI6 officer who reveals this says it's the only time MI6 ever like completely funded a startup. Maybe that's true, maybe that's not. I don't credit a literal MI6 officer with necessarily being honest about everything.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're fun, all those startups that make James Bond's little gadgets.

• 23:57Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, there's gonna be a couple of those, right? Q's gotta have some, gotta have some companies he's working with.

• 24:04Robert Evans?

  So, as noted earlier, Maxwell starts shipping the stuff to the UK. And while he's doing this, he, 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, 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. 63,000 books worth of added stuff, it's just massively overloaded the system, right? Per The Guardian, quote, "The British government's solution was to pair the venerable British publishing house Butterworths with the renowned German publisher Springer to draw on the latter's expertise. Butterworths would learn to turn a profit on journals and British science would get its work out at a faster pace.

• 24:49Robert Evans?

  The Butterworths directors, being ex-British intelligence themselves, hired the young Maxwell to help manage the company and another ex-spook, Paul Roseboud, a metallurgist who spent the war passing Nazi nuclear secrets to the British through French and Dutch resistance, as scientific editor. When Butterworths decided to abandon the fledgling project in 1951, Maxwell offered 13,000 pounds, about 420 grand today, for both Butterworths and Springer's shares, giving him control of the company. Roseboud stayed on as scientific director and named the new venture Pergamon Press, after a coin from the ancient Greek city of Pergamon, featuring Athena, goddess of wisdom, which they adapted for the company logo. A simple line drawing appropriately representing both knowledge and money."

• 25:30Robert Evans?

  So, what starts as a British program to like, get scientific publishing up, winds up entirely in Maxwell and Roseboud's hands. Because the company that the British government contracts with is like, ah, there's probably not a lot of money in this. Yeah, we'll take 13,000 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 30.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  He's not 30 years old yet?

• 25:59Robert Evans?

  No, no, he would have been. So he's 23 when the war ends. He would have been like 28 or 29 right now. I think.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 26:05Robert Evans?

  He's doing well.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  I'm 42 and I haven't like murdered anybody.

• 26:10Robert Evans?

  Haven't murdered dozens of SS men.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  I haven't killed any mayors. I haven't taken over the scientific publishing of two entire nations yet.

• 26:18Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  The last generation was just stronger and better.

• 26:22Robert Evans?

  I'm sorry. Yeah. The energy this guy had.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  It's because of the cellphone, you know, that's why I haven't, I haven't murdered any Germans yet.

• 26:29Robert Evans?

  It's the cellphone. I had a Robert Maxwell secretly invented Adderall. He was just keeping it from everybody for a while.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Injecting it into his leg.

• 26:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's his only food.

• 26:43Robert Evans?

  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 as well as Pergamon does. A great example of this would be a business deal he sets up in the early 50s. 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 that we should probably send all of the stuff through Argentina? Because Argentina can pay with pork bellies?

• 27:23Robert Evans?

  Now, look, 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. Yeah.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  It was a settlers of Catan, uh, logic.

• 27:35Robert Evans?

  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 really want these.

• 27:58Robert Evans?

  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 is like, yeah, we will literally take anything. It's rancid. Fine. We'll make it into sausage. We're doing so badly right now. Toxic pork is the best Austria can do. Thanks Hitler. Yeah. Again, there's like, if you've been to Berlin, you've had like currywurst, 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 at 50% sawdust. 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.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Every time we eat a currywurst, you think of Maxwell and his quest to take over all of publishing.

• 28:51Robert Evans?

  All of publishing in the rancid pork business.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 28:55Robert Evans?

  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 Austria, whatever, recognizes that he just made up a country. This is not real. Yeah, that sounds real to me.

• 29:15Robert Evans?

  Wow. Again, we just got out of the Nazi period, not super knowledgeable about the rest of the world here.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  You guys don't even want to know what's been happening in South America, man. There's Oceania's taking over. They make the best pork bellies. You really want some.

• 29:28Robert Evans?

  The freshest pork bellies.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:32Robert Evans?

  Wow. So in 1955, back doing their Pergamon business, we're out of the pork belly thing. Maxwell and his partner Rosebowed. 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. You'd think this would have ended cooler than it does.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, these guys sound awesome.

• 29:57Robert Evans?

  They fucking are at this point.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  And they're arbitraging pork bellies instead of money. By the way. Maybe the, maybe the first clue that they're not as smart as we think they are. That they're like, hey, we could, you know, it'd be better than being paid in money, being paid in pork bellies.

• 30:10Robert Evans?

  Pork bellies.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Receiving the pork bellies and then having to travel around Europe, reselling your rancid pork bellies. For Austrian money, the Austrian money can't be great.

• 30:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that can't have been like a great profit margin, right?

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:25Robert Evans?

  So in 1955, Maxwell and his partner Rosebowed 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 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 rent 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, I will give you money in exchange for the rights to everything you publish, right?

• 31:08Robert Evans?

  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 rich men 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, 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, you know?

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Just going around the open mics, handing out five dollar bills.

• 31:42Robert Evans?

  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 coming up with a fucking check, that's shocking to people, right? Don Frank, a competing publisher, considered this dishonest, but it worked.

• 32:12Robert Evans?

  What made Pergamon 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 all of the relevant research in their field as it's being published. This means subscriptions to every relevant journal are a necessity, right? 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

• 32:57Robert Evans?

  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, 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? Like, 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.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  And this is not like a huge part of the budget of any one university anyway.

• 33:45Robert Evans?

  No, no.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  So he could charge, he could charge an arm and a leg.

• 33:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  But it's just gonna be some, like, the, ah, the library has to pay for a little bit of it. It doesn't cost them as much as their mortgage.

• 33:55Robert Evans?

  It's a hundred dollars instead of ten dollars. Right, yes. And we're getting all this defense money anyway, because the US government needs physicists, right?

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:04Robert Evans?

  Now, it was his business partner, Rosebowed, who had the idea that would truly make Pergamon 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 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. Pergamon 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.

• 34:49Robert Evans?

  And suddenly every college in the Western world subscribes. Immediate profits. Right? There are so a really good magazine is working on like a 10 to 15% profit margin. Right? And that's a magazine that's doing very well. His profit margins on these journals are over 50%. 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. Um, no, we use SciHub. Everyone use SciHub. Fuck these people. Fuck scientific publishing as an industry. Steal it. Not legal advice.

• 35:31Robert Evans?

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• 36:30Robert Evans?

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• 37:09Robert Evans?

  And we're back. SciHub is a website that collects most of the journals you might want. If you like find a journal that's paywalled, you go to SciHub, Google it, there's a bunch of different mirrors, put the DOI number or just the URL link to the study you want, and SciHub 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.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  I mean, I think pretty much every grad student in the world is using it.

• 37:37Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. And they should be. And it, all of this should be free.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, cuz it's, oh, you mean, uh, scientific knowledge, the, uh, the birthright of mankind?

• 37:46Robert Evans?

  That our tax is paid for?

• 37:47Speaker 04

  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.

• 37:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it should probably be everyone's property. Um, but the collective genius of mankind? I don't know. Anyway, so Rosebowed, 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, "Oh, man, I really don't, I don't feel good being in business with you and doing this. I, I may be contributed terribly to a great evil." And he leaves. And so Maxwell's in sole charge of Pergamon now. And once he grasps Rosebowed's idea, he runs with it like fucking Usain 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." You know?

• 38:40Robert Evans?

  If a researcher, yeah, like that, like, that's literally how it's been happening. By the late 50s, he brought a sort of sleazy He's like the first 80s 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 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.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 39:15Robert Evans?

  That's such a, again, this is why Rosebowed quits in 56 is he's like, I don't know, maybe this feels gross.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  I also have to say, like, there's been a lot of talk in the last 20 years about, you know, for-profit journals and, and, you know, all the problems in scientific publishing. I always thought that that profit motive was relatively recent. I didn't realize it was rapacious, even at the dawn of this shit.

• 39:36Robert Evans?

  Yes, and, and it Maxwell invents it. Now, obviously, would something similar, maybe, but like, it's him. He's the one who starts this.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. 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, 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.

• 40:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you, you just don't know. And, you know, I, I think we're probably doing better with Wikipedia than most things on the internet these days.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. No, I mean, that's a good example. If that hadn't existed, something bad could have taken its place. There could have been a better version of scientific publishing.

• 40:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, filed, costs a hundred dollars a month or some shit or whatever. Yeah. And it tells you that Elon Musk, you're going to get a hyperloop in your city soon or whatever. Yeah. So the next Geneva conference, now working alone, Robert Maxwell rinses 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 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 Isles to figure out how to make the journal. Like, it, it is like classic Hollywood era shit, right?

• 41:03Robert Evans?

  Where you're like, go, go 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.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  This would work on me.

• 41:17Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, of course.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 41:24Robert Evans?

  Of course.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  I mean, I study ants, but of course I should go on a free, all expenses paid trip of Europe.

• 41:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and, and, 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 worked 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 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, 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.

• 42:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so he told his deputy director at Pergamon, 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, it feels very similar to like Hollywood. I, 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 thus more sales. In 1959, Pergamon had 40 journals. By the mid 60s, it would publish more than 150, which is like almost like 10 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 Pergamon.

• 42:56Robert Evans?

  Maxwell is not like a particularly patriotic businessman. He does 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, I think, I mean, he definitely is doing some spying. And I'm sure they're also putting him up in the mansion because it's like wired and they want to spy on 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

• 43:41Robert Evans?

  the exclusive English language publisher of like Russian science. Whoa. Right? All of like these, yeah. So he is connected. He sounds like a blast to spend a weekend with. He sounds like a shitload of fun. Yeah. Right? And 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, lot of fun, though. Like, yeah, he was an asshole. Drew 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 evil as it becomes, but the downsides of what he starts are very obvious today. The modern field of scientific literature is crippling expensive for institutions like libraries and colleges, the latter of which pass their costs on to students.

• 44:25Robert Evans?

  And while Maxwell initially wowed scientists with promises of payouts, by the mid 60s, he'd helped to normalize a system where individual researchers were more reliant on journals than journals were on them, per The Guardian. Scientists create work under their own direction, funded largely by governments, 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. 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 Economist demanded that journalists write and edit

• 45:09Robert Evans?

  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 the way, a description of how it is now.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  That, that's an incredible summary of how it works. And, and like peer review, you know, we're taught in, in college at any rate, that this is a good thing. The, the fact that it's free labor and, 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? Other than, you know, hitting start on the printing press.

• 45:44Robert Evans?

  Fuck all.

• 45:45Speaker 04

  Which is, 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?

• 46:02Robert Evans?

  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, right? 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.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  God damn, you got me mad. This is the kind of thing I normally do segments about. You got me mad about it.

• 46:42Robert Evans?

  You can find very good quotes in articles about this, including some that we'll have 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, given things the administration's doing, yeah. These are a little older articles, but it's a massive problem. Now, 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.

• 47:20Robert Evans?

  But, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's interesting.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  It's also such a classic example of, you know, rent seeking, as economists 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 heiress.

• 47:37Robert Evans?

  Billions, billions.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  And so they are profiting off of it, but they do not put money back into the system.

• 47:44Robert Evans?

  Absolutely not.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  If they are making money off of the production of science, why not fund some fucking science? But they don't do that.

• 47:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Why would the fu- 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 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 gonna have that little level of scruples, right? They're just not gonna give a fuck. And this is gonna 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 quote once more from

• 48:33Robert Evans?

  another Guardian article. "The publishing business is perverse and needless." The Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen wrote in a 2003 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 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 20th century is no longer a viable career option.

• 49:16Robert Evans?

  Under today's system, the father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 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 were not the result of like a team of people working in, you know, for profit for a company in order to make a thing. It was the result of a scientist who had an interest and kind of in a meandering way pursued it for decades until he changed life for every human being.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:52Robert Evans?

  Right? Jonas Salk had a personal crusade against polio, 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.

• 50:02Speaker 04

  Well, and part of it is the, is the social or career pressure of having to publish, which is, I'm going to guess is an entirely different problem. Like that, that is the, what, what scientists' careers are based on is the pressure to publish. But it feeds, again, back into this system. Like you, you, you don't last long in a tenured position if you never publish anything.

• 50:25Robert Evans?

  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.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:33Robert Evans?

  Right? But that's after his death. So Maxwell moves out of London. We're still in this, in the 60s here. He purchases the Headington Hills Hall Estate in Oxford, which had been built in 1824 and become one of the most iconic residences in the country. I'll have Sophie pull up the picture. The noble family who'd had to live there sold it off in 1953. 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 society will show up at. And he makes this, both his home and the headquarters of Pergamon Press, right? And it, you know, that's kind of the way things work in the UK. I think

• 51:15Robert Evans?

  still to this day that like, you can skip a bunch of levels of the social hierarchy if you buy the right house, you know?

• 51:24Robert Evans?

  He and Betty had nine children ultimately in 19, 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 1950. Seven, he and Betty lose their three year old daughter to leukemia. In 1961, their oldest son, Michael, is in a car crash that leaves him coma bound for seven years. He dies finally in 1968. And that that nearly a decade, and this is during his like 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 stopped talking really like they

• 52:06Robert Evans?

  don't, their relationship is never the same. And 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.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:17Robert Evans?

  Um, 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 Gillan Maxwell, but in 1961, his youngest daughter, Gillan, um, at age three tells her mother, mommy, 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, I am a person at age three.

• 52:50Speaker 04

  Who reported this?

• 52:52Robert Evans?

  Uh, this is, was in his biography by Preston. Um, and I believe this was reported by one of the Maxwell brothers. Uh, and again, this is, this is well before the scandal. So.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  No, no, I know. I'm just like, well, Gillen wouldn't remember this and the parents don't know the kids exist. So they probably wouldn't remember it.

• 53:06Robert Evans?

  His brothers are older.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  One of the brothers like, oh man, that was a real bummer when our three year old sister said, mommy, I exist.

• 53:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that really fucked us all up. Actually. Yeah. I uh, still don't feel bad for her. Yeah. I didn't, 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. Not great. Still don't feel bad for her. Yeah. Yeah. Um, he does start to smother her with affection from this point forward, right? Uh, 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 sons and at his wife for the rest of his days, but he never really does it. Gillen, she becomes uh, coddled and is obviously his favorite. Um, 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.

• 53:53Robert Evans?

  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-1960s, he starts to work towards political power. In 1964, he runs for parliament in the constituency of Buckingham, and he wins as a member of the Labour Party. And this is a weird aside, he identifies as a socialist his entire life.

• 54:16Speaker 04

  Really? He identifies as a socialist?

• 54:19Robert Evans?

  Yep. He strongly identifies as a socialist.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  So he thinks that, like, public goods should be available to the public at low or no cost, subsidized by the government?

• 54:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Here's the thing-

• 54:34Speaker 04

  But not scientific research?

• 54:35Robert Evans?

  Not scientific research. That doesn't count. And also, unions don't count.

• 54:39Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 54:40Robert Evans?

  I think he identifies as a socialist because his mom did, and 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, 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 a part of the Labour Party. And he is, he plays a role in the switch from Labour to New Labour, right? Which is when the British Labour Party jettisons the unions, right? Like, Robert Maxwell is part of that process.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  How? What does he do?

• 55:14Robert Evans?

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• 56:22Robert Evans?

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• 57:04Robert Evans?

  So, Robert has now gotten himself into Parliament as part of Labour. 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 humble, farm-labouring family and would rather cut off my arm than betray my class." And it's true that he does come from a humble farm-labouring family, but there is no bigger class traitor than this fucking guy. His political peers who knew him claimed 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 Labour."

• 57:49Robert Evans?

  Which is a very Trumpian comment, right? That like, "I'm not a member..." Member of the establishment, I'm a billionaire. I own all of science, but I'm not part of the establishment fundamentally. So I, I'm a conservative, but I, I, I'm with labor, right? I'm actually a progressive somehow. It's like an Elon Musk statement. Yeah.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  It's an in group, out group thing. They were, they 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.

• 58:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And he, he also considers, so a big thing, once he gets into labor is his, he's 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. Lot of unions voting in this period of time still. They 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.

• 58:53Robert Evans?

  It's like, no, I'm gonna trade my Maserati for a Lambo. So people know I'm a working man, right?

• 59:00Robert Evans?

  I don't know, man.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  It's not chauffeured, now I just mow over the peasants under my own power.

• 59:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So this did not have the intended effect. And although he was re-elected in 1966, he ultimately lost his seat in 1970 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 60s and 70s, having an awkward photo taken with Henry Kissinger. Just look at the 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.

• 59:35Robert Evans?

  I love this picture.

• 59:37Speaker 04

  That guy's a wheeler dealer, he's drunk already.

• 59:39Robert Evans?

  He is, yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Like, I, I can smell him based on this photo. Does that make sense? He smells like mothballs and vodka.

• 59:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, my, maybe a little Aqua Velva in there too.

• 59:49Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he smells like the back room of an Italian deli that's actually a mob front.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  He's going, how you doing sweetheart? He's like patting the waitress's ass like this guy is such a piece of shit.

• 1:00:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's shocking to me again that he's like, he's like a Czech, uh, Ruthenian Jewish guy. Cause 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, he has the face of a mob boss. Like you could have put him in The Sopranos.

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  It really is the 20th century dream, right?

• 1:00:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  Of starting in this, you know, little backwater and, and becoming a sort of like poly national, uh, wheeler dealer billionaire, uh, player asshole.

• 1:00:34Robert Evans?

  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 kinda was a self-made billionaire. Like, like he did come from nothing.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Robert Evans?

  Um, and then destroyed science. Great.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  I, I, I think there was more, I feel like that was more possible after an event like World War Two, where everything gets scrambled and you can, you can rush in and pick up the pieces.

• 1:00:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, think about it. Both Maxwell and Kissinger really are both like, they, they both start their lives as like shrapnel from this horrific conflict persecuted by the Nazis. And then the, 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, the, the way the world opens up after World War Two, makes a lot of these guys' improbable lives possible.

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  I can't wait for World War Three.

• 1:01:30Robert Evans?

  It's gonna be great. It's gonna be great.

• 1:01:31Speaker 04

  Just think about all the new billionaires we're gonna get. And I'm gonna be like, I wish I was a younger man.

• 1:01:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  I wish I was just trying to get my start after World War Three, you know, after the nukes go off and I could build the, the, the nuclear mitigation business.

• 1:01:45Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  Could happen.

• 1:01:54Robert Evans?

  Could ha- it could happen here. Yeah. Through the late 1960s, Maxwell repeatedly tried to expand his empire into news media. He attempts to buy News of the World in 1968 and The Sun in 1969, and Rupert Murdoch beats him both times. This enrages him. He considers himself Rupert Murdoch's nemesis. Rupert Murdoch is always like, oh, I don't, I've never even heard of that guy. Who are you talking about? Nemesis? Nah, nah.

• 1:02:20Robert Evans?

  They're not making him less sympathetic, though, by this part. Nativeism 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." What was he considered at the time? He was British? They knew, yeah, but they figured, they found out he'd been born Jan. He hadn't been born Jan, but that's what they thought. This guy's a Ruthenian. 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 1969, after he negotiated what should have been a great deal to sell Pergamon Press to a wealthy American investor, Saul Steinberg. Unfortunately for our boy, Maxwell illegally concealed the true value of the company, basically

• 1:03:04Robert Evans?

  pretending it was a lot worth more than it was, via what writer Robert Philpott calls "smoke and mirrors accounting practices." He gets removed from the board of directors, and the UK starts an investigation into his activities that concludes in 71. 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 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 that's the end of the story, right? Obviously, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Now, five years later, he takes control of Pergamon again. He's running it all.

• 1:03:44Robert Evans?

  And his southern rise and fall earns him the nickname "The Bouncing Czech," like C-Z-E-H, which is not bad. It's not bad. Great work. Look, the British press is good at some things. Yeah, I love that shit.

• 1:04:01Robert Evans?

  And for the next 10 years after this improbable rise back, he goes from strength to strength. He buys Europe's largest printing company. He becomes owner of The Mirror, 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...

• 1:04:23Robert Evans?

  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. 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 Labour 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.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  What, and he just has animus for unions because he's a business owner and that's the way the wind is blowing?

• 1:05:01Robert Evans?

  And that's the, yeah, 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.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  No, that's, that's what anti-unionism is fundamentally about. It's about anyone else having power. Unions are about workers having power and

• 1:05:22Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  The people on top don't want them to have the power.

• 1:05:25Robert Evans?

  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 like LeBron, right? Like, he's just got this built-in skill he was born with for knowing how to make a paper profitable. I don't know why.

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  We could, we could use a little bit of that right now, to be quite honest.

• 1:05:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we need another one of those who's not evil.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now we just got Bezos and Patrick Sun Shong.

• 1:06:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right. So he buys more publications. He becomes a media maven 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 as much power to shape information on which so many people depend."

• 1:06:21Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:06:22Robert Evans?

  And Murdoch is obviously his rival at this time, but this 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, cribbs a little bit from this guy's notes in terms of like, oh, Really, like, he's taking some notes. Not that, 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 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 4 a.m. one Sunday morning to ask him the time, and instilled a culture of distrust

• 1:07:06Robert Evans?

  and rivalry. He bugged his staff," by which I mean, "he bugged them with surveillance devices, spending hours alone, listening to the recordings for evidence of disloyalty, and even had them followed." Thank Christ.

• 1:07:21Speaker 04

  Like, dude, you're obsessed with me? You're spending hours alone, listening to the recordings of me?

• 1:07:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's kind of flattering.

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  You are, what you're really pulling into focus now is this man is a long-lost succession character.

• 1:07:34Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes!

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  Nailed it.

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  He would have, he would have participated in Boar on the Floor. There's no way.

• 1:07:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Speaker 04

  He sounds like he created Boar on the Floor.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, he is Boar on the Floor, yeah.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. Boar on the floor!

• 1:07:57Robert Evans?

  We missed a flashback scene if he's 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 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 chauffeured vehicle? And so Maxwell fires his kid? And Ian's first words when he gets fired are, "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.

• 1:08:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is very succession. You're in, you're out, you're up, you're down.

• 1:08:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Dad loves you, he doesn't love you. You never know where you stand, except you'll never be free.

• 1:08:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. 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 is covering it in particular because in the mid 80s, 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 gives him instant access to the prime minister, Yitzhak Schmear, and he announces his intention, "I'm gonna put a quarter of a billion dollars into Israel," and he normally lies when he says stuff like this, but he does this, and he uses his profits from the mir in order to do this. And I'm gonna quote from his biography. "Over the next four years, thanks to his mir group profits, Maxwell pumped millions

• 1:09:26Robert Evans?

  into the country, buying newspapers, investing in 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 Mossad." And, boy, is he useful to the Mossad. In 1986, he tipped... So, there's this scientist, this Israeli scientist, Mordecai Vannuno, who's part of, like, Israel's nuclear program that Israel still does not acknowledge that they have nukes, right? We know they... Like, everyone knows, but it's like, kind of this-

• 1:09:55Speaker 04

  They don't acknowledge they have them now?

• 1:09:57Robert Evans?

  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. And Mordecai goes to the British press with inside info about Israel's nuclear 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 Mossad, and he's jailed for 18 years, which is, like, in journalism terms, bad.

• 1:10:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, to give somebody up to a foreign intelligence service, and then they're jailed?

• 1:10:38Robert Evans?

  Yes. Real, real bad.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, usually they try not to do that.

• 1:10:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Bad publisher move.

• 1:10:48Robert Evans?

  Hey, Robert here, and I just wanted to come in and note that the story of Mordecai Vanunu is a lot more complicated than 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 where more than one person kind of went to the Mossad about what he was saying. But yeah, Maxwell definitely was involved when somebody else sold the story to the Sunday Mirror, and he went to the Mossad over it. So anyway, Mordecai is a very interesting guy, obviously very courageous guy. Story's really worth looking into. I also did want to note, because we had a question about this earlier, Israel still does not officially

• 1:11:32Robert Evans?

  admit that they have nuclear weapons, although they're believed to have somewhere between like 1 and 400 warheads. It's that their kind of official defense posture strategy is to neither confirm nor deny that they do. It kind of became clear in the late 70s that they did, but this is not something that is like officially admitted. So anyway, just wanted to add that clarification.

• 1:11:54Robert Evans?

  Now, there are allegations, unfortunately because he's involved in the Mossad, 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 Mossad agent, and that's just really not accurate. One of the big things you'll hear is that, and this comes from the book, "Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy," which is, let's say, somewhat exaggerated. And they allege 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. And the Baltimore Sun sums up their argument. They report that Maxwell sold the program to most of the important government

• 1:12:38Robert Evans?

  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 trapdoor that allowed Israeli intelligence to tap many of the highest state secrets of the Soviet Union, Britain, the US, 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 this is one of ours. Now Maxwell is involved. I'm going to explain what happened. So this software was designed by a software developer in Washington called Inslaw.

• 1:13:21Robert Evans?

  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 accused criminals. It was developed under a Department of Justice grant. So the DOJ was licensed to 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 if we just do that anyway? Right? Per an article in the New Statesman, "Under the Ronald Reagan administration's covert intelligence initiative known as Follow the Money, the NSA misappropriated Promise for sale to banks in 1982. The version of Promise sold by the NSA had been espionage-enabled through a backdoor

• 1:14:02Robert Evans?

  in the program, allowing the agency to covertly conduct real-time electronic surveillance of the flow of money to suspected terrorists and other perceived threats to US national interests. A letter from the US Department of Justice in 1985, later obtained by Inslaw because the company sues 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 be facilitated by the late Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mafuz and the arms dealers Adnan Khashoggi and Manouchir Gorbanev Far. Promise should be delivered without paperwork, customs, or delay, it stated, and all of the transactions paid for through a Swiss bank account."

• 1:14:48Robert Evans?

  So, number one, this is on us. The Mossad does not start this program and they don't put the back, it's not Israeli technicians who put the back door in, Reagan's guys do, right? A bunch of the shadiest, 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 1980s are allowed to sell pirated versions of promise. Basically, the Attorney General under Reagan, Ed Meese, will give you the, like, basically license you to sell pirated, compromised versions of promise to foreign governments if you're his friend? Wow. Like, that's how, that's part of how this works? It's like a way the Reagan administration is, like, rewarding loyal people. It's like, hey, you've got a good, hey, you did us good and you've got a good connection

• 1:15:33Robert Evans?

  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 and this guy gets to make some money, right? Wow. 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 Mossad guy named Rafi Aitane, and that guy in the Mossad is like, maybe a guy at the Mossad isn't the best dude to sell to Iraq, but you know who can sell 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.

• 1:16:17Robert Evans?

  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 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 skolduggery it's involved in, it's just a lot more centered on Ed Meese and the Reagan administration than some of these other claims make. And 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.

• 1:16:58Robert Evans?

  Of Maxwell's fingers in arms dealers that the Israeli government found useful too. And some of these are true, but it's not, it's often portrayed as he is an 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, he's a, you know, that's the kind of thing he's, he's useful for. And so he's, he is connected to the Mossad because he's a powerful, rich businessman. Who desperately wants to prove his 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.

• 1:17:39Robert Evans?

  And, 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. Cause he argues, it's hard to imagine Maxwell himself doing a 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, 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 Mossad. He is incredibly, he's way, he's so highly connected.

• 1:18:25Robert Evans?

  By 1988, Maxwell estimated his own net worth at about $4 billion. And the parties he threw, attended by everyone who was anyone in UK politics were legendary. John Preston describes his 1988 birthday, an event that had to take three days because more than 3,000 people attended. There's like tiers of guests in terms of like which day you're allowed to be at.

• 1:18:45Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:18:47Robert Evans?

  It's, it's, it's fucked up.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  It really seems like, you know, he did, he did some bad shit, but he wins me back with the parties. The parties sound great.

• 1:18:56Robert Evans?

  The parties sound great. The arms dealing, the spying on every foreign government in the world for the CIA and the Mossad. 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 then explains all the ways that she thinks she's cool. Like it's such a fucking Thatcher moment. Oh, man. 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 their children. Some of the guests arrived bearing birthday presents. The broadcaster, David Frost,

• 1:19:41Robert Evans?

  turned up with a 500-pound bottle of wine. Unaware of how much it had cost, Maxwell Scheff later tipped it into a beef stew. As guests sipped their drinks, the band of the Coldstream Guards marched back and forth across the lawn. Before dinner started, Robert and Betty made their formal entrance into the marquee to an announcement from the master of ceremonies. Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome your host and hostess, Robert and Elizabeth Maxwell, a fanfare of herald trumpeteers. Everyone stood to applaud. Along 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 normally given to foreign heads of state in recognition of outstanding civilian or military conduct. Betty Maxwell wore a dress made of gold

• 1:20:26Robert Evans?

  embroidered tulle over yellow taffeta silk. So like, parties, parties. Like, real rich people parties.

• 1:20:35Speaker 04

  See, I missed the boat with World War II. If I had just been able to murder a couple Germans.

• 1:20:39Robert Evans?

  Couple dozen Germans.

• 1:20:40Speaker 04

  I could have been on the road to be being covered in silver taffeta.

• 1:20:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:44Speaker 04

  And having Margaret Thatcher sing my praises.

• 1:20:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, kind of. Well, sing her own praises at your birthday. Yeah, classic Thatcher.

• 1:20:54Robert Evans?

  Make it all about her.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  The greatest generation, though.

• 1:20:58Robert Evans?

  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 all of the books on his bookshelf are fake. Like, they're made out of cardboard. They're like fake books.

• 1:21:25Robert Evans?

  Now Preston says only the books concealing his stereo system were fake. I don't know.

• 1:21:32Robert Evans?

  But this is kind of evidence that as rich as he was on paper, and this is the thing, he's worth 4.4 billion on paper, or something like that. He's not actually doing as well as it seems, right? And 1998 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 $2.6 billion buying US publisher Macmillan. And that's a billion dollars more than its own shareholders valued it at? Like, he kind of has a musk, where he's like, "I'll offer you 2.6 billion." And they're like, "We were not gonna ask for that much, but oh fucking K," right?

• 1:22:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Robert Evans?

  He had to borrow from 44 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 buying more and more publishers, and he's like desperate to win. He doesn't want Murdoch to get Macmillan. 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?"

• 1:22:39Speaker 04

  That must make him even angrier. "I don't know her," says Rupert Murdoch.

• 1:22:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, "I don't know who you're talking about." Anyway, back to being evil. In March of 1991, 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 buy. It's such a bad buy, the owners pay him $60 million to take it. And they pay him that because it's in a lot more debt than that.

• 1:23:19Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:23:20Robert Evans?

  Right? It's such a bad buy.

• 1:23:22Speaker 04

  So they're getting off scot-free by paying a different dude to own it?

• 1:23:25Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. Please take this shit and all of its debts off of our fucking hands.

• 1:23:30Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:23:31Robert Evans?

  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 super, he's got this skill. So he sails his yacht, the Lady Gillan, named after his daughter, into the city harbor to take control of the paper. He gives this 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? 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 80s 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.

• 1:24:16Robert Evans?

  And all 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 1991, he has to sell Pergamon Press, and that's his like 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,

• 1:25:01Robert Evans?

  and suddenly you're out 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?

• 1:25:12Speaker 04

  I'm racking my brain. Where do you go?

• 1:25:15Robert Evans?

  Well, you know where there's a lot of money in any given company that's been around this long with a large workforce?

• 1:25:20Speaker 04

  The pension plan. He raids the pension plan.

• 1:25:23Robert Evans?

  He raids the pension. He steals nearly half a billion dollars from the pension plan.

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  Now I'm mad. Now I don't like him.

• 1:25:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:25:29Speaker 04

  Now I don't like him.

• 1:25:30Robert Evans?

  He destroys so many people's lives and retirements. He fucking robs this pension plan, right?

• 1:25:37Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:25:37Robert Evans?

  And it's not even enough because his debts are well over a billion dollars. Banks are hounding him constantly. He starts gambling in London casinos. All he'll do is like gamble and then watch James Bond movies while eating 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 II. Because he like, wrote letters to his wife and talked about him, like, to journalists about like, again, I machined gun prisoners.

• 1:26:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Robert Evans?

  And again, it's the least bad thing he ever did. But, so he's got that, too. He's got all these debts. His whole empire is about to collapse when he set sail on his yacht, the Lady Gillan, on November 1, 1991. He's getting letters constantly from, from different banks, being like, hey, this is overdue. Can you even prove that you're solvent in anymore? Swiss bank is threatening to go public and it like, has told the London police that he's broken a bunch of laws. So, he's in a lot of trouble. And around 5:00 AM, on November 1, I think it's November 1, 1991, he falls overboard, off the stem of his yacht,

• 1:26:51Robert Evans?

  as it passes towards Tenerife. And his body is fished out of the ocean about 12 hours later by the Spanish National Rescue Service helicopter. Nobody knows precisely what happened. The thing that you will encounter most commonly is that the Mossad 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 and the Israeli President. Shimon Peres is there, right? They give him, like, 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

• 1:27:32Robert Evans?

  stature. But there are like allegations that basically he tried to blackmail the Mossad to get them to pay him $400 million. And it, I don't know, doesn't seem like the kind of move he'd have made. Again, he's a steal the pension plan guy.

• 1:27:47Speaker 04

  People treat these like spy agencies as though, like, they always have reason to kill anybody at any time.

• 1:27:55Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:27:56Speaker 04

  That like, there's some, they're like a Deus ex machina that people use for a simple explanation to make themselves seem smart. Where like, why, why would they?

• 1:28:05Robert Evans?

  Why? Why? Like, for what they, Israel wasn't angry at him.

• 1:28:09Speaker 04

  It's the most annoying thing in, in history analysis, is people making this claim. Well, the Mossad had him killed.

• 1:28:16Robert Evans?

  Why?

• 1:28:16Speaker 04

  What does that explain? You know?

• 1:28:18Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Robert Evans?

  Um, 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 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 68, 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 and 68 and not in good health, and he fell off his boat.

• 1:29:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:03Robert Evans?

  Both of those are just likelier to me than like, the Mossad poisoned him with an untraceable poison on his boat, so it would look 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 believing either. He is initially mourned as like this great figure, because 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 400 million pounds from pension funds, that he, there were 763 million British pounds missing from his companies. He is described as the crook of the century by Newsweek magazine.

• 1:29:41Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:29:42Robert Evans?

  And, not a, yeah, maybe, he's one of them, like.

• 1:29:47Speaker 04

  Things finally caught up with old Bobby Maxwell.

• 1:29:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 04

  Murdering innocent people.

• 1:29:51Robert Evans?

  They sure did.

• 1:29:52Speaker 04

  Destroying scientific publishing. Nah, he's fine. But stealing pension funds, that'll get you.

• 1:29:58Robert Evans?

  Which does suck, like, that is really bad.

• 1:30:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Robert Evans?

  It is one of his worst things.

• 1:30:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, absolutely. No, that made me, up until, up until now, he was sort of like a debonair ne'er-do-well, you know?

• 1:30:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 04

  I was, I was enjoying the story. Now I'm, now I'm pissed off.

• 1:30:13Robert Evans?

  Now I'm pissed off. Yeah, and it's, so his, 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?

• 1:30:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course not.

• 1:30:26Robert Evans?

  They have to take over and they're left with like 400 million pounds or so. They've got to like figure out how to put together. His assets are sold off. Most of like the, uh, the, what are 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 Gillen stays comfortable for a while, you know, a while.

• 1:30:53Speaker 04

  Well, I didn't think, uh, I didn't think I could end with a lower opinion of Gillan Maxwell. I didn't anticipate that this is.

• 1:31:01Robert Evans?

  Shocking, right?

• 1:31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, she's also a criminal nepo baby. Okay.

• 1:31:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I also didn't really call her dad being so cool up until age 23. Cause he's really knocking it out of the park up until age 23. Great first act.

• 1:31:17Speaker 04

  Oh my God.

• 1:31:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like one of those movies that like really falls apart in the second half. Like, ah, you could have used more editing. I was really on board.

• 1:31:27Speaker 04

  Well, it's, uh, it's funny how much it tracks sort of the standard. You know, the, it's a Citizen Kane or a, uh, 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, I wouldn't believe it, you know?

• 1:31:50Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:32:06Speaker 04

  Incredible. He's, uh, he, what a, what a bastard. I'm now behind him.

• 1:32:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're now behind him. Well, got any pluggables to plug? We've kept you here long enough.

• 1:32:17Speaker 04

  I do. Um, I, uh, once again, my podcast is called Factually. Um, I do, uh, do that on YouTube. Where I also do video monologues. Um, and, uh, yeah, you can, uh, check out my standup special, Unmedicated on Dropout right now.

• 1:32:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 1:32:33Robert Evans?

  Uh, well, awesome. Check out that. Check out Dropout. And, um, 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.

• 1:32:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. And don't tell people you did it so proudly. Don't be like, I committed a war crime.

• 1:32:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Maybe don't destroy your whole life competing with Rupert Murdoch and being a dick. Such a weird way to blow your life up.

• 1:33:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. So funny.

• 1:33:06Speaker 04

  Competing in an asshole contest with Rupert Murdoch. Not a good way to go.

• 1:33:10Robert Evans?

  Not even being noticed. Oh, man.

• 1:33:12Speaker 03

  Murdoch was like, who?

• 1:33:14Robert Evans?

  It is. I, I don't want to ever give it to Rupert, but there's some of the great hater moments are just Rupert being like, who are you talking about?

• 1:33:23Robert Evans?

  All right. Well, that's the episode, everybody. Good night and good luck.

• 1:33:27Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me. This is awesome.

• 1:33:29Robert Evans?

  Thank you, Adam. Really appreciate you. Can't wait to get these episodes out. And we're done. Goodbye.

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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