Maxwell: The Final Verdict. Tom Bower

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      Moreover, many of those who reported Maxwell’s affairs during the 1980s were only vaguely aware of the details of the Pergamon saga in 1969, when his publishing empire had disintegrated amid suspicions of dishonesty which appeared to have terminated his business life. After three damning DTI reports, no one expected Maxwell’s resurrection. However, the DTI inspectors, having found the evidence of fraud and voiced a memorable phrase about his unfitness to manage a public company, had not directly accused him of criminality. It was the inspectors’ cowardly reluctance to publish their real convictions and the police failure to prosecute which permitted Maxwell during the 1980s, when explaining his life, to distort the record of the Pergamon saga.

      Accordingly, by 1987, Buckingham Palace, the City, Westminster and Whitehall had forgotten or forgiven the past. In the year in which Maxwell’s final frauds began, most journalists reflected the prevailing sentiment and were willing to afford him the benefit of the doubt.

      To have broken through Maxwell’s barrier required not only a brave inside source who was willing to steal documents but also someone who would risk the Chairman’s inevitable writ. But, unlike in America, whistleblowers are castigated in Britain, where secrecy is a virtue. To break those barriers also required expertise and a lot of money, increasingly unavailable to newspapers and to television. So almost until his end Maxwell enjoyed a relatively favourable press, although journalists were not to blame for the canker’s survival.

      The real fault for Maxwell’s undiscovered fraud belongs to the policemen employed in the Serious Fraud Office, to the civil servants, especially in IMRO and the DTI, who are empowered to supervise Britain’s trusts and corporations, and to the accountants at Coopers and Lybrand who were his companies’ auditors. As with most of Britain’s financial scandals, those arrogant, idle and ignorant bureaucrats, having failed in their duties, were not embarrassed nor dismissed, because they were protected by self-imposed anonymity. It was their good fortune that many blamed Britain’s libel laws for the failure to expose Maxwell’s fraud. But that was and remains too easy. Maxwell prospered because hundreds of otherwise intelligent people wilfully suspended any moral judgment and succumbed to their avarice and self-interest. To suggest that much will be learned from Maxwell’s story is to ignore past experience, but his story is an extraordinary fable, not least because only now can one read the final verdict.

       ONE The Autopsy – 9 November 1991

      The corpse was instantly recognizable. The eye could follow the jet-black hair and bushy eyebrows on the broad Slav head down the huge white torso towards the fat legs. Until four days earlier, the puffy face, recorded thousands of times on celluloid across the world, had been off-white. Now it was an unpleasant dark grey. The body was also disfigured. An incision, 78 cm long, stretched from the neck down the stomach to the crotch. Another incision crossed under the head, from the left shoulder along the collar bone. Firm, black needlework neatly joined the skin to conceal the damage to the deceased’s organs.

      Lying on a spotless white sheet in a tiled autopsy room, the corpse was surrounded by eight men and one woman dressed in green smocks. An unusual air of expectancy, even urgency, passed among the living as they stood beneath the fierce light. It was 10.25 on a Saturday night and there was pressure on them to complete their work long before daybreak. Over the past years, thousands of corpses – the victims of the Arab uprising – had passed through that undistinguished stucco building in Tel Aviv. But, for the most part, they had been the remains of anonymous young men killed by bullets, mutilated by bombs or occasionally suffocated by torture.

      This cadaver was different. In life, the man had been famous, and in death there was a mystery. Plucked from the Atlantic Ocean off the Canary Islands, he had been flown for burial in Israel. Standing near the corpse for this second autopsy was Dr Iain West, the head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London. His hands, encased in rubber gloves, were gently touching the face: ‘He’s been thumped here. That looks genuine. You don’t get that falling just over the edge of a boat. You don’t get this sort of injury.’ West’s Scottish-accented voice sounded aggressive. Retained by the British insurance companies who would have to pay out £21 million if the cause of death were proved to have been accident or murder, he found his adrenalin aroused by a preliminary autopsy report signed two days earlier by Spanish pathologists. After twenty-one years of experience – and 25,000 autopsies – he had concluded that there were no more than two Spanish pathologists who deserved any respect: the remainder were ‘not very good’. The conclusion of Dr Carlos Lopez de Lamela, one of that remainder, that the cause of death was ‘heart failure’ was trite and inconsequential. West was thirsting to find the real cause of death. His first suspicion was murder. Yet he knew that so much of pathology relied upon possibilities or probabilities and not upon certainties. Mysteries often remained unresolved, especially when the evidence was contaminated by incompetence.

      The Briton’s position at the autopsy was unusual. Under the insurance companies’ agreement with the Israeli government, he could observe but not actively participate. West regretted that he would not be allowed to follow the contours and patterns of any injuries which might be discovered and privately felt slightly disdainful of his temporary colleague, Dr Yehuda Hiss. He recalled the forty-five-year-old Israeli pathologist – then his junior – learning his craft in Britain in the mid-1980s. He had judged him to be ‘competent’, although unused to the traditional challenges of autopsy reports in Britain. West was nevertheless now gratified to learn that his lack of confidence in the Spaniards was partially shared by Hiss. In the Israeli’s opinion, Dr Lamela’s equivocation about the cause of death was unimpressive.

      West watched Hiss dictate his visual observations. Touching the body gently, even sensitively, the Israeli noted small abrasions around the nostrils and rubbed skin under the nose and on the ear, but no signs of fresh epidermal damage anywhere on the head or neck. There were no recently broken bones. Although the body had apparently floated in the sea for up to twelve hours, the skin showed no signs of wrinkling or sunburn. ‘We’ll X-ray the hands and the foot,’ ordered Hiss.

      His dictation was interrupted by West: ‘I wonder if they’ve looked at his back?’

      ‘No, no,’ replied Hiss, going on to note a small scar, thin pubic hair and circumcision.

      Again he was interrupted: ‘The teeth are in bad condition.’

      ‘The dental treatment is poor,’ agreed another Israeli.

      ‘Very poor’, grunted West, ‘for a man who was so rich.’

      ‘Are you sure it’s him?’ asked an Israeli. ‘We’d better X-ray the teeth for a dental check.’

      ‘Well, it looks like him,’ snapped West. ‘The trouble is we’re up against time. He’s being buried tomorrow. I think we’ll take fingerprints.’ Again, he criticized the Spaniards: ‘The fingernails haven’t been cut off. They said they’d done it.’

      Midnight passed. It was now the day of the burial. The corpse was turned over. ‘We’ll cut through and wrap it back,’ said West impatiently. The two pathologists had already concurred that the Spanish failure to examine the deceased’s back was a grave omission – it had been a common practice in Britain since the 1930s, as a method of discovering hidden wounds.

      There was no sentiment as two scalpels, Hiss’s and an assistant’s, were poised over the vast human mound. None of the doctors contemplated its past: the small baby in the СКАЧАТЬ