I now knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life—only it was in a field that barely existed. Although the Iron Curtain had been lifted, nobody was investing any money in Eastern Europe. I knew that would eventually change, but in the meantime my best option was to simply stay at BCG—assuming they would let me.
After returning from the fiasco in Sanok, I kept my head down, praying that Wolfgang hadn’t submitted a recommendation to fire me. To my great relief, he was either too distracted or had forgotten, because nobody came to my office with a pink slip. I finally knew I was in the clear in late January 1991 when John Lindquist suggested that he and I write an article together. If I were going to be fired, why would one of the top partners in the firm want to write an article with me?
The piece he had in mind was about investing in Eastern Europe, which we would submit to a trade magazine called Mergers & Acquisitions Europe. I looked into M&A Europe and it appeared to have an almost nonexistent circulation, but I didn’t care. I was ready to exploit any avenue that would help me establish myself as an expert on investing in the region.
To write the article, I studied everything I could get my hands on. I read a stack of more than two hundred news stories and quickly learned that fewer than twenty deals had ever been done in the former Soviet Bloc in the previous decade. The most prolific investor was Robert Maxwell, a maverick 350-pound British billionaire who was originally from Czechoslovakia, and who had done three of the twenty deals.
I figured I would impress John if I could get an interview with someone in Maxwell’s organization, so I called Maxwell’s press office, mentioning the article. They must not have done any homework on M&A Europe, because amazingly I was offered a meeting with the deputy chairman of Maxwell Communications Corporation (MCC), Jean-Pierre Anselmini.
The following week I showed up at Maxwell House, a modern building halfway between Mayfair and the neighborhood known as the City of London. I met Anselmini, a suave, English-speaking Frenchman in his late fifties, and he welcomed me into his plush office.
As we made small talk, I arranged my paperwork neatly between us. But just as I started to ask my first question, Anselmini pointed at one of my spreadsheets and asked, “What’s that?”
“That’s my Eastern European deal list,” I said, happy that I had come so well prepared.
“May I have a look at it?”
“Of course.” I pushed the spreadsheet across the table.
He examined it and tensed up. “Mr. Browder, what kind of journalist makes an M-and-A deal list?” It had never occurred to me that I might be too well prepared for this meeting. “Could you tell me a bit more about this magazine you work for?”
“Well, I—I don’t exactly work for a magazine. I’m actually with the Boston Consulting Group. I’m doing this article freelance because I’m fascinated by investing in Eastern Europe.”
He leaned back and gave me a thoughtful frown. “Why are you so interested in Eastern Europe?”
I then told him the story of how excited I was to be an investor in the very first privatizations in Poland, and about Autosan, and my career ambition of investing in the Eastern Bloc.
When it became clear to him that I wasn’t there to spy on Maxwell or his company, Anselmini started to relax. “You know, your coming here today might actually be very fortuitous.” He stroked his chin. “We’re in the process of setting up an investment fund called the Maxwell Central and East European Partnership. You strike me as just the type of person we’d like to hire. Would you be interested?”
Of course I would. I tried to conceal my eagerness, but I couldn’t, and by the time I left, I had a job interview scheduled in my calendar.
To prepare for it I spent the next two weeks tracking down anyone who knew what it was like to work for Robert Maxwell. He owned the Daily Mirror in London, a local tabloid, and was regarded as not merely eccentric but imperious, testy, and impossible to deal with—so I had my concerns.
I found an ex-BCG consultant named Sylvia Greene who had once worked for him. I got her on the phone and asked for her advice.
After a long silence, she said, “Listen, Bill, forgive me if I’m being blunt—but in my opinion you’d be totally out of your mind going to work for Maxwell.”
“Why’s that?”
“Robert Maxwell is a monster. He fires everybody all the time,” Sylvia said with feeling, making me wonder if she’d been one of the people he’d fired.
“That’s not very comforting.”
She paused again. “No, it isn’t. There are lots of stories I could tell you, but there’s a dramatic one that’s been making the rounds. About six months ago, Maxwell was on his private jet in Tampa, Florida. The plane was taxiing toward the runway and he asked his assistant for a pen to sign some documents. When she handed him a Biro ballpoint instead of his usual Montblanc, he became furious. He demanded to know how she could be so stupid not to have the right pen. She didn’t have a good answer and he fired her on the spot. She was literally deposited right onto the tarmac. This poor little twenty-six-year-old secretary from Essex had to find her way back to London all on her own.”
I found three more ex-Maxwell employees and got three equally outrageous and colorful anecdotes, all with one common denominator: everyone was getting fired. One banker, a friend at Goldman Sachs, said to me, “The probability of you lasting a year there is zero, Bill.”
I considered these stories carefully as the interview drew nearer, but they never succeeded in scaring me off. So what if I got fired? I had a Stanford MBA and BCG on my résumé. Surely I could find another job if I needed to.
I did the interview, then two more. Within days of the last one I was offered the position.
Against all the warnings, I accepted it.
I started my new job in March 1991. With my higher salary, I moved into my own place, a nice little cottage in Hampstead, North West London. From there I walked down a narrow road and got on the Northern Line to Chancery Lane, where I made my way to Maxwell House. Robert Maxwell had purchased this building in part because it was one of only two in all of London that allowed helicopters to land on the roof. This enabled Maxwell to commute from his home at Headington Hill Hall in Oxford to his office by helicopter, avoiding the traffic.
The idea of the boss arriving in such style sounded impressive until I experienced it for the first time. With windows open on a warm spring day, I heard the staccato whirl of a helicopter approaching. As it got closer, the sound became more intense. By the time it was directly overhead, papers in the office started to fly everywhere. All telephone conversations had to stop because of the noise. Things returned to normal only when the helicopter had safely landed and the rotors were switched off. The whole ordeal lasted four minutes.
On my first day of work I was told that I could pick up a copy of my employment contract from Maxwell’s secretary. I headed up to the tenth floor and waited in the reception area for his secretary to get around to dealing with me. As I flipped through an annual report, Maxwell himself burst out of his office. His face was red and the underarms of his shirt were soaked through with dark circles of sweat.
“Why have you not yet got me Sir John Morgan on the telephone!” he shouted at his assistant, an unflappable blond woman in a dark skirt who was neither surprised nor offended by this outburst.
“You didn’t tell me that you wanted to speak to him, sir,” she said calmly over the top of her glasses.
Maxwell barked, “Look, missus, I haven’t got time to tell you everything. If you do not learn to take the initiative, you and I are going to fall out.”
I slunk into my chair and tried not to be noticed, and as quickly as Maxwell appeared, he lumbered back into his office. The assistant finished what she was doing and then handed me an envelope with a knowing look. I grabbed it and made my way back to the eighth floor.
Later that day, I mentioned the incident to one of the secretaries near my desk. “That’s nothing,” she huffed. “A few weeks ago he shouted so loudly at someone from his Hungarian newspaper, the poor man had a heart attack.”
I went back to my desk, my contract suddenly heavy in my hands. That evening, as if to confirm what everyone really thought of Maxwell, as soon as the whomp-whomp of his helicopter could be heard, indicating that he was leaving, loud cheers rose across the office floor. I couldn’t help but wonder, Have I made a big mistake by coming here?
On the Monday of my second week, I arrived in my office and found a new addition, a fair-haired Englishman a few years older than me, sitting at the spare desk. He stood and offered his hand. “Hello, I’m George. George Ireland. I’m going to be sharing this office with you.” His English accent was so upper-crust and pronounced that at first I thought he was faking it. George wore a dark, three-piece suit and had a copy of the Daily Telegraph on his desk. A tightly furled, black umbrella leaned against his filing cabinet. He struck me as a caricature of the perfect English gentleman.
I found out later that George had previously worked as Maxwell’s private secretary, but unlike the others in that position, he had quit before he was fired. As he was a close childhood friend and Oxford roommate of Maxwell’s son Kevin, another place was found for George. Whatever humiliations Maxwell inflicted on his staff, he had a strange and well-developed sense of family loyalty, which he had extended to George.
But as soon as I met George, I was suspicious. Was he going to report back to the boss everything I said?
After our introduction, George and I settled at our desks, and a few minutes later he asked, “Bill, have you seen Eugene anywhere?” Eugene Katz was one of Maxwell’s financial-bag carriers who sat nearby.
“No,” I said offhandedly. “I heard that Maxwell sent him to do some due diligence on a company in the US.”
George sneered incredulously. “Due diligence on a company! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Eugene knows nothing about companies. You might as well send your local publican1 to do this due diligence,” he said, inflecting the last two words for effect.
Over the course of our first day together, George proceeded to destroy the possibility of my feeling deferential toward anyone in the organization. He had such a keen eye for absurdity and hypocrisy—and such a razor-sharp wit—that I had a hard time not laughing anytime one of Maxwell’s top lieutenants was mentioned in conversation.
That was how I learned that George was not spying on me.
From George’s running commentary, it became obvious that Maxwell managed his company more like a corner shop than a major multinational corporation. Everything about it reeked of nepotism, dysfunction, and bad decision making. Yet, I still felt that I’d landed the best job in the world. I’d achieved my goal of being an investor in Eastern Europe. Maxwell was the only person making investments in the region, and if anyone in Eastern Europe wanted to raise capital, they had to come to us. Since I was the one who vetted all the deals, I was effectively the gatekeeper for every Western financial transaction in that part of the world—all at the tender age of twenty-seven.
By the fall of 1991 I had reviewed more than three hundred deals, I had traveled to nearly every country of the former Soviet Bloc, and I was responsible for making three significant investments for our fund. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
But then, after returning from lunch on November 5, I switched on my computer and was greeted with a red Reuters headline: “Maxwell Missing at Sea.” I chuckled and swiveled in my chair. “Hey, George—how did you do that?” George was always organizing pranks, and I figured this was one of them.
Without looking up from his work he said, “What on earth are you talking about, Bill?”
“This thing on my Reuters screen. It’s really convincing.”
“What’s on your Reuters screen?” He rolled his chair to my desk and we stared at it together. “I . . .” he said slowly. That’s when I realized that it wasn’t a joke at all.
Our small office had glass interior walls and I could see Eugene, white as a ghost, running toward the elevators. Then a few senior executives rushed past, struck with similar looks of panic. Robert Maxwell was indeed missing at sea. This was horrible news. Maxwell may have been a bastard, but he was also the undisputed patriarch of the organization, and now, for better or worse, he was gone.
Nobody in the office knew anything about what had happened, so George and I stayed glued to Reuters (this was before the Internet, and Reuters was all we had for breaking news). Six hours after the first headline appeared, we learned that Maxwell’s enormous body had been lifted out of the Atlantic Ocean off the Canary Islands by a Spanish naval search-and-rescue helicopter. He was sixty-eight years old. To this day, nobody knows whether it was an accident, suicide, or murder.
The day after Maxwell died, the share price of MCC plummeted. This was to be expected, but it was made worse because Maxwell had used shares of his companies as collateral to borrow money to support the share price of MCC. These loans were now being called in by the banks, and nobody knew what could be repaid and what couldn’t. The most visible effect of this uncertainty was the endless procession of well-dressed, nervous bankers who lined up to meet with Eugene, desperate to get their loans repaid.
While we were all shocked by Maxwell’s death, we couldn’t help worrying about our own futures. Would our jobs be safe? Would we get our year-end bonuses? Would the company even survive?
A little more than a week after Maxwell’s death, my boss called me into his office and said, “Bill, we’re going to pay bonuses a little early this year. You’ve done a fine job and we’re going to give you fifty thousand pounds.”
I was stunned. This was more money than I had seen in my entire life, and twice what I was expecting. “Wow. Thank you.”
He then handed me a check—not a machine-typed check issued by the payroll department, but a handwritten one. “It’s very important that you go down to the bank and ask for express clearing of this to your account straightaway. As soon as you’re done, I’d like you to come back here and let me know how it went.”
I left the office, walked quickly to Barclays on High Holborn, and nervously presented the check to the teller, requesting that it be cleared to my account immediately.
“Please take a seat, sir,” the teller said before disappearing. I turned and sat on an old brown sofa. I tapped my feet nervously, reading a savings-account brochure. Five minutes passed. I picked up another leaflet on mutual funds, but couldn’t focus. I started thinking about the Thai vacation I was going to book for the Christmas holidays when this was all over. Thirty minutes passed. Something wasn’t right. Why was it taking so long? Finally, after an hour, the teller returned with a bald, middle-aged man in a brown suit.
“Mr. Browder, I’m the manager.” He shuffled slightly and looked at his toes before eyeing me warily. “I’m sorry, but there aren’t sufficient funds in the account to clear this check.”
I couldn’t believe it. How could MCC—a multibillion-pound company—not have enough money to cover a £50,000 check? I grabbed the uncashed check and quickly made my way back to the office to tell my boss the news. His bonus was going to be orders of magnitude larger than mine, and to say that he was unhappy is putting it mildly.
I went home that evening crestfallen. In spite of the dramatic developments at work, it was my turn to host a weekly expat poker game. My nerves were so frayed that I could easily have done without it, but by the time the day was over, six of my friends were already on their way to my cottage. In the age before cell phones, it would have been impossible to track each of them down to cancel.
I went home and one by one my friends showed up—mostly bankers and consultants, plus a new guy, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. When they were all there, we opened some beers and started to play dealer’s choice. After a few rounds, my friend Dan, an Australian at Merrill Lynch, was already down £500, which was a big loss in our game. Several of us thought he would give up and go home, but he put on a brave face. “No worries, mates,” he said cockily. “I’m going to make a comeback. Besides, bonus time is coming up, so who cares about losing five hundred quid.”
The combination of a few beers, the boastful talk, and Dan’s impending payday made it impossible for me to keep my mouth shut. I looked around and said, “Guys—you wouldn’t believe what happened to me today.”
I started to tell the story, but before continuing, I said, “You guys have got to promise to keep this to yourselves.” Heads nodded around the table, and I went through the day’s drama. My banking friends were transfixed. Bonuses are the only thing that investment bankers care about, and the idea of getting a check and then not being able to cash it is an investment banker’s worst nightmare.
The game finished shortly after midnight—Dan never did make his money back—and everyone went home. Even though I had finished the game £250 down, I was satisfied, knowing that I had told the best story of the night.
I continued to go to work that week as if everything were fine, but things were seriously unraveling at Maxwell. Then, two days after poker night as I walked to the Hampstead Tube stop, I picked up the Wall Street Journal. Just above the fold was the headline “The Bouncing Czech.” The byline: Tony Horwitz, the reporter I’d played poker with.
I bought the paper and opened it up. There, in black and white, was the exact story I’d told around my kitchen table.
I got on the Tube and reread the piece, mortified by what I had done. I thought this reporter was going to keep this to himself, but he had completely screwed me. No matter what kind of crisis the company was going through, there was no way I could talk my way out of this monumental fuckup.
When I got to work I stared straight ahead, avoiding the eyes of my co-workers. I was desperate to come up with a plausible explanation for my actions, but I couldn’t. George arrived a few minutes later, completely oblivious to my indiscretion. Before I had a chance to explain to him that I would probably be getting fired that day, I glanced through our office’s glass partition and noticed a strange group of men assembling in the reception area. They were so out of place that I pointed them out to George. He rolled his chair over to my desk and we watched them together—and for a moment I forgot about the Wall Street Journal article.
Unlike the parade of dark-suited bankers from before, these men wore ill-fitting blazers and raincoats and looked completely uncomfortable. They huddled briefly before fanning out across our floor. A young man, not more than twenty-five years old, walked into our room. “ ’Morning, gents,” he said in a thick cockney accent. “You probably don’t know why we’re here. My name is PC2 Jones. And this”—he waved his arm in a grand gesture—“is now a crime scene.”
For a brief moment I was relieved that this wasn’t about my Wall Street Journal stupidity. But that feeling was short-lived as I started to appreciate the gravity of the situation.
PC Jones took our details and, as George and I watched, started placing white evidence tape over our desks, computer screens, and briefcases. He then asked us to leave.
“When can we come back?” I asked nervously.
“I’m afraid I don’t know that, sir. All I know is you have to go. Now.”
“No. That’s part of the investigation.”
George and I looked at each other, grabbed our coats, and quickly left the building. As soon as we got outside, we were met by a swarm of reporters at the building’s entrance.
“Were you part of the fraud?” one shouted, thrusting his microphone into my face.
“Where’s the pensioners’ money?” another demanded, a camera rolling over his shoulder.
“What did you do for Maxwell?” a third one yelled.
I could barely think as we pushed our way free of the reporters. Several of them trailed us for a half a block before giving up. We didn’t know what to do, so we walked briskly toward Lincoln’s Inn Fields and ducked into Sir John Soane’s Museum. As soon as we were safe, George started to laugh. He thought that the whole thing was a big joke. I, on the other hand, was in shock. How could I have been so stupid not to listen to everyone’s advice about Maxwell?
When I got home that afternoon, I turned on the news and the lead story on every channel was the £460 million hole that had been discovered in MCC’s pension fund. Maxwell had looted the firm’s pension fund in an attempt to prop up the company’s sagging share price, and now thirty-two thousand pensioners had lost their life savings. On the BBC I saw the melee at the entrance of our building and even caught a glimpse of myself fighting through the crowd. Later that night, the BBC reported that Maxwell’s was the biggest fraud in British history.
The next morning I couldn’t decide: should I go to work or not? After deliberating for an hour, I decided to go. I left my peaceful cottage, got on the Tube, and once again fought my way through the scrum of reporters at the front entrance of Maxwell House. When I got to the eighth floor, I was greeted in the reception area by a new group of strangers. This time, they were the bankruptcy administrators. One stopped me before I could go into my office and said, “Go to the auditorium. There’s about to be an important announcement.”
I followed his instructions and found an empty seat next to George. About half an hour later, a middle-aged man carrying a clipboard appeared. His sleeves were rolled up, he had no tie, and his hair was mussed, as if he had nervously been running his fingers through it over and over. He took the podium and started reading from a prepared statement.
“Good morning, everyone. I’m David Solent from Arthur Andersen. Last night, Maxwell Communications Corporation and all of its subsidiaries were put into administration. The court has appointed Arthur Andersen as bankruptcy administrators to wind up the company. Following standard procedures, our first course of action is to announce redundancies.” He then began to read names, in alphabetical order, of all the people who were being fired. Here and there, secretaries started weeping. One man stood and shouted obscenities. This man tried to get close to the stage, but was stopped by a pair of security guards and escorted away. Then George’s name was called, along with that of Robert Maxwell’s son Kevin, and just about everybody else I knew at the company.
Amazingly, my name wasn’t called. Of all the things I had been warned about before taking the job, the one thing that was sure to happen—my being fired—didn’t happen. I soon learned that the administrators had kept me on because they had no idea what to do with the investments in Eastern Europe. They needed someone around to help them sort it out.
I grabbed onto this little victory, thinking that it would make it easier for me to find a new job when everything was over. Unfortunately, I could not have been more wrong. I was no golden boy anymore. Having Maxwell on my résumé was as toxic as it could get, and I soon discovered that nobody in London would touch me.
1 Pub manager.
2 Police constable.