MAXWELL, EXCESSES OF LAST DECADE

Robert Maxwell, the British publishing tycoon, was a crook a $1.38 billion (and climbing) crook. Even his son says, "My father was a crook." A month ago, Maxwell's body was found floating off the Canary Islands where he had been cruising on his Trumpian yacht. Was Maxwell pushed, did he stumble or did he jump into the water?

Maxwell was a master corporate shuffler, creating more than 400 shell companies and nimbly moving stocks and cash from one shell to another. A few of his corporations were public, but the vast majority were private and thus insulated from regulation and disclosure requirements. Maxwell used the assets of the public companies to shore up the private ones and to sustain his princely life style.

He even siphoned off the pension funds of his employees. In 1971, the British government had declared Maxwell "unfit" to operate a public company by reason of his then-identified shady dealings. That didn't seem to bother bankers enough to keep a close watch over his dexterous piracy.

Although an immigrant Czech, Maxwell was, in his own mind, part of the British Establishment. As Walter Bagehot might write, the British like to defer to those with real or pretended power. If one seeks to command, one will find the obedient. Maxwell was the power that dared to speak his own name often and loudly. Despite the 1971 findings of unfitness, despite reporting that the Maxwell empire was a "house of cards," he commanded credit and the creditors obliged.

Maxwell was a man of incredible contrasts. He was, at one time, a socialist member of Parliament, yet he lived a life of ostentation and opulence. His flagship newspaper, the Daily Mirror, was the tabloid voice of the Labor Party, yet he paid his employees the lowest pensions in the newspaper industry. Maxwell bragged about his generosity to various causes, but, as it turns out, he was mostly generous with other people's money.

He was a vigorous exponent of the right of free press to publish as it saw fit, yet, under Britain's strict libel laws, he obtained endless writs prohibiting any writer or author from saying an unkind word about him. He gave speeches on civil liberties, yet tapped the phones of his corporate managers.

As Maxwell cruised near the Canary Islands, he knew he had played the shuffle game to its outer limits. There was simply nothing left to steal. The common wisdom in London is that he jumped and the Maxwell empire drowned with him. His sons had their passports lifted when it was discovered they had co-signed the documents that authorized the plunder of the pension funds. (Son Kevin was allowed one trip to New York to "save" the Daily News.) Maxwell's widow fled to her native France from the Regency mansion Maxwell rented in Oxford. She told the staff not to expect her back very soon. Left behind is the $250,000 Rolls-Royce, the helicopter, the $20 million yacht all very nice but no one knows who owns them now. Now the bankers will fight the pensioners for proper title.

Hardly anyone in Britain had anything nice to say about the plundering Maxwell. One friend did try to soften it all by saying, "He was a beleaguered man." His next-to-last editor at the Daily Mirror put it rather pointedly when he said, "He was a liar, thief, bully, trickster, fraudster, monster. This exercise of loathing has spewed out in a cathartic exercise."

The 1990s have claimed another practitioner of 1980s excess, leaving thousands of victims to pick up the pieces. We must be mindful that we are in the season of Dickens.