THE GREATEST HEIST: Chapter 6 - The Concorde Deception

The handover from Robert Maxwell to his daughter Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein was hidden behind a lie designed to conceal a secret past and a staggering fortune.

Ghislaine Maxwell's $4,000 Concorde flight to New York in November 1992 was carefully constructed to land dual meanings to divergent audiences. Her late father, Robert Maxwell, would have delighted at the PR spectacle it caused on two sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

To the British press and the pension victims, it appeared an unmitigated disaster – the disgraced tycoon's daughter flaunting stolen wealth on a $4,000 Concorde ticket while pensioners faced destitution. The bankers cheated by her father were incandescent with anger.

But to New York society, a different story was being written. Here was Ghislaine Maxwell, arriving in signature style – supersonic Concorde, of course – ready to conquer Manhattan. Not as a refugee fleeing scandal, but as a sophisticated European socialite bringing her connections, her charm, and her father's extensive network to America's playground of the ultra-rich.

The outrage in London only enhanced her mystique in New York. Americans have always loved a scandal survivor, especially one who arrives on the Concorde. "In New York," the Mail quipped, "they adore the progeny of felons as much as the felons themselves."

A one-way trip on Concorde cost more than $4,000 – supposedly an awful lot of money for a young woman reported to be living on a 'meager' $160,000 trust fund. But that was entirely the point – to raise just enough doubt about the "broke heiress" narrative to still get her invited to the right parties, because “you never know.” Poor Ghislaine, forced to make do on merely $160,000 a year, but still flying Concorde to Manhattan – suggested a myriad of possibilities.

What nobody realized was that they were witnessing one of the most audacious moves in criminal history. That $4,000 Concorde ticket wasn't an escape – it was a grand entrance. And with her traveled not the remnants of a fortune, but the controls to a $3 billion criminal empire.

The greatest heist in history was about to begin – with an all-new cast.

The Lie Exposed

The carefully crafted Concorde narrative was designed to fit into a far larger operation that would, many decades later, bring America to its knees.

In 2019, on the Narativ podcast I hosted, Ari Ben-Menashe revealed a stunning truth to me – he had met Jeffrey Epstein in the early 80s in the office of Robert Maxwell, and with his girlfriend Ghislaine. You could hear my disbelief as Ben- Menashe said to me: "Ghislaine met Jeffrey Epstein in the early eighties."

"We can reveal to you now for the first time," I reacted in real-time.

"The story has been that they met in the nineties," I explained, "but you're now saying they met in the eighties in London in the context of the Iran-Iraq war, in the context of the Iran-Contra scandal."

This wasn't a woman running to a stranger for rescue. She was executing a plan with someone she'd known for over a decade.

Ben-Menashe told me directly: "I met Jeffrey Epstein because he was introduced to me by Robert Maxwell." The introduction came with a stunning endorsement from Israeli intelligence: "Your Israeli bosses have already approved."Maxwell wanted Ben-Menashe to add Epstein to their group of arms traders but he declined. Not that it would matter, Epstein already had the highest stamp of approval through Maxwell.

Think about what this means. While the world was being sold a story of a desperate daughter fleeing her father's disgrace, the truth was that Ghislaine and Epstein had been working together since the early 1980s. They weren't lovers who found each other in crisis. They were intelligence operatives who had spent a decade preparing for this exact moment.

Paid subscribers can get a deeper dive into this chapter by scrolling down. You will learn the size and source of Robert Maxwell’s hidden fortune; how it was laundered into the US financial system, and why it was so important for Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein to keep up the Concorde deception. This investigation is entirely funded by paid subscriptions to Narativ.org Paywall has been lifted until 4 PM ET on Aug 12.

1982: The Iran-Contra Connection

While the world watched the Falklands War, a different operation was underway in London. Robert Maxwell, simultaneously working for Mossad, the KGB, and MI6, was moving hundreds of millions in arms to Iran through a front company called Aura.

To understand the audacity of what Maxwell was running, you have to grasp how a newspaper baron built a massive off-the-books operation that dwarfed his legitimate media empire. On the surface, Maxwell owned newspapers and publishing houses. Beneath that veneer, he was running three parallel operations that would reshape global finance.

First was the arms trading. As part of the Iran-Contra operation, Maxwell moved weapons to Iran through a web of front companies, taking enormous commissions on each transaction. Israel needed Iran armed against Iraq. The Americans needed untraceable money for the Contras. Maxwell provided the infrastructure, using his media empire's global reach as cover for moving both weapons and money.

Second was the PROMIS software operation. Originally developed by Inslaw Inc. for the US Justice Department to track legal cases, PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) had incredible capabilities for parsing and analyzing vast amounts of data. The software was stolen by the Justice Department and passed to Israeli intelligence, who made a deal with Maxwell: he could resell it worldwide, splitting the profits, but with one crucial modification.

Maxwell had Israeli intelligence build a backdoor into the software. Every institution that bought PROMIS – banks, intelligence agencies, governments – was unknowingly giving Maxwell and his handlers complete visibility into their operations. Imagine the power: you're laundering billions of dollars through the global banking system, and you can see exactly how every bank is tracking money flows, what triggers their suspicion reports, how to structure transactions to avoid detection. It was the perfect tool for managing a criminal empire.

By 1984, Maxwell was marketing this trojan horse through his Berlitz language schools and other seemingly legitimate businesses worldwide. Banks thought they were getting cutting-edge software to track transactions and prevent fraud. Instead, they were installing the very tool that would enable the largest money laundering operation in history.

The third operation was the most audacious: the KGB's directive to "infect capitalism with our money." As the Soviet Union began its collapse, Communist Party officials and KGB operatives were looting the state, stealing billions that needed to find safe harbor in Western banks. Maxwell's network would move this money, taking 15-20% commission while fulfilling Kryuchkov's vision of corrupting Western capitalism from within.

Throughout this period, Jeffrey Epstein was a frequent visitor to the publisher’s offices at the Mirror Group. While Ben-Menashe vehemently denied any involvement of Epstein in his arms trading group, Epstein had been learning the ropes from Adnan Khashoggi, who was involved in several deals with Maxwell. Regardless of the circumstances, the British super spy and his Brooklyn protégé interacted frequently in the 1980s.

As Maxwell was entering his final years, he amassed a remarkable intelligence operation no one at the time knew about. The PROMIS backdoors would show them exactly how to structure transactions. The arms deals provided massive cash flows that needed cleaning. The Soviet money would soon flood in, requiring sophisticated financial engineering to integrate into Western markets.

The Wash and Spin

But there was another crucial piece to this puzzle – Steven Hoffenberg and Towers Financial. In 1987, Douglas Leese had a problem. The Al-Yamamah scandal was heating up. Parliamentary investigators were sniffing around. He needed his protégé Epstein somewhere safe, somewhere the arms money could be washed without attracting British scrutiny.

"The man that introduced me to Epstein was a partner then with Adnan Khashoggi, was entrenched in the arms trafficking business," Hoffenberg told me. "And wanted me very desperately to hire Jeffrey Epstein."

The desperation was telling. This wasn't a job recommendation – it was an order from the intelligence-arms dealing network. Leese was "a principal in Towers," Hoffenberg confirmed. "He had an enormous say in Towers Financial."

Hoffenberg himself was no innocent. He'd been running financial frauds since the 1970s, but Towers Financial would become something far more sophisticated under Epstein's guidance. By 1991, "two billion dollars a year" was flowing through Towers – not the $450 million that prosecutors would later claim. The money came from arms deals via Douglas Leese and Khashoggi, Soviet funds via Maxwell's networks, Iran-Contra funds that needed washing, and increasingly, money from the collapsing Soviet Union.

The $600 Million Secret

At Maxwell's disposal was a fortune of money – slush funds created by Israel and the US to fund the Iran-Contra operation. Ben-Menashe revealed the staggering scale: Israel's slush fund contained $600 million plus interest, safely tucked away in the East Bloc. The CIA had another $600 million plus interest sitting in various banks outside the U.S.

$1.2 billion in untraceable funds that would never appear on any government ledger.

"As for the American CIA money," Ben-Menashe explained, "in August 1991, we cut a deal handing control of it to Robert Maxwell, who in turn was supposed to disburse it to the Americans. But Maxwell reneged on the deal."

Three months later, Maxwell was dead.

The Soviet Collapse Fortune

The scale of the looting was staggering. In one Bulgarian operation alone, Maxwell moved $500 million using nothing more than simple withdrawal slips. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had established 84 foreign companies with 7,000 bank accounts – all requiring Western financial expertise to access and empty.

Within weeks of the August 1991 coup attempt, seven Communist Party finance officials died under mysterious circumstances. They knew where the money was hidden. Maxwell himself died ten weeks later, found floating near his yacht while attempting to blackmail Mossad for $650 million to cover his massive thefts.

Dead men may tell no tales, but they can leave a treasure trove of secrets.

The Fortune That "Didn't Exist"

The media painted Ghislaine as virtually penniless, surviving on a "meager" $160,000 annual trust fund. Poor little rich girl, forced to flee her father's disgrace with barely enough for a Concorde ticket.

The reality was staggering. When administrators tried to recover the $750 million stolen from Mirror pension funds, they could only liquidate what they could find and prove Maxwell owned. The visible assets – newspapers, publishing companies, the yacht Lady Ghislaine – recovered perhaps $150-300 million, leaving pensioners with massive shortfalls.

But this was the genius of Maxwell's structure. His tangled empire of Liechtenstein foundations, private companies, and cross-holdings shown in corporate charts was just the legitimate front – designed to collapse while protecting the real fortune. At the time of his death, Robert Maxwell controlled:

The Visible Losses (What Administrators Found):

• $750 million stolen from Mirror Group pension funds

• $160 million diverted from Mirror Group company accounts

• $1.6 billion in loans secured against worthless collateral

The Invisible Fortune (What They Never Found):

• $780 million in CIA Iran-Contra funds (stolen, never returned)

• $600 million in Israeli Iran-Contra funds (under Maxwell's control)

• Billions in Soviet collapse money (15-20% commission on transfers)

• In one Bulgarian operation alone, he moved $500 million with simple withdrawal slips

• The Communist Party's 84 foreign companies with 7,000 bank accounts

• Ongoing PROMIS software profits from backdoors worldwide

Conservative total of hidden assets: Over $3 billion

The money wasn't in the corporate structure being liquidated. It was in Swiss numbered accounts, Liechtenstein anstalts, Cayman Islands shells, bearer bonds in safety deposit boxes, and real estate held through untraceable trusts. Everything designed to be invisible to administrators but fully accessible to those who knew the passwords and account numbers.

This fortune didn't disappear when Maxwell died. It needed new management. And that management transition took exactly one year to execute.

November 5, 1991: The Inheritance

Robert Maxwell's bloated body was pulled from the Atlantic Ocean near his yacht, Lady Ghislaine. The official verdict: accidental drowning. The intelligence community knew better. Within hours, Israeli intelligence was at his funeral. Mossad's directors lined up to pay respects to their asset.

But the real action was happening behind the scenes. As Steven Hoffenberg would later reveal: "It was a handoff from the father Robert Maxwell to his daughter Ghislaine, who brought in her lover and boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein in the takeover of the father's espionage business."

This wasn't a romantic relationship that began in New York. This was a decade-long intelligence operation reaching a key transition.

Shredding the Evidence

The tick-tock of Maxwell's death reveals the truth -

The morning before Maxwell died, he'd had two crucial phone calls. One with his son Kevin about the Bank of England meeting regarding an $80 million default to Goldman Sachs. According to Steven Hoffenberg, Maxwell also spoke with Epstein that day about his "debt issues." Within hours, Maxwell was dead, his body pulled from the Atlantic Ocean near his yacht.

Two days later, Ghislaine stood aboard the Lady Ghislaine in Tenerife, delivering a performance for the assembled media. Speaking first in what ITV News called "perfect Spanish" before switching to English in a "broken voice," she thanked the press for their "courtesy and consideration" during this "very, very sad time."

Behind this grief lay frantic activity. Roy Greenslade, a Daily Mirror journalist, later confirmed: "A reliable colleague says he saw Ghislaine shredding documents on board the yacht in the aftermath of Robert's death." She knew exactly what she was looking for – the records that could expose the intelligence operations, the account numbers, the client lists.

FBI files would later reveal that Epstein was listed as a person of interest in Maxwell's death. Within days of the drowning, he was in New York at a Plaza Hotel tribute to Maxwell, already maneuvering to take control of the empire.

By the time Ghislaine boarded that Concorde in November 1992, one year after her father’s drowning, the transition was complete. According to Hoffenberg, they had moved Maxwell's "spying records operations" from London to Epstein's compounds in New York and Florida – "truck by truck, file by file." The offshore accounts scattered across Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Cayman Islands had new signatures, new passwords, new controllers.

The woman on that Concorde flight wasn't a broke heiress fleeing scandal. She was one of the richest criminals in the world, carrying the keys to an intelligence empire built on three decades of arms dealing, money laundering, and blackmail. Together with Epstein, she controlled not just billions in hidden assets, but the kompromat files that could destroy presidents, princes, and CEOs.

As that Concorde touched down at JFK Airport, nobody realized they were witnessing the arrival of the greatest criminal enterprise in history. The target wasn't a person or a company or even a fortune.

The target was America itself.