It's the summer of 1991. Maxwell owns McMillan, and he owns the New York Daily News.

From the outside, he looks like he's on top. But if anyone could take a close look, they'd

see that Maxwell was in trouble.

Before Braun wouldn't ran a think tank, she was a journalist at the Financial Times newspaper.

She was suspicious that Maxwell was in real trouble, but it wasn't an easy sell. Her editor

at the paper needed to be convinced that Maxwell's empire could possibly be in enough trouble

that it was worth their print.

The editors said, look, alright, alright, alright. Please keep on writing about supermarkets

and company results as we're asking. You can write about Maxwell. But I'll give you

a quarter of the time of one researcher in the library. He said, alright, see where you

can get on finding out about his debt. And so I started in about July, August of 1991,

trying to put together a map of Maxwell's companies.

It was a mess. There were around 800 registered companies. And some of them were subsidiaries

of other ones.

The only way to understand the state of Robert's finances was to investigate the status

of every one of these companies. So she got a hold of the public records for each of these

companies. And started to create a map of how they were all linked.

And I started spreading them out on one corner of the Financial Times floor and started

getting very sodonic looks from my colleagues who were producing much more coffee than I

was at the time and I was really feeling quite ill at ease.

She emailed me a picture of her work that eventually moved from the newsroom floor to a half-page

spread in the newspaper. I simplified the 800 odd companies and at the top you have Robert

...