Ghislaine Maxwell arrived in New York some 30 years ago as the young and glamorous emissary of her wealthy and influential father, an international man of mystery. Robert Maxwell was born Jan Ludvik Hyman Binyamin Hoch in the meager circumstances of an Eastern European shtetl. He lost most of his family in the Holocaust, escaped the Nazis and earned combat honours while fighting as a volunteer in the British Army under his new name, Ivan du Maurier.

After Germany's surrender, the resourceful young man persuaded the Czechoslovakian communist government to supply air power to the Israelis in their 1948 war for nationhood. At the same time, he was establishing himself under yet another name, Maxwell, amid the battered and dazed society of postwar England. He became a publisher, a dealmaker, a member of Parliament, an empire builder, a cooker of ledger books, a swashbuckler who persuaded the Oxfordshire council to lease to him a vast mansion donated for more-civic purposes by the family of Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose salon hosted the likes of Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot.

The youngest of Maxwell's nine children, Ghislaine, hosted parties at the mansion, known as Headington Hill Hall, while attending nearby Oxford University. Thus she learned the power of money in making glamorous friends. Where the money came from was of little importance - her father was known to British satirists as "the bouncing Czech" on account of his finagled finances. Access to wealth made one matter.

She delivered magnificently on her New York assignment, introducing the Maxwell brand to Manhattan's high society in time for daddy's purchase of the most widely circulated newspaper in the city at the time, the Daily News, in 1991. Maxwell's London tabloid war with Rupert Murdoch was going global. But no sooner had father and daughter scored their coup than it all fell to pieces. Mysterious to the end, Maxwell pitched over the side of his massive yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, on a quiet night off the coast of Spain as his empire collapsed into a rubble of looted pension funds.