BARACUTEY CUBANO

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Robert Vesco, fugitive financier, has died in Cuba, associates say
Odyssey of fraud, bribery charges

By Marc Lacey
New York Times News Service / May 3, 2008

HAVANA - Robert L. Vesco, the fugitive financier who spent most of his life eluding American justice, may even have managed to die on the sly.
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Vesco, who was sentenced to a long prison term in Cuba in 1996 and was wanted in the United States for crimes ranging from securities fraud and drug trafficking to political bribery, died more than five months ago, on Nov. 23, from lung cancer, say people close to him.

If so, it was never reported publicly by Cuban authorities, who said yesterday that they considered him a "nonissue." US officials said yesterday that they knew nothing about it.

"We don't know that it occurred," a US official said.

If Vesco in fact eluded US authorities until his final day, it was the fitting end to his nearly four decades on the run. He was wanted, among other things, for bilking some $200 million from credulous investors in the 1970s, making an illegal contribution to Richard M. Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign, and trying to induce the Carter administration to let Libya buy American planes.

Vesco last made the news a decade ago when he was sentenced to prison in Cuba, where he had taken sanctuary, for a financial scam. He emerged in recent years and lived a quiet life in Havana until he developed lung cancer. After about a week in a hospital, friends say, he died and is buried in an unmarked grave.

Given the controversial nature of the man, none of his friends dared be identified for fear of running afoul of Cuban authorities. While word of Vesco's death could be the final ruse of a 72-year-old, modern-day buccaneer who had every reason to drop off the radar, it would have to be an elaborate one.

Records at Colon Cemetery in Havana indicate that a Robert Vesco was buried there on Nov. 24, and photographs and videos show a man resembling him in a casket with his longtime Cuban companion looking over him.

Other photos show him coughing and clearly in pain in a hospital bed on what a friend said was the day before he died. There are also photos of a small group of people attending his burial.

His last days, a friend said, were in marked contrast to his ebullient preprison phase, when he partied lavishly, chain-smoked, and talked big.

Some of those who knew Vesco said it would not surprise them if Vesco had orchestrated a fake death, to slip away one more time. "He could have died," said Arthur Herzog, an author who interviewed Vesco in Cuba for a biography. "But Bob has used disguises in the past."

On top of that, Herzog said, an intermediary who lives on the island had left the impression that he was in contact with Vesco in Cuba within the last month.

After a criminal odyssey that began on Wall Street, Vesco fled the United States in 1971, along the way repeatedly demonstrating the power of money to overcome any ideology.
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His associates and protectors included democratically elected presidents in Costa Rica, the left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the cocaine barons of Colombia, the terrorism-tainted government in Libya, and finally, the communist government of Fidel Castro.

"With even a fraction of what he was supposed to have stolen he could have disappeared," wrote Herzog, in his 1987 biography, "Vesco: From Wall Street to Castro's Cuba, The Rise, Fall and Exile of the King of White Collar Crime."

Instead, Vesco seemed to have a compulsion to call attention to himself from his places of exile. A self-made man, he seemed hardly able to help it.

A high school dropout from Detroit, he lied about his age to get a job on an automobile assembly line. At 21, he moved to New Jersey to work for a struggling manufacturer of machine tools.

He took over the company when it went bankrupt, rebuilt it, and renamed it International Controls Corp. By the age of 30, Vesco was a millionaire.

He turned his sights on a Switzerland-based mutual fund company, Investment Overseas Services (IOS). When that, too, ran into trouble, Vesco offered to rescue the company and was embraced as a white knight by investors terrified of losing their savings.

He bought IOS in 1970 for less than $5 million, gaining control of an estimated $400 million in funds. The accounting at the company had been so chaotic that Vesco, by adding a few subterfuges of his own, was able to allegedly plunder its holdings at will.

After numerous complaints, the US Securities and Exchange Commission investigated. In 1972, the commission charged Vesco and others in a civil lawsuit with stealing more than $224 million.

But Vesco had already fled, first to the Bahamas and then to Costa Rica. There, he established a close friendship with President Jose Figueres, plowing some $11 million into his adopted country.

Vesco also befriended Donald A. Nixon Jr., a nephew of President Richard M. Nixon, and gave $200,000 to the Nixon campaign, apparently hoping the president would help quash the investigation against him.

It was to no avail. But to the frustration of the FBI, Vesco remained tantalizingly out of reach in Costa Rica, where he passed himself off as a progressive dairy and cattle rancher and an investor in high-tech projects.

Eventually, one of his high-tech brainstorms - a factory to make machine guns, which included Figueres' son as a partner - became his undoing.

A public and political outcry ensued, and by 1978, he was forced to leave for the Bahamas, the beginning of years of hopscotching that included stops in Antigua and Nicaragua, before Cuba finally accepted him for "humanitarian" reasons.
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