Robert Vesco

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Robert Lee Vesco (born December 4, 1935) is a US financier who fled a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation and ended up in Cuba.

Robert Vesco took over a small New Jersey industrial company called International Controls Corporation and grew it rapidly through hostile, debt-financed takeovers of other businesses. By 1968 the company owned an airline and several manufacturing plants and Vesco held shares totalling $50 million. Although outwardly a family man, he spent most of his time in gambling.

In 1970 Vesco emerged as a possible savior of the failing Swiss investment firm Investors Overseas Services (IOS), a firm that invested funds for overseas Americans (and Americans looking to avoid U.S. scrutiny or taxes) in a variety of mutual funds. The founder of IOS, a man named Bernie Cornfeld, had run into trouble with the SEC and when his firm ran into financial difficulty, no large, reputable 'white knight' was willing to get involved.

Vesco saw his chance, and entered in a protracted battle to assume control of the company, opposed by Cornfeld and others. The battle quickly got nasty; Cornfeld was thrown in jail in Switzerland and Vesco was accused of looting the company of hundreds of millions of dollars. Many prominent figures in global business, finance, and royalty were tied to the mess, receiving money from one party or the other for support. Among the accusations against Vesco were that he parked funds belonging to IOS's investors in a series of dummy corporations, one of which had an Amsterdam address that was later linked to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and that he broke into a Swiss bank vault to obtain shares. These charges will likely never be proven, as Vesco went on the lam, fleeing to Latin America and spending the next fifteen years hopping between countries that lacked extradition treaties with the United States.

In 1973, Vesco fled to Costa Rica. Shortly before his departure, in hopes of shutting off the SEC investigation into his activities, Vesco routed illegal contributions to Richard Nixon through his nephew, Donald Nixon. The story was soon revealed and Vesco was in bigger trouble than before. Among the charges that emerged in the years after Watergate, the SEC accused him of embezzling $220 million from 4 different IOS funds, and he was accused of cocaine trafficking.

In Costa Rica, Vesco donated $2.1 million to company of president Jose Figueres. Figueres even passed a law to guarantee that Vesco would not be extradited. Vesco still hired a number of bodyguards.

In 1974 Figueres's constitutional term ended. Vesco managed to stay in Costa Rica up until 1978, when President Rodrigo Carazo (1978-1982) repealed the "Vesco Law". Vesco moved first to Nassau and then to Antigua. The Costa Rican government blocked his attempt to return. For a while, he lived in Nicaragua, while the Sandinista Government was in power. Each of these countries accepted him in the hopes that his great wealth would finance local development projects (or significant bribes to those in charge). However, this worked poorly for everybody involved. Though Vesco was reputed to have stolen over $200,000,000, and appeared several times in Forbes Magazine's list of the wealthiest people in the world (job title: "Felon"), it seems likely in hindsight that the amount he stole was much, much smaller. By 1980, he was probably broke and attempting drug running and other ventures to keep himself afloat. In 1982 he moved to Cuba, a country that could provide him with treatment for his painful urinary tract infections, and which would not extradite him to the U.S. Cuban authorities accepted him on the condition that he would not get involved in any financial deals. He also married Lidia Alfonsa Llauger.

Vesco was apparently not able to resist future financial schemes, and was soon involved in a plan to trade in a supposed anti-cancer and AIDS drug called TX. His partner in this enterprise was again Donald Nixon, who had been his bag-man in his failed efforts to buy the support of Richard Nixon twenty years earlier. On May 31, 1995 Cuban authorities arrested Vesco, his wife, and Nixon, whom they held for 30 days before sending him back to America. Vesco was not so lucky; in 1996 the Cuban government sentenced him to thirteen years in jail.

Vesco has two sons and one daughter. His older son, Patrick, attended the International School of Havana, which is associated with the University of Nebraska Lincoln Extended Education Program, using the alias "Patrick Adams". Patrick currently lives in Texas, USA.