When Robert Vesco practices to deceive
He lives in a sprawling green and white house overlooking the Atlantic on New Providence Island in the Bahamas. He is much devoted to his wife Pat and their five children. By all accounts, he lives simply, though he does indulge himself occasionally. At his private dock are moored a 60-ft. motor cruiser, a 27-ft. fishing boat, three small motorboats and a sailboat,and his yard is crammed with expensive equipment for them.
For fugitive Financier Robert Vesco, 44, however, boating is only a pastime. He devotes his main energies to trying to quash federal indictments that charge him with looting an estimated $224 million from Geneva-based Investors Overseas Services, Ltd., in the early 1970s, and then trying to stifle an SEC inquiry into his activities by illegally donating $200,000 to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. (Former Attorney General John Mitchell and Campaign Finance Chairman Maurice Stans, who were indicted along with Vesco, were acquitted in 1974. Though Vesco is safe from extradition from the Bahamas, where he fled in 1978, he is eager to resume his career as a globe-trotting financier. U.S. investigators have already tried to collar him: last winter in an operation of questionable legality, the FBI made plans to seize Vesco on a commercial flight between Costa Rica and the Bahamas and divert the plane to Florida. Vesco was tipped off and avoided the trap.
From his palmy refuge, Vesco has been busy spinning an elaborate web of bribery plots that he hopes will somehow enmesh the Carter Administration and result in getting the charges against him dropped. The Justice Department, the FBI, the SEC, a Senate subcommittee and a federal grand jury in New York City are investigating his activities. Vesco's goal, says a high Justice Department official, "is to embarrass the Administration so that he can come back home with immunity from his legal problems."
Federal investigators divide Vesco's schemes into two phases.
In the first, dubbed Vesco I by Government lawyers, he offered four Georgians $10 million in late 1976 if they could persuade the incoming Carter Administration to fix his legal problems. The group in turn paid W. Spencer Lee IV, a lawyer from Albany, Ga., $10,000 to talk with his longtime friend and Carter confidant Hamilton Jordan about Vesco's plight. Lee met first with Carter Aide Richard M. Harden, who, claims Lee, persuaded him not to see Jordan. Lee says he then dropped the scheme entirely. After investigating Vesco I for 18 months, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., disbanded without returning any indictments. But Justice Department lawyers, in a memo to Assistant Attorney General Philip Heymann, recommended that Harden be further investigated by a special prosecutor; both Lee and Harden were suspected of lying when they claimed they never approached Jordan. But Heymann turned down the lawyers' proposal. Explains a top Justice Department official: There's something there. We have contradictions that can't easily be explained. But in terms of developing information of criminal wrongdoing, forget it. There just wasn't enough evidence."