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Charges against Vesco outside Cuba are myriad if not of mythic proportions. One is the 1989 U.S. indictment of Vesco in absentia for facilitating the narcotics-trafficking activities of Colombian drug kingpin Carlos Lehder-Rivas, who from 1978 to '80 was using the Bahamas as a transshipment point for cocaine. Vesco was living in the Bahamas at that time and is thought to have helped Lehder bribe influential Bahamian officials to look the other way while coke-laden planes landed at and took off from Norman's Cay, a Bahamian island on which Lehder had built an outsize landing strip. Vesco was also said to have arranged for Lehder's planes to fly through Cuban air space. There was speculation last week that Havana would turn Vesco over to Washington to foster the datente both sides have been trying to achieve. "The Cubans are looking for ways to curry favor," says a State Department official. But no one believes that Vesco will be turned over for free, and the Cubans were reportedly vexed when news of his arrest was first leaked. Nevertheless, the Justice Department last week was already assembling a team of U.S. marshals to fly to Havana to pick up Vesco. But the other and much older charges are what made Vesco's reputation. In 1972 Vesco left the U.S. for Central America and the Caribbean ahead of Securities and Exchange Commission charges that he looted a European mutual fund of a quarter of a billion dollars. (He had acquired the fund for a mere $5 million the year before.) In April 1972 he secretly dispatched an employee with $200,000 in $100 bills to Maurice H. Stans, Commerce Secretary for Richard Nixon and at that time chief fund raiser for his re-election campaign. Federal prosecutors accused Vesco of trying to bribe the Nixon Administration to head off the sec probe. Stans and Attorney General John Mitchell were later indicted on charges that they intervened on Vesco's behalf in the sec case. Vesco, by then living in Costa Rica, refused to return to the U.S. to testify. Stans and Mitchell were subsequently acquitted.
Hounded by the , Vesco spent two decades in epic ostentation and arrogance-on-the-run, buying influence in Costa Rica, contemplating the establishment of a sovereign state in Antigua, toying with journalists, offering hints of revelatory interviews and then, in one case, dancing around a swimming pool with egotistical delight as a lightning storm lit up the Cuban sky, leaving the would-be questioner dangling.
Before he was a villain, Robert Vesco was a Horatio Alger hero. Born in 1935 to lower-middle-class parents in Detroit, Vesco, according to biographer Arthur Herzog, had three youthful dreams: to become a millionaire, to head his own company and "to get the hell out of Detroit." He accomplished those goals rapidly. Largely self- educated, the teenage Vesco, who managed to complete only half a correspondence course toward a high school diploma, grew a mustache to look older and try to qualify for jobs in local auto factories. He quickly moved from low-level design work to engineering to sales in various firms, garnering experience in one post to parlay into another. By the time he was 21, his job had transferred him out of Detroit and into New York City and the land of hungry investors.