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He stayed with his employer only three years before striking out on his own. After hooking up with a cash-strapped O-ring manufacturer in New Jersey, he was fortuitously introduced to a group of investors that included Baron Edmund de Rothschild and RCA's David Sarnoff. They put about $1 million into his company, but after growing nervous about Vesco's grandiose expansion plans, they allowed him to buy them out for only $12,500 (all except Rothschild, who stayed in and after 18 months made a profit of more than $1 million on his $250,000 investment). By 1965 Vesco had incorporated his company, and by financial sleight of hand, he took his International Controls Corp. public without sec scrutiny. He bought controlling shares of a public company, merged it with ICC, and renamed the resulting company ICC. Presto: he was a publicly traded company. He had also accomplished his two other goals: he had his own firm, and he was a millionaire, at least on paper. He was just 30 years old.
To arrive at that pinnacle, Vesco used an innate talent for self-inflation and conspicuous consumption. As a struggling entrepreneur, he would call on his investors wearing, according to Herzog in his book Vesco, "a double-breasted suit, a homburg, and gloves" on a hot summer day. He would then say, "If my chauffeur calls, tell him to circle the block if he has to." The chauffeur in question was his plant manager, Ralph Dodd. Vesco liked to say he graduated from Wayne State University, although there is no record of his enrolling there. But he had such self-possession that people believed his stories and went along with his boasts. He was an untiring gambler, though he won and lost with bad grace. He once publicly cajoled a man to pay a lost wager of $1,000. When the man wrote the check, Vesco further shamed him by auctioning the draft to the crowd for $200. He bought houses in Costa Rica and Switzerland, a yacht and a Boeing 707, which he outfitted with an office, bedrooms and a discotheque. To the annoyance of his neighbors, he built a heliport on his home property in suburban New Jersey. He liked to try to get away with things. He once bought his wife a $65,000 ring and then tried to get his company to pay him a bonus to cover its cost. A would-be partner reputedly told Vesco, "I had a dream. You and I slept together on a cold night. In the morning, you had all the blankets."
In 1970, when he was only 35, Vesco set his eyes on Investors Overseas Services, a floundering mutual fund run by playboy-salesman Bernard Cornfeld. Touting his expertise in setting up ICC (by then a conglomerate of several companies) Vesco came in with a $5 million bail-out and was hailed as IOS's savior. Very quickly, however, IOS funds were mysteriously misdirected. By the time the sec was ready to indict Vesco, the financier was gone, having taken his loot and his family, his yacht and his planes, to Costa Rica.