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He renounced his U.S. citizenship and set himself up in the Central American nation. President Josa Figueres Ferrer had no problem harboring the fugitive. "When has any country rejected the money that has come to it from abroad?" he said on television. Vesco would invest $13 million in Costa Rica. Indeed, when press reports had Vesco depositing $325,000 in a New York bank account in Figueres' name, the President issued a clarification: it "really amounted to $436,000," not a mere $325,000. By 1978, however, vesco had fled to the Bahamas after a change in the Costa Rican presidency. In 1982 he left the Bahamas in the wake of his alleged effort to bribe the Carter Administration into allowing Libya to buy C-130 military planes (including a disputed $220,000 attempted kickback to the President's brother Billy). Vesco then sought refuge in Antigua and considered buying half an island from the country's ruling dynasty to set up his own kingdom-until rumors of an raid forced him to flee briefly back to Costa Rica and then to Nicaragua. Finally, in 1982, he settled in Cuba as the most favored capitalist guest of Castro's communist regime. There he went by the name John Adams -- even though everyone knew he was Robert Vesco. He was above the laws and the rules. In 1993, when his son "Patrick Adams" had trouble in Havana's International School-which takes only hard currency for tuition -- it was the British schoolmistress who was sent packing.
Last week, however, even the Cuban welcome had worn out and Vesco was under arrest in Havana. He had become a relic of an earlier era: the protopredator of an age of excess that had been overshadowed by another decade of carnivorous capitalism. Nevertheless, his arrest and anticipated repatriation to the U.S. are welcome news, especially for Drug Enforcement Administration agents. "It's always nice to get a 23-year fugitive off the books," says a dea official. Some worry about the evidence and the memory of witnesses. Says Raymond Levites, a former U.S. prosecutor who once tried to offer Vesco a deal to return: "Criminal cases are not like wine and cheese. They do not age well."
Many, though, want to see the mysteries cleared up. How did Vesco destroy IOS? How much money did he really take? Herzog believes that much of Vesco's legendary villainy is exaggerated: "First of all, I think he was a little nuts, more than a little. The classic paranoid, terrified of the FBI. I think he was a guy who was always a little bit crooked and I think he reacted by running, probably convinced he couldn't get a fair trial." Throughout his fugitive years, however, Vesco maintained his innocence, even as he wooed reporters and journalists with his reputation. In the end, perhaps he will again choose to boast of his deeds-and profit by it. Included in his trust funds for his children are literary rights to his life's weird story.
--Reported by Cathy Booth/Miami, Laura Lopez/Mexico City, Douglas Waller/