THE PREDATOR'S FALL

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Robert Vesco had escaped for so long it seemed he had escaped from memory. When the Cuban government announced last week that it had placed the fugitive American financier under arrest, Vesco was little more than a cipher, a relic from an earlier generation, recalled in vague outline for his criminal odyssey around the Caribbean and for a broad range of roles -- millionaire, gambler, stock cheat, illegal campaign contributor, Watergate shadow, drug dealer, scoundrel. He was, for archaeologists of roguery, the fossil evidence that money can buy power and immunity from the reach of the law. Now, suddenly and surprisingly, he was back in the news. But last week Robert Vesco became not a player but a pawn. Havana, which had provided him rich refuge for a decade, seemed to decide the moment had arrived to offer him up to the U.S., which had been chasing him unsuccessfully for 23 years.

In Cuba, Vesco was a creature of legendary largesse, and the news of el americano's arrest whipped through the rumor mills. When he settled on the island in 1982, Vesco, who had been known to fire his American employees simply for arriving late for work, was so incensed at the tardiness of the bodyguards assigned to him by the government that he gave all of them Rolexes to keep accurate time. Last week the only security guard at his empty white-washed house at 2114 204th Street, in Havana's elegant Atabey suburb, turned journalists away, saying, "If you want to know more, please direct your inquiries to Villa Marista." Villa Marista is the headquarters of Cuba's state police, who deal with only the most sensitive cases and do not give up secrets easily. Was Vesco under arrest? "Yes," confirmed the guard. "He is under investigation." On Saturday the Cuban Foreign Ministry said Vesco was under suspicion of being a "provocateur and agent for foreign special services." The country involved was not identified.

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.

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.

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/

With reporting by CATHY BOOTH/MIAMI, LAURA LOPEZ/MEXICO CITY, DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON AND SUSASNNE WASHBURN/NEW YORK