[2] Vesco was notorious throughout his life, attempting to buy a Caribbean island from Antigua to create an autonomous country and having a national law in Costa Rica made to protect him from extradition.
In November 2007 the New York Times reported that he had died of lung cancer at a hospital in Havana, Cuba, five months before,[1] although it has been suggested that he faked his death.
[5] In 1970, Vesco began a successful takeover bid for Investors Overseas Service, Ltd., a mutual fund investment company with holdings of $1.5 billion managed by financier Bernard Cornfeld, who were in trouble with the SEC.
Among the accusations against Vesco were that he parked funds belonging to IOS investors in a series of dummy corporations, one of which had an Amsterdam address that was later associated with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and that he broke into a Swiss bank vault to obtain shares.
[2][6][7] During February 1973, with criminal charges against him imminent, Vesco used the corporate jet to flee to Costa Rica along with about $200 million worth of IOS's investments, according to SEC allegations.
Vesco would continue to wage a legal battle from Costa Rica and the Bahamas to try to maintain control of his 26 percent of ICC stock, but, with five outstanding indictments for securities fraud against him, he could not return to the United States.
As counsel to International Controls Corporation, New Jersey lawyer Harry L. Sears delivered the contribution to Maurice Stans, finance chairman for the Committee to Re-elect the President.
[9] In Costa Rica, Vesco donated $2.1 million to Sociedad Agricola Industrial San Cristobal, S.A., a company initiated by President José Figueres.
However, this worked badly for everybody involved, although Vesco was reputed to have stolen more than $200 million, and appeared several times on the Forbes list of the wealthiest people in the world.
[12] During 1982 he relocated to Cuba, a country that could provide him with treatment for his painful urinary tract infections and would not extradite him to the U.S. Cuban authorities accepted him on the condition that he not become involved in any financial deals.
Intended as a possible reboot pilot for the canceled detective series Cannon, the TV film featured the even more portly ex private eye enjoying sedate retirement as a gourmet restaurateur and fishing charter boat captain until he is lured by a still fetching old flame (from his presumably less obese post World War II army days) back into hefty gumshoe action to solve the murder of her husband, a retired CIA agent turned country horse breeder.
Cannon winds up chasing down an expat financier similar to Vesco (played by Arthur Hill) along a still warm trail from Costa Rica back to the US after he finds out the murder victim had stumbled on a plot among other retired CIA agents to smuggle the fugitive back into the US following plastic surgery, where he had assumed a new identity as the dead man's inconspicuous neighborly horse vet.