TRAVEL & ADVENTURE
Robert Vesco:
Con Man in Costa Rica By Karl Kahler
I
f Costa Rica had a Hall of Fame of Foreign Rogues, there would be a statue of Robert Vesco at the entrance.
Audacious, mendacious and thievish to the core, Vesco was the king of fugitive financiers, a master of the game of “Catch Me If You Can.” He was one of the most controversial figures in Costa Rican history, and his friendship with José “Pepe” Figueres became a shameful stain on the legacy of the country’s greatest president. Fleeing U.S. prosecution after looting a Swiss investment firm of more than $200 million, in 1972 Vesco absconded to Costa Rica, where he bought the 1,000-acre Cabo Velas ranch at the northern end of Tamarindo Bay and Playa Grande.
FEATURED FUGITIVE
He built a six-bedroom house with two swimming pools and a bowling alley, paved a dirt runway for his fleet of private planes, and became a hero to the local community by his donations to schools and his generosity to the town of Matapalo. Figueres, the three-term president who came to power in the 1948 civil war, welcomed Vesco and his millions of stolen dollars. But a change of administration a few years later pulled the rug out from under the charming charlatan. In 1978 Vesco was forced to flee from Costa Rica, and he ended up in Castro’s Cuba. 50
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But he still managed to be condemned to prison in Cuba, where he was trying to hawk a cure for cancer. Perhaps it was fitting that cancer was what finally killed him. Young scoundrel Born in Detroit in 1935, Vesco dropped out of high school and moved to New Jersey at 21 to work for a maker of machine tools. He took over the company when it went bankrupt, renamed it International Controls Corp., and became a millionaire by the age of 30. In 1970 he took over Investment Overseas Services, a troubled Swiss mutual fund firm, for less than $5 million, gaining control of an estimated $400 million in funds. Under investigation for fraud, he fled the U.S. in 1971, went to the Bahamas, and then came to Costa Rica in 1972 at the invitation of Figueres. In 1972, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused him and his associates of looting the Swiss firm of more than $224 million. He was also accused in 1972 of making an illegal donation of $200,000 to President Richard Nixon’s campaign in hopes of getting charges against him dropped. In Costa Rica, he hoped to set up a “financial district” where international funds of uncertain origin would be free of scrutiny, according to a 2006 story in the Tico Times. howlermag.com
