Robert Vesco

Who was Robert Vesco?

Robert Lee Vesco was a fugitive criminal United States financier. After several years of high stakes investments and seedy credit dealings, Vesco was alleged guilty of securities fraud. He immediately fled the ensuing U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation by living in a number of Central American and Caribbean countries.

Vesco was notorious throughout his life, attempting to buy a Caribbean island from Antigua in order to create an autonomous country and having a national law in Costa Rica made to protect him from extradition. A 2001 Slate.com article labeled Vesco "the undisputed king of the fugitive financiers." After settling in Cuba in 1982, Vesco was charged with drug smuggling in 1989. In the 1990s he was indicted by the Cuban government for "fraud and illicit economic activity" and "acts prejudicial to the economic plans and contracts of the state" in 1996.

Vesco was sentenced to 13 years in jail by Cuba. Five months after his death in November 2007 the New York Times reported he succumbed to lung cancer at a hospital in Havana, Cuba.