Vesco Redux

• Share

Now the charge is drugs

In the Fugitives Hall of Fame, Robert Vesco ranks as the most enterprising. The New Jersey financier fled the U.S. in 1972 after being indicted on charges that he looted $224 million from the Geneva-based Investors Overseas Services Ltd., and illegally donated $200,000 to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. Since then Vesco has lolled in exile in the Caribbean, apparently in the Bahamas, safe from extradition efforts. He found himself in the headlines again last week: for the past four years, according to a report aired on NBC Nightly News, Robert Vesco has been directing a booming drug-smuggling business from his palmy refuge and bribing top Bahamian officials to look the other way.

The report said U.S. investigators believe that Vesco's operatives set up business at Norman's Cay. Vesco allegedly paid about $100,000 a month to Bahamian officials, including the Prime Minister, Sir Lynden Pindling.

For years the FBI has pursued Vesco, lately investigating his possible links with drug smuggling in the Caribbean, but no indictments have been sought. The probe once stalled when the FBI wanted to set up a sting operation to catch Bahamian officials taking bribes. The CIA station chief in the Bahamas and U.S. Ambassador Lev Dobriansky opposed the plan, and it was scuttled, for fear that any such investigation might jeopardize negotiations with Pindling's government over the continued use of a U.S. submarine-testing base there.

The latest net of allegations, however, has some large holes. As described by NBC, Vesco's base on Norman's Cay sounds like an operation actually run on the same tiny island by Carlos Enrique Lehder-Rivas, a Colombian drug trafficker. The DEA, which began investigating Lehder a decade ago, has told TIME that he shipped at least 500 kilos of cocaine a month from Norman's Cay between 1976 and 1982. "Vesco hangs out with some of those people," says a Caribbean drug authority, "but he's not the kingpin." Finally, Caribbean drug dealers rarely trade in both marijuana and coke, as Vesco is accused of doing. Moreover, it seems that the drug charges against Vesco may have been inflated by U.S. officials hoping to pressure Bahamian authorities to extradite the financier.

Last week's charges certainly made waves in the Bahamas. Opposition leaders demanded an inquiry, while Pindling's government denied the graft allegations, calling them a "criminally conceived conspiracy against the Bahamas."