The following is adapted from The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, by James Rosen, to be published in March by Doubleday.

“That dirty Jew son of a bitch!" Robert Vesco was somewhere in the nighttime sky, out over the Atlantic—

"That rat bastard Sporkin … " —seething aboard his private jet, the Silver Phyllis, a Boeing 707 outfitted with what were then the world's only airborne sauna and discotheque—

"That sheeny prick at the S.E.C." —and his feelings about Stanley Sporkin, director of the division of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the punctilious civil servant overseeing the federal investigation into Vesco's multimillion-dollar business empire—

"I ought to have his lights put out." —were running toward the violent—

"I could do that, you know." —and brimming with the kind of braggadocio, fueled with rage and machismo, that was Vesco's leading export in the early 1970s. For years this had been going on, this long-distance duel, this ceaseless back-and-forth with subpoenas and depositions, and Vesco, who was used to getting his way (or buying it), had found this pest utterly insusceptible to the businessman's usual emoluments.

"That bastard Sporkin won't play ball!" And Vesco, one of the richest men in America, a fat-cat political donor seen just a few years earlier with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon on the dais of the white-tie Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, was feeling cornered and trapped, pursued by federal regulators like a hunted animal. Indeed, by March 1973, with his top lieutenants scurrying to testify before a federal grand jury in Lower Manhattan, Vesco would trigger a physical chase, hopping aboard the Silver Phyllis and fleeing the country forever. (View slideshow.)

"From now on," he declared to his pilot, "we'll be operating in the Caribbean and Central and South America. They're breaking my balls here in the U.S.  I don't have to stand for that kind of shit." (The above account, including the quotes, comes from The Flying Carpetbagger, co-written by Vesco's former pilot A.L. Eisenhauer, who was no fan of his former boss; at one point, he even stole the financier's beloved plane.)

The feds were not surprised; the S.E.C. had already warned the State Department that Vesco "may be attempting to insulate himself from the jurisdiction of the United States courts."

With his slick black hair, beady eyes, and dastardly pencil mustache, Vesco attained legendary status: the original "fugitive financier"; a jet-setting international swindler; the wealthy, winsome rogue in sideburns and sunglasses forever a step ahead of his uptight G-man pursuers, who were cursing into their two-way radios while the target slipped through their grasp again. Elaborate F.B.I. plots to kidnap and drug Vesco and return him to the U.S. produced nothing but bad publicity. "Where is he now?" the newspapers asked in gleeful headlines atop romantic tales of his exploits. In fact, whenever he emerged from his six-car caravan, surrounded by guards with submachine guns, the fugitive lived the most ostentatious kind of exile: crowning Latin American beauty queens, waxing defiant via satellite to Walter Cronkite, declaring victory outside the Caribbean courthouses where he staved off extradition. There were reports that he even slipped in and out of America, twice.

Vesco's luck—or perhaps just his money—finally ran out in May 1995, when he was imprisoned in Cuba, which had been his safe haven since 1982. By then, Vesco faced multiple federal indictments for alleged crimes ranging from making an illegal contribution to Nixon's infamous Committee to Reelect the President (subsequently dubbed CREEP) to trafficking narcotics, but Fidel Castro, for his own reasons, refused to release his world-famous prisoner to American authorities. Since then, Vesco, once perhaps the most celebrated white-collar criminal, has seemingly vanished, with firsthand information on his status or whereabouts almost impossible to obtain. No new verifiable photographs of him have appeared in more than a decade.

The case of S.E.C. v. Robert L. Vesco is still pending, an agency spokesperson says. By many accounts, the 72-year-old Vesco now has a Cuban wife. A State Department official at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana cited reports a few years back of the couple "walking about freely" along the streets of the city. Another senior U.S. official told Condé Nast Portfolio that as of 2003, Vesco was confined to the medical unit of a minimum-security prison somewhere in Cuba, suffering from heart trouble. John Lowrey, a security officer presently stationed in the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, told Condé Nast Portfolio, "To the best of our information, Mr. Vesco is currently still incarcerated and is scheduled to be released in 2009." An influential Cuban American who visited Miami in November spoke to "some people who should know" and was told that Vesco "is serving a sentence under house arrest" and that "they do not expect him to be released alive." What is beyond dispute is that whatever his physical condition or geographic location, Robert Vesco has taken up permanent residence in purgatory, a captive of his talents for finance and deceit and his singular toxicity to both the Castro regime and the American securities and law-enforcement establishment. "A lot of people don't want him back" in the States, says Ann Louise Bardach, the last journalist known to have interviewed Vesco's wives and children. "He reminds people of corruption at the highest levels of government. And who needs that? He makes Marc Rich"—a fellow fugitive financier—"look like a piker."

Born in Detroit in 1935—his mother of Slovenian descent, his father an Italian assembly-line supervisor for Chrysler—Robert Lee Vesco always wanted to get rich quick. A voracious reader and fast learner, he dropped out of a technical high school to sell newspapers, lay bricks, and repair cars. Married at 17 and a father of three by 26, Vesco juggled engineering and middle-management jobs in the automobile industry with a variety of odd pursuits: running small-stakes-gambling operations and bingo parlors, as well as a highway bar called the Powder Mill Inn. (Most of these early biographical details come from Vesco, a 1987 book by Arthur Herzog.)

Vesco was an exaggerator and a name-dropper. Using those gifts, he was able to start his career, attracting enough capital from reputable sources to purchase controlling interests in a handful of machine-parts manufacturers. In 1965, he consolidated these companies as the International Controls Corp., a suitably Bond-villain-like name, and within a year he was, at least on paper, a millionaire. By 1970, Vesco's wheeler-dealer dynamism had brought him unmistakable wealth—though heavily leveraged, I.C.C. encompassed 13 subsidiaries—but little respect. No matter how many companies he acquired, charity checks he wrote, or photo ops with famous people he squeezed into, Vesco was still not a big shot. Where, for example, was his special passport, the one that would let him bypass customs at any airport in the world? "It was a status symbol that he wanted very badly," an employee later testified.

Vesco decided to go international. His acquisitive tastes were drawn to the world of offshore mutual funds, then a largely unregulated source of unlimited nontaxable risk capital. With typical grandiosity, Vesco set his sights on the massive, Geneva-based mutual fund empire that dominated offshore finance: International Overseas Services, the brainchild of the original jet-setting investment scammer, Bernard Cornfeld. Vesco needed $2 million to fund his own firm's debt structure, and I.O.S. made an attractive mark. Despite the objections of Cornfeld—who bitterly derided his empire's ersatz rescuer as "that hoodlum," according to Vesco biographer Robert Hutchison—Vesco insinuated himself into the I.O.S. hierarchy. Through a complex series of transactions that cloaked his ownership, he bought 6.6 million shares from Cornfeld and was elected chairman in February 1971.

"I knew I was in the presence of one of the greatest financial geniuses of the 20th century," Cornfeld's assistant said, according to Herzog's biography.

The S.E.C., however, smelled a rat. On March 18, 1971, the agency opened a formal investigation into I.C.C. Initially at issue was whether Vesco's plunge into I.O.S. violated a consent order that prohibited the fund from operating within the U.S. Sporkin, who had joined the agency in 1961, was overseeing the investigation. "If we don't stop Vesco now, he'll own the world by the time he's 40," Sporkin is said to have warned associates in the early 1970s, according to Herzog. "I knew these were not good people," he recalled years later. Vesco, he said, "didn't look like a choirboy." Sporkin's boss, S.E.C. general counsel G. Bradford Cook, testified that Vesco was "crude, very sleek-looking…a slimer…the type that brings out animosity." Vesco thought himself the victim of a "witch hunt" and, against his lawyers' advice, impulsively countersued the S.E.C. and its chairman, William Casey, who would later serve as President Reagan's C.I.A. director and become a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.

If he could only meet with Casey personally, Vesco seems to have thought, he could talk his way out of the S.E.C.'s crosshairs. For the nouveau riche entrepreneur from New Jersey, getting an audience with the S.E.C. chairman, the aloof and patrician veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, became an obsession. Casey was uncooperative, though, telling intermediaries, according to testimony, "If they want to see me, they should go through the men working on the case."

Then Vesco had another idea. One of his recent personnel acquisitions—to him, lawyers were as plentiful and interchangeable as shirts—was Harry Sears, the 6-foot-5 former majority leader of the New Jersey State Senate. Vesco had lavishly supported Sears' failed 1969 gubernatorial bid, and the former state senator, known as the most honest politician in New Jersey, was now effectively the businessman's indentured servant. "We own him," Vesco allegedly once said of the politician. "He's bought and paid for." Sears, in turn, enjoyed close ties to John Mitchell, President Nixon's attorney general and most trusted confidant. Perhaps Sears, working through Mitchell, could arrange for Casey to meet with Vesco.

But Mitchell did nothing, despite repeated pleas from Sears, to exert pressure on the S.E.C. Indeed, things only got worse. At Vesco's depositions, fights broke out. Cook, the S.E.C.'s general counsel, bluntly told Sears, "Vesco lied when he was here on deposition, and if Vesco lied, we have to consider the possibility of a criminal referral." Sears testified that he reported back to his patron that he was "getting bad marks" with the S.E.C. chairman. "Bob, they do not believe you.... They claim you perjured yourself, and they point it out in very strong terms."

"That's a lot of crap!" Vesco shot back. The staff lawyers must "have brainwashed Brad Cook," he said. Now Vesco concluded that there was only one escape from his predicament: He would buy his way out.

Accordingly, Vesco and I.C.C. president Laurence Richardson paid a visit to the Washington office of former Commerce secretary Maurice Stans on March 8, 1972. A big-game hunter who enjoyed the finer things, the owlish 63-year-old Stans stood imperiously astride the worlds of politics and finance. He had served as President Eisenhower's budget director and in 1960 had won election to the Accounting Hall of Fame. Now the head of CREEP's finance committee, Stans was on his way toward raising $62 million—the equivalent of $310 million today—for Nixon's reelection drive, a then-unheard-of sum.

Vesco began the meeting, according to later testimony, by telling Stans that he had been a generous contributor to Nixon's cause in 1968—he had given $50,000—and wanted to do better in '72. "But I have a problem," Vesco continued. "My company and I are under investigation by the S.E.C.  The investigation has been going on for more than a year and not produced any charges nor arrived at any settlement. It's completely without merit and amounts to a personal vendetta and harassment.... I want to find a way to bring the case to a conference and a settlement."

"Well," Stans replied, "I can't help you with this, but let's see if we can get you an appointment with John Mitchell today while you are here." Richardson recalled that Stans picked up the phone but did not succeed in getting an appointment.

"How much you got in mind to give?" Stans then asked. "I want to be in the front row," Vesco said, his arriviste ambitions laid bare. When Stans indicated that would cost more than $1 million, Vesco offered to give $500,000 in two installments. Stans explained that after April 7, all contributions of that size had to be publicly reported with the donor's name, so Vesco might want to make the first payment before April 6.

"How do you want it?" Vesco asked.

"I would like it in currency," Stans said.

"You mean cash?" Vesco asked.

"Yes," Stans replied, "currency."

As Vesco and Richardson left the offices, according to the testimony, Vesco mused aloud about how clever he had been in broaching the S.E.C. problem with Stans; no quid pro quo had been discussed, but Vesco had made his desires plain. In fact, it was Stans who had played the snickering Vesco. "Stans was a true professional in his field," Vesco biographer Hutchison wrote in 1974. Stans  "knew exactly where to draw that line while giving Vesco the come-on. Vesco, according to Richardson, did in fact think he was buying influence. Although Stans did not offer any discouragement, he knew how not to transgress the boundaries of criminal liability."

Richardson also sensed this. When Vesco remarked that $500,000 was "cheaper than legal fees," Richardson replied, "If you think those guys are going to do anything for you...why, forget it. They'll just take your money."

As the deadline for donations loomed, Vesco, ever the street hustler, was having trouble assembling the cash. "It would be a lot easier for me to write a check," he said. The front-row types didn't know from such problems: Some $6 million, according to testimony, came tumbling into CREEP's coffers, almost all in cash, in the crazed 48 hours before April 7.

Second-row Vesco was forced, finally, to rely on a loan from the Bahamas Commonwealth Bank. On April 6, a Vesco aide and a 270-pound armed guard picked up $200,000 at Barclay's Bank on Wall Street, packed it into a briefcase, and reported to the I.C.C. offices in Fairfield, New Jersey. Finding no safe, the aide stuffed the cash into the hollow bodies of two lamps in Vesco's office. The money didn't make it to CREEP in time to avoid the new disclosure rules.

The next day, Vesco assigned Richardson to serve as the bagman and deliver the $200,000 in "currency" to Stans. Harry Sears, Vesco's forlorn flunky, agreed to tag along. Richardson later testified that before they left I.C.C., Vesco instructed the pair to deliver a message: "Tell Stans to get that fuckin' S.E.C. off my back!"

"I will give him the message," Richardson said, "but not in those words."

"Be damned sure you give him the message," Vesco persisted.

On April 10, Richardson and Sears arrived in Stans' office. If the Watergate era was in large part defined by the corrupting influence of untraceable cash on the American political system, this particular moment in the well-appointed office of CREEP's finance chairman was paradigmatic: Here were three upright members of the Greatest Generation, one carrying a briefcase stuffed with $200,000 in $100 bills. No one present likely harbored any delusions that the cash was being delivered—anonymously and past the lawful date—because Vesco had such passionate beliefs about détente or wage and price controls.

Richardson placed the briefcase atop Stans' desk, angled it toward him, then opened it enough for the former Commerce secretary to see the tightly packed stacks of Ben Franklins inside.

"Mr. Stans, here is your currency," Richardson said, pointedly using Stans' term. "Do you want to count it?"

No, Stans said. That wouldn't be necessary. Then, after closing the briefcase, Richardson, according to later testimony, unleashed the genie. "Mr. Vesco wants me to deliver you a message. He'd like to get some help."

"Tell him that's not my bailiwick," Stans replied, according to Sears. "That's John Mitchell's department."

Sears angrily bolted from the couch he'd been sitting on. "Now, wait a minute," he said. "What we brought here today is a political contribution. There's nothing else involved. Larry, I think perhaps we better leave. Mr. Stans is busy." Richardson took the hint. Vesco's secretary Shirley Bailey would later testify that Richardson confided to her that "he was of the opinion that Mr. Vesco would leave the country and that he was guilty."

More than a month after Vesco's cash changed hands, the S.E.C.'s hounding continued unabated. In another grim session with Cook, on May 31, Vesco offered to end the case once and for all by enacting the "de-Vescoization" of I.C.C. The bald 34-year-old S.E.C. lawyer replied sternly that any settlement had to include an acknowledgment of wrongdoing by Vesco.

"Your investigation has been going on for a year," Vesco said, fuming, "and you have nothing." When Cook alluded to criminal prosecution, Vesco went ballistic. "No way, baby!" he shouted. "I am 36 years old. I have my entire life in front of me. There's no way I will put my head in a criminal case, and I'll fight you every way I can."

On notice that the S.E.C. considered him a criminal, once again Vesco saw a savior in John Mitchell, now Nixon's campaign manager. Vesco harbored a weird fascination with the steely-eyed, pipe-smoking former attorney general, sometimes impressing visitors by excusing himself to take calls—real or imaginary, there is some dispute—from him. The two had met briefly a year earlier, at a dinner in Sears' honor in New Jersey.

Shortly after receiving Cook's warning, Vesco and Sears trudged into Mitchell's law office. Vesco retreated to a couch while Sears and Mitchell talked politics. For all his wealth and status consciousness, Vesco, in this setting, was a zero, reduced to looking on from afar, mute, while the older men, masters of electoral realpolitik, conversed at a level beyond his ken. But the meeting changed nothing.

By the summer of 1972, Sporkin and the S.E.C. lawyers, relentlessly pursuing the I.C.C. paper trail, suspected that Vesco and his corporate cronies were guilty not only of perjury but also of "looting" I.C.C.'s subsidiaries. Here, the case took a major turn. The feds had begun by investigating I.C.C.'s acquisition of I.O.S. and the truthfulness of Vesco's registration filings and deposition statements. Sporkin and his staff now saw a grand criminal conspiracy: theft on an unprecedented scale, with countless investors across the globe losing their life's savings so that Vesco could jet around Latin America on the Silver Phyllis.

On September 29, with the presidential election a month away, the S.E.C. subpoenaed Vesco for an October 11 appearance. He realized at once that Sporkin was wise to the illegal cash contribution to CREEP, or at least to the unexplained exodus of $200,000 from the Bahamas Commonwealth Bank. "Those bastards would like nothing more than to nail me and the president to the wall together," Vesco raged, according to testimony. "There's no way that I'm going to testify. This would blow the lid because of the interpretation of it by the media.... Nixon may survive some of the other things, but this would be the crusher."

Unable to buy his way out of trouble, Vesco now looked to play his final card: blackmail. "Get hold of Mitchell and those guys," he barked at Sears, "and tell them that they will have that [deposition] quashed or I'll blow the lid off the whole thing." It was already too late. Three days earlier, over cocktails in New York, Mitchell had heard from Casey that the Vesco case had "deteriorated immeasurably." The investigation was now being "pushed by the S.E.C. on a crash basis."

"So be it," Mitchell said.

Key I.C.C. employees now began pleading the Fifth. Among them were Shirley Bailey and Laurence Richardson, soon to make the first of more than 65 appearances before the U.S. Attorney's office and a grand jury. (Richardson would eventually reach a settlement with the S.E.C.) Sporkin believed he had finally cracked the case. Accordingly, on November 27, 1972, the S.E.C. filed a formal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charging Vesco and 20 associates with diverting more than $224 million (more than $1 billion in today's money) from four offshore mutual funds into two banks Vesco allegedly controlled in the Bahamas and Luxembourg. The S.E.C.'s artful phrasing fed a myth that Vesco had simply absconded with the massive sums cited in the complaint. But as Herzog, the Vesco biographer, noted, the complaint never said that the proceeds from the $224 million in securities that were indisputably sold were "stolen." Instead, it used words like diverted and spirited.

"The S.E.C. counted the same figures again and again in reaching the total," a lawyer representing I.O.S. shareholders told Herzog. Since exact figures in Vesco's case were always hard to come by, it was somewhat fitting, as the Wall Street Journal reported in 1984, that a dedicated band of lawyers, accountants, and bankruptcy trustees had "recovered" $500 million in assets that were supposedly misappropriated by Vesco—more than double the amount the S.E.C. originally charged him with "diverting" and still $100 million shy of what they reckoned he had, by that point, stashed away.

Inside the White House, Vesco's indictment stirred little alarm. "The way this will probably end up," adviser John Ehrlichman correctly predicted in a taped conversation with Nixon on March 16, 1973, Vesco "will go to Costa Rica, where he has bought the president."

"The son of a bitch," Nixon said. In fact, Vesco had already fled the country. During the next few months, with Watergate metastasizing and Mitchell and Stans indicted in New York (they were later acquitted in the case), Nixon's lack of interest turned to disbelief. "Vesco is a crook," the president cried. I.C.C. "didn't get anything. We indicted them.... Vesco got indicted too. Shit! It's stupidity, insanity!"

Vesco agreed. In the Bahamas in July 1973, he grumbled, "Those bastards sold me out," according to his pilot's account. "They fucked me, and they're going to keep on fucking me. They're no fucking good—every one of them—from Nixon on down the line."

As Vesco's fortune dwindled—drained by his taste for luxury, his life on the lam, and the ever-larger bribes he had to pay the banana republic regimes on whose mercies he depended—so did his influence. By 1982, having worn out his welcome in the Bahamas, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Antigua, Vesco had relocated to Cuba. "If he wants to live, let him live here," Castro told an interviewer. "We don't care what he did in the United States."

Though details about Vesco's activities after 1980 are murky, he is believed to have made the drug trade his principal business. He was indicted by American authorities in 1984 on cocaine-trafficking charges and again in 1989 for allegedly using his influence with the Castro regime to secure overflight rights for a cocaine-smuggling operation led by a top member of the Medellín drug cartel.

In time, even Castro branded him an outlaw. When Vesco was arrested in the spring of 1995, Cuban authorities initially accused him of serving as "a provocateur and an agent of foreign special services," but for reasons undisclosed, he was formally charged with "fraud and illicit economic activity" and tried on allegations that he schemed to deceive the Cuban Ministry of Public Health and other investors in the marketing of a miracle drug. Trapped at last, Vesco, then 60, tried to summon the old garrulous charm, saying that he wouldn't defraud the country that had granted him safe haven.

But Castro-style justice prevailed. Vesco was sentenced to 13 years in prison and hasn't been heard from since. In the end, the very qualities that propelled Vesco a quarter-century earlier to the chairmanship of the I.O.S. board—his genius for financial manipulation and his core dishonesty—proved his undoing. "He was known in Cuba as the minister of corruption," says Otto Reich, a Cuban native who served as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs during George W. Bush's first term. Vesco "had set up a lot of Castro's international business organizations to circumvent the embargo," Reich says. "The word on the street was that he was trying to leave the island, and Castro had him arrested because he knew too much."