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.)