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."