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."