-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Vesco
Arthur Herzog©1987
DoubleDay
ISBN 0-385-24176-3
380 pps. – first/one edition – out-of-print
--[2]--
39
VESCO IN CUBA
SENATOR HAWKINS: Vesco told you he is living in Havana as
the guest of the Cuban government?
MR. DEKKER: His egomania-he told me once that he runs
the central bank.
SENATOR HAWKINS: He has a big ego, doesn't he.
MR. DEKKER: Yes.
SENATOR HAWKINS: What was Vesco's relationship to the
Cuban government, in your opinion?
MR. DEKKER: At that moment, very strong. If it is still that
way after the disasters, I do not know.*
[* "Role of Nicaragua in Drug Trafficking," p. 39. Hearing before the
subcommittee on Children. Drugs and Alcoholism of the Committee on Labor and
Human Resources, United States Senate, 1985. Dekker is Jitze Kooistra.]
For Cuba, Vesco would be quite as difficult as he had been for Costa Rica,
only in a different way. Though Fidel Castro said that Cuba harbored the
then-ailing fugitive for humanitarian reasons -as it undoubtedly did with a
quirky, ideological, anti-Yanqui twist-the Cubans entrusted him with
hard-found dollars, supported him financially, and handed him a bill for
$880,000, according to the fugitive. What happened well illustrated Cuba's
plight, partly the result of antagonism between it and the United States.
In the mid- 1950s, Cuba's per capita income had been one of the highest in
Latin America. Twenty-five years later it was far from that. Cuba does not
provide extensive statistics, but its economists declare that comparisons are
meaningless because they don't take into account that, under Batista, wealth
was concentrated in a few hands, nor would economic statistics reflect great
advances in education, medical care, support for the elderly and so on.
Nonetheless, Cuba-just as Costa Rica needs U.S. support-requires the $4
billion in annual aid it receives from the Soviet Union. The Cubans, while
faulting their own bureaucracy, corruption, and inefficiencies, also blame
the country's condition on the U.S. embargo and military expenses forced on
it by the United States. Cuba was prepared to employ unusual means, and one
was Robert Vesco.
If the fugitive had ceased to pretend he was a major investor, he did rave
about his high-level contacts, and a friend, listening, said, "Don't bullshit
these guys." Vesco snapped, "How do you think I've gotten by all these
years?" Because he sounded knowledgeable about real estate, the Cubans
involved him in a plan to develop Cayo Largo, off the southern Cuban coast,
as a tourist resort. Customs formalities would be waived, private ownership
permitted, hotels and condos built, and investments encouraged. There might
have been a banking setup of some kind. It was the sort of enclave that had
attracted Vesco before.
It was reported that the eighty-eight pairs of $6,000 classified infrared
night-vision binoculars confiscated at a Florida dockside were a
Vesco-arranged shipment for Cuba. A much larger Vesco importation attempt was
established by the U.S. Attorney in a Brownsville, Texas, trial in November
1983. The spring before, a subsidiary of Ingersoll-Rand, California Pellet
Mill Company, with offices in San Francisco, received an inquiry from what
appeared to be a Costa Rican outfit called Cominsa, later changed to Imbagua,
an acronym In Spanish for water-pumping equipment. A man representing both
companies, Jose MacCourtney, negotiated the purchase of ten of California
Pellet's mills plus extra equipment. In payment for the first shipment, a
check from Barclays Bank in Nassau for $712,337.50 was deposited in
California Pellet's account at the Bank of America. Another apparent Costa
Rican named Luhr was also involved. Luhr was Meissner's mother's name and
appeared on his Costa Rican passport. Meissner denied any knowledge of the
deal but said Vesco well knew his second last name.
The company produced machinery that compacted fine substances into dense
solids—ranging from animal food to municipal waste conversion into fuel.
Still another application was treating the residue from sugar-cane
processing, bagasse. Bagasse can be converted into briquettes for fuel for a
refinery's boilers. A refinery could thus be made self-sufficient in energy
and perhaps have fuel pellets to sell. The equipment Imbagua bought was a
recent model and probably the best of its kind.
At about the same time MacCourtney came to San Francisco, a car dealer from
West Columbia, Texas, Richard S. Bettini, received a phone call from an old
acquaintance. On instructions, Bettini always referred to the man as a
"friend," so as not to prejudice the jury. The friend was Vesco, who, the
prosecutor reminded the judge, "absconded from the United States with 300
million dollars." Vesco wanted to talk about old times in Detroit. Soon
after, Pat Vesco called from Houston and Bettim said he would like to visit.
Vesco phoned again, suggesting that Bettim fly to Cancun, Mexico. He was met
there by a pilot to take him to Cozumel. Airborne about ten minutes, Bettini
heard the pilot request permission to enter Cuban air space, and cried, "Turn
around! Go back!" but the plane landed in Havana. The Cubans wanted his
passport, and Bettini, who hadn't brought it, begged to be flown out but the
pilot refused. The terrified Bettini was placed in a small room. His surprise
at all this seemed a little feigned—Mr. or Mrs. Fugitive must have given him
some destination—but Vesco's whereabouts in early 1983 were still unknown.
"Then this friend came, whom I hadn't seen since 1967, and put his arms
around me and kissed me and I felt like hitting him," Bettini said. Vesco
drove Bettini to a modest, white stucco house at the Hemingway Marina at
Barlovento, about fifteen minutes from Havana. Pat was there and they talked
about old times in Detroit, like playing pinochle. Bettini spent the night on
Vesco's yacht, chock-full of equipment, he noted. The next day the fugitive
came to the point. He asked Bettini do him a favor by renting a warehouse in
Houston to store food-processing equipment for a company called Imbagua in
Costa Rica, where the equipment would be sent.
With two other car dealers, Bettini arranged a $10,000, one year lease on a
warehouse near the Houston ship canal and sublet it to Imbagua for $18,000,
the difference being expenses and commissions, according to Bettini, who
believed the check came from Barclays Bank. The lease was signed on June 10,
1983.
Vesco called about the warehouse and told Bettini to wait until he was
contacted. Bettini then heard from a man who identified himself as French
Canadian. He said a truck would arrive soon at the warehouse. There evidently
would be other shipments in the next two or three months. But the truck, a
trailer instead of a flatbed, wouldn't fit inside, and Bettini was told to
send it on to Harlingen International Airport near Brownsville.
Meantime, the main actors, Albert Anthony Volpe, thought to be a Canadian
organized crime figure, Alejo Quintera Peralta, a Mexican businessman
believed to be from Cuban intelligence, and Salvador Ramirez Preciado, a
Mexican air cargo expert, had not been idle. Ramirez tried to convince one
air freight outfit to file a flight plan for Costa Rica, fake engine trouble,
and land in Merida, Mexico, where the pelletizing equipment would be
unloaded. (It would then be forwarded to Cuba, perhaps through Nicaragua.)
When the airline refused, Ramirez found anotherGlobal International Airways
of Kansas City. just before the Fourth of July, two heavily laden flatbed
trucks left Sparks, Nevada, bound for, the drivers learned en route, San
Antonio, where they met still a third truck, from Crawfordsville, Indiana,
also carrying pelletizing equipment. The conspirators contacted the drivers
at a motel and told them to proceed to Brownsville. The trucks were assembled
at the airport and unloaded as a Global 707 freighter took off from Baltimore.
The U.S. Customs had been tipped off that industrial equipment was to be
exported illegally, and agents watched the equipment being loaded on the 707.
However, one of the large pieces wouldn't fit so the plane still hadn't been
loaded by evening. Volpe and Ramirez had planned to fly separately to Mexico
on a chartered aircraft, but, becoming suspicious, tried to take off. Customs
alerted the control tower, which ordered the plane to return. Ramirez denied
a connection with the 707, but the agents searched his briefcase and
established it. U.S. Customs seized the equipment at Harlingen and more at a
Chicago warehouse. None was ever returned to California Pellet Mill, which
took a small loss because it was building the other mills that had been
ordered by Imbagua.
Some two days after Ramirez, Volpe, and Quintera had been arrested, Vesco
phoned Bettini and said, "Things are all screwed up. Things are messed up.
There are all kinds of problems. I want you to call Bob Foglia in New York or
New jersey." Bettini did, and Foglia, one of Vesco's lawyers, flew to Houston
and then to Cancun where a plane from Cuba brought him $240,000, with which
he posted bail for the three Jailed men—$25,000 for Quintera (someone else
put up another $25,000), who fled to Mexico, $50,000 for Volpe, who, said Forb
es magazine, skipped to Canada and then Yugoslavia, and for Ramirez, who was
the only one who stood trial. He received a five-year prison term but perhaps
he was lucky.
Bettini, whose family described him as bitter at Vesco for having deceived
him in not admitting the machinery was destined for Cuba, died in an
ambulance the day before his forty-eighth birthday of a massive heart attack,
though he had had no previous coronary difficulties. Quintera was reported
shot to death two weeks before the trial commenced. His brother had died
shortly before in a Mexico City helicopter crash. Volpe's brother Paul was
found dead in the trunk of his wife's car at the Toronto airport. He was
supposed to have just returned from observing the Brownsville trial.
In Cuba, the Vescos lived well but not lavishly, although they had two
Mercedes with drivers. They had a house in the Siboney district, not far from
a compound where Castro and other high officials live, and another, more
spacious one at the Hemingway Marina at Barlovento. The house faced a canal
and Vesco berthed one of his yachts at his own wharf. After the U.S. Customs
seizure at Harlingen, the Vescos moved to a smaller place, on Havana's wide
Fifth Avenue and then back to Siboney where Vesco did his own carpentry.
Castro said that Vesco was simply one more foreign resident, but it wasn't
true. Vesco's access to Cuba had been the result of a call by Tomas Borge to
his Cuban counterpart, Minister of the Interior Ramiro Valdez. Vesco was
assigned to the Compania Importadora-Exportadora, or CIMEX, one of whose
people, Junco, had fought with Castro in the Sierra Maestre and had been with
Cuban intelligence, the DGI. He was Vesco's gofer and watchdog and he seems
to have reported to Tony de La Guardia, a State Security Colonel. In 1983,
after the pelletizing deal was stopped, Vesco's relations with the Cuban
government turned sour, and the Cubans gave him a bill Vesco variously
claimed was for $880,000 or $800,000, though LeBlanc believed $400,000 was a
more reasonable figure.
Vesco had charged personal bills to CIMEX—the costly telephone, rents, cars,
airline tickets to Nicaragua, flights for other people to various places,
and, it was said, a $150,000 advance commission. (He played around with
another commission, for Cuban Monte Cristo cigars to be sold in a one-shot
shipment to a Las Vegas casino that would give them to big-rollers, but the
deal fell through.) Cuba was prepared to write off its investment in the
sugar equipment, plus the bail it appeared to have provided, but wanted the
rest of its money. When Vesco couldn't or wouldn't pay, his boats-—n which,
the FBI knew, he had cruised off the coast of Florida, landing at least once
at Key West—were embargoed and his long-distance telephone rights restricted.
His boats were seized by the Cubans as collateral but returned in a
settlement.
Vesco claimed he didn't pay the Cuban bill because he feared that if he
admitted he had ready sources his hosts would demand even more. But he also
told people he was broke. Despite his consistent fabrications, it doesn't
seem likely that Vesco, if he had the money he is supposed to have clipped,
would deliberately have chosen impoverished, difficult Cuba when more
pleasant refuges could have been found. For LeBlanc, Vesco was down to his
last half-million or so, though Pat still had her jewels. He may have
received, in kickbacks and commissions, many millions, but the costs of
fugitivehood were enormous and Bob always squandered money. Within a year,
Norman predicted in 1986, Bob would be virtually penniless.
In 1985 occurred another strange episode that put some light on Vesco
finances. Midyear, the Vescos sold the Guanacaste finca to a group of rich
Americans that included Manfred DeRewal, owner of a Guanacaste hotel. The
price was $1.2 million, and Norman and Pat went to Panama City to pick up the
first payment, $600,000, of which $240,000 was in cash. Prompted by American
officials who thought the money might be narcotics related, the Panamanians,
who fully cooperate with the United States on any matter related to drug
trafficking, arrested the two, who spent the night in jail. On their release,
they discovered the $240,000, of which $60,000 was intended for LeBlanc for
his services over the years, was missing. Vesco had phoned Reggie Donawa, an
Antiguan who with Ulis Brown had sailed the Salude from Haiti to Cuba, and
asked him to come from Antigua to Panama City. Reggie's Job was to bring some
of the proceeds from the finca sale to Cuba. He picked up the money, he says,
from a Panama bank and placed it in the hotel safe deposit box. He realized
he was under surveillance and was arrested that night on suspicion of drugs.
He protested his innocence and indeed, hardly understood the sort of trouble
his courier role might put him in. The authorities—Donawa wasn't quite
certain who they were—took the safe deposit key away from him and put him on
a 2 A.M. plane for Miami. Whoever had the key must certainly have removed the
money. Word of this event reached many ears, especially after Pat, at Vesco's
insistence, filed a report on the episode in Costa Rica.
The Cubans were furious at Vesco for the report because of the publicity
potential. They seemed to believe that Pat took the money. LeBlanc thought
the Panamanians had done so, while the Panamanians blamed the American drug
officials or Pat and Norman or Norman and Bob in tandem. Vesco said it had
been LeBlanc, and telephoned him in Costa Rica to announce he had a contract
out on Nasty Norman's life. LeBlanc shrugged.
In the fall of 1985, a small unofficial Costa Rican diplomatic partv, headed
by Jose Figueres, visited Havana on the Central American peace issue. While
there, Figueres saw Vesco, who said that his "problem" with the Cubans had
been solved. He had made an arrangement to pay the bill with the finca money.
But, sitting on the rug with bare feet at Don Pepe's Cuban government guest
house, he repeated the threat against LeBlanc. What agitated him more,
though, was his son Tony.
One of the final ironies in the Vesco tale is the family that is supposed to
have been sacred to him. Dawn and her son, Robert, Jr., seemed all right and
came down from Florida to visit, but Danny, the eldest, broke with his father
and did not speak to him for several years—in 1985, after calls from Bob,
Danny relented for a while. Still, he evidently detested the onus attached to
his name, and in 1986 changed it to Daniel Williams. Bobby Jr., who tried to
hit Vesco with a coat rack in Cuba, served in the U.S. Army but only for a
year. Tony's temper was a problem, and Bob sent him out of Cuba, but only
briefly. ("Tony's problem," Meissner believed, "was that Bob was always on
his back.") Stiff-upper-lip Pat was often depressed and had to leave Cuba for
U.S. visits to preserve her sanity.
Vesco's relations with the Cubans soured not only because of money. In
October 1983, a mob of reporters descended on Cuba after the U.S. Grenada
invasion, and Vesco, with his love of publicity, made a furtive attempt to be
interviewed, which the Cubans forbade. To them, Vesco had become an
embarrassment, and they virtually begged Figueres to make unofficial
arrangements to place New Jersey Bob in Rumania with whose President, Nicolae
Ceausescu, Don Pepe was close. Figueres declined because, he said, Vesco had
come to Cuba through the Nicaraguans and was no longer his responsibility.
Castro claimed that Vesco was not under house arrest or anything like it,
seeming to imply that would have been illegal in Cuba, but Bob was tightly
supervised, and Meissner had to obtain permission to see him. Vesco was not
allowed to visit hotels, because he might meet reporters there, and sometimes
couldn't even go shopping. Junco kept an eye on Bob, stateless, everywhere
unwanted, everywhere regarded with suspicion, without real rights and
privileges, subject to Cuban dictates. Vesco could hardly have been said to
be free.
The Cubans didn't wish Vesco to talk about the activities he had engaged in
on their behalf and, besides, felt an obligation to ensure his safety—the
North American authorities had by no means lost interest in the fugitive
whose seizure would have been as humiliating to Cuban security as his
avoidance of arrest had embarrassed the United States. In fact, U.S. efforts
were still under way. Ernest R. Keiser, a man in his early sixties, had
successfully lured former CIA agent Edwin P. Wilson, the Libyan arms
supplier, to the Dominican Republic, where he was refused entry and put on a
plane to New York City. Keiser either approached, or was approached by, U.S.
Attorneys and the U.S. marshals to capture other important fugitives and
Vesco headed the list. Keiser, a U.S. marshal, and a government informant
flew to Mexico City, where Keiser talked to Vesco on the phone, trying to
convince him with details provided by the informant that the two had met
before. He wanted to entice Vesco to the Bahamas, on the pretext of arranging
another pelletizing deal, but, suspicious, Vesco shied off.
In 1985, Keiser, accused of larceny, was shot in the back the day before his
fraud trial opened, forcing a postponement. Keiser vanished to become a
fugitive himself. Keiser said that Vesco, or Wilson from his prison cell,
might have arranged the shooting and the theft of his briefcase, but it
seemed likely that the shot, which missed vital organs, had been arranged by
Keiser himself.
In August, 1985, Cuba held a five-day conference on Third World debt,
attended by more than one thousand Latin American politicians (though not the
key ones to Castro's dismay), in which the Cuban leader urged cancellation of
Latin debts to the U.S. as part of the liberation struggle. An NBC TV crew
wanted a shot of Vesco. The stakeout, across the street from his house, began
at dawn. Among the crew was Nicole Szulc, daughter of Tad Szulc, even then
interviewing Castro for his book Fidel, which may have contributed to Fidel's
anger over the incident. The photo shows a gaunt man in casual clothes with a
lined and somber face, hardly the ebullient chief of International Controls.
During the press conference after the closing session, Castro's voice rose as
he cited. complete details of the NBC caper. He conceded it was "probable"
that Vesco lived in Cuba. He told the reporters, "I know you've become
interested in Robert Vesco, more even than with the debt dialogue here . . .
to divert attention . . . and this is taking place through the actions of the
U.S. intelligence services." Castro denied that he had had "business dealings
or economic interests" with Vesco who, he said, was "hunted like a deer
through the world. . . . They're persecuting a man that's living with his
wife and [family]. What do they want to do, take his eyes out, or turn him
into ground meat?"
After the conference Fidel went into a tantrum associates described as
similar to those of the early Cuban revolutionary period and which lasted
several days. A psychologist friend was brought to calm him. "Pula cono,'
Castro profanely kept calling Vesco, whom he had never met but whose presence
had upstaged his meeting. "Pula cono." Washington might have said something
similar.
pps. 334-343
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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