Word: vesco
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...Commerce. To this day Stans steadfastly maintains he was not involved in any Watergate wrongdoing. In 1975 he did plead guilty to five misdemeanor violations of campaign laws, paying a $5,000 fine. (A year earlier he was acquitted of conspiring to stifle an SEC probe of financier Robert Vesco.) Watergate did not dim his loyalty or his powers: he raised $30 million for the Nixon library. Stans deems some of the current D.N.C. contributions "improper, illegal and purposely dishonest." Though he is "very much in favor" of the Senate's upcoming investigation, the now retired business consultant and philanthropist...
FORGOTTEN MAN OF THE YEAR: Robert Vesco, Watergate-era outlaw, whose arrest caused barely a ripple. Runner-up: ... We forget
...After hooking up with a cash-strapped O-ring manufacturer in New Jersey, he was fortuitously introduced to a group of investors that included Baron Edmund de Rothschild and RCA's David Sarnoff. They put about $1 million into his company, but after growing nervous about Vesco's grandiose expansion plans, they allowed him to buy them out for only $12,500 (all except Rothschild, who stayed in and after 18 months made a profit of more than $1 million on his $250,000 investment). By 1965 Vesco had incorporated his company, and by financial sleight of hand, he took...
...arrive at that pinnacle, Vesco used an innate talent for self-inflation and conspicuous consumption. As a struggling entrepreneur, he would call on his investors wearing, according to Herzog in his book Vesco, "a double-breasted suit, a homburg, and gloves" on a hot summer day. He would then say, "If my chauffeur calls, tell him to circle the block if he has to." The chauffeur in question was his plant manager, Ralph Dodd. Vesco liked to say he graduated from Wayne State University, although there is no record of his enrolling there. But he had such self-possession that...
...when he was only 35, Vesco set his eyes on Investors Overseas Services, a floundering mutual fund run by playboy-salesman Bernard Cornfeld. Touting his expertise in setting up ICC (by then a conglomerate of several companies) Vesco came in with a $5 million bail-out and was hailed as IOS's savior. Very quickly, however, IOS funds were mysteriously misdirected. By the time the sec was ready to indict Vesco, the financier was gone, having taken his loot and his family, his yacht and his planes, to Costa Rica...