Word: vesco
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Sears in his previous testimony had spun a strong web of circumstantial evidence to support the Government's charge that Mitchell and Stans illegally tried to ease the tangled problems of Financier Robert Vesco with the Securities and Exchange Commission. As his part of the deal, claimed the prosecutors, Vesco made a secret contribution of $200,000 to President Nixon's campaign in 1972. But then Sears, 54, lawyer, former G.O.P. leader in the New Jersey senate and political handyman for Vesco, turned to Play-Doh in the skillful hands of Peter E. Fleming Jr., Mitchell...
Front Row Seat. Sears made the whole Vesco affair sound like the everyday fraternizing of friends in high places rather than a plot to trade political influence for a campaign contribution. When Sears said he had introduced Vesco to his friend Mitchell on March 12, 1971, the defense pointed out that the date was 13 months before the financier made his gift and six days before the SEC even began looking into Vesco's mutual-fund operations overseas...
Sears was Vesco's man-"he was in Vesco's pocket," as a federal prosecutor bluntly put it. Vesco had contributed $20,000 to Sears' unsuccessful attempt to win New Jersey's Republican gubernatorial primary in 1969, then helped him to pay off his campaign debts. Vesco also put Sears on a $60,000-a-year retainer as part-time counsel and a director of his International Controls Corp., which had taken over Investors Overseas Services, the rickety mutual-fund empire glued together in Switzerland by Bernard Cornfeld...
...began in 1971 to nose into Vesco's operations abroad. Sears said that he tried for months to persuade his old political friend John Mitchell to help Vesco get access to William Casey, then the SEC chairman, so that the financier could plead his case in person. Mitchell appeared sympathetic, but nothing happened, though Sears pointed out that Vesco had made a substantial contribution to Nixon's 1968 election campaign and that "he represented himself as being close to the Nixon family...
...Indeed, Vesco was acquainted with the President's two brothers, Edward, 43, and F. Donald, 59, and the latter's son, Donald A. Nixon, who has worked as an aide to the moneyman...