Vesco reportedly died last Nov.

By STAFF WRITER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Robert Vesco, the fugitive financier who left a trail of alleged bribery, embezzlement and drug trafficking that reached to the White House, died in Cuba late last year, The New York Times reported Saturday.

Vesco, who fled to Costa Rica in 1971 to avoid a US Securities and Exchange investigation into charges of cheating investors of more than 200 million dollars, died of lung cancer on November 23, the newspaper said, citing people close to him.

But it said US officials, who pursued Vesco for decades across numerous South American and Caribbean countries, were not aware of his death. Cuban officials also did not confirm the death to the paper.

"Records at Colon Cemetery in Havana indicate that a Robert Vesco was buried there on November 24, and photographs and videos viewed by The New York Times show a man resembling him in a casket with his longtime Cuban companion looking over him," the Times said.

However, it quoted author Arthur Herzog, who wrote a 1987 biography which called Vesco "The King of White Collar Crime," told the Times that Vesco may have orchestrated a fake death.

"He could have died," Herzog said. "But Bob has used disguises in the past."

Vesco, who would have been 72 at the time of his death, was caught up in the 1970s in some of the biggest scandals of the time.

Believed one of the United States' richest men at the beginning of the 1970s, after felling to avoid the SEC probe, he made an illegal 200,000 dollar contribution to then-president Richard Nixon's 1972 White House run in apparent hopes of quashing the investigations.

Five years later he was exposed trying to bribe members of the administration of president Jimmy Carter with millions of dollars.

He fled to the Bahamas and then Costa Rica in 1971, where he was sheltered by then-president Jose Figueres for years, investing millions into the country, the Times said.

Eventually he was forced to leave Costa Rica, moving to the Bahamas, Antigua and Nicaragua as US authorities sought his extradition. He finally settled in Havana, where after several years his name cropped up in US investigations into a Colombian drug smuggling ring.

Caught up in a scandal in Cuba, he was jailed in 1996 and released in 2005, the Times reported.