It was November, 1983, and it fell on my lot to have been covering the federal courthouse for the Brownsville Herald during the trial of three men who had been accused of being part of a scheme with fugitive financier Robert Vesco to smuggle prohibited sugar pelletizing technology from the United States to Cuba.
Vesco wasn't in the court, and neither were two of the three men charged in the scheme.
Only one of the three defendants appeared for trial. Salvadoran Ramirez Preciado was convicted of violating the Trading with the Enemy Act and later sentenced to a five-year jail term by U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela on Dec. 19. Vela had upped Preciado's bond to $500,000 from $50,000 pending his sentencing.
The other two men were identified as Canadian organized crime figure Albert Anthony Volpe who jumped bond and attorneys presented a Mexican death certificate showing that suspect Alejo Quintero Peralta of Mexico City had been killed by a sister-in-law in a domestic incident. U.S. Customs agents thought Preciado was a Cuban intelligence officer.
I learned from Customs sources who worked the case that they had seized the sugar mill equipment at Valley International Airport at Harlingen, Tex., July 7. The three men suspected of working with Vesco were arrested at that time. Then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Wolfe charged at the trial of the three men that a Vesco associate arranged their $50,000 cash bonds.
"Cuba is in the process of improving all faces of its industry and all the technology they need is in this country," Wolfe said. "Vesco was going to get it for them. We won't see the end of this for years and years."
Case files indicated that Vesco had arranged to buy the prohibited technology from California Pellet Mill Company, a subsidiary of Ingersoll-Rand, with offices in San Francisco. He used 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 10 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.
The company produced machinery that compacted fine substances into dense solids ranging from animal food to municipal waste conversion into fuel. The application Vesco and the Cubans were trying to smuggle treated 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 machinery was seized at the Valley International Airport, and in Chicago after the men's arrests in Harlingen. The equipment seized here was a recent model and probably the best of its kind.
At the time, our sources said that "the Cuban government had built a beach house for Vesco and at least six other men some said implicated in the original $224 million mutual fund swindle of IOS Ltd., an European-based mutual fund firm."
Vesco was president and Milton F. Meissner was vice-president of of IOS Ltd., an European-based mutual fund firm.
A Jan. 11, 1976, indictment charged the two men with conspiracy to misappropriate the $224 million. At the time of Preciado's trial, Meissner was spotted by a newspaper reporter at the Varlovento Yacht Club near Havana.
The government sources alleged that Vesco used corporations located in Greece, Costa Rica and Canada as fronts in the alleged scheme to circumvent the U.S. blockade.
It isn't often that a worldwide fugitive of such notoriety made his presence known in our neck of the South Texas chaparral, but the story made the wire services and newspapers in Detroit (where Vesco was born and raised) and in New York and other large U.S. cities because of the international aspect of the scheme.
Vesco was born in Detroit and became a millionaire by age 30. He spent decades on the run from US authorities not only for fraud, but for drug trafficking, bribing American officials, and illegal contributions to Richard Nixon. Vesco reportedly died in Cuba in 2008. A relative, who is living anonymously in a rundown Havana apartment, told a news reporter that Vesco had a small funeral in Havana and is buried in a tomb that does not bear his name.
Vesco was born in Detroit and became a millionaire by age 30. He spent decades on the run from US authorities not only for fraud, but for drug trafficking, bribing American officials, and illegal contributions to Richard Nixon. Vesco reportedly died in Cuba in 2008. A relative, who is living anonymously in a rundown Havana apartment, told a news reporter that Vesco had a small funeral in Havana and is buried in a tomb that does not bear his name.
And we thought Brownsville was a quiet, little, out-of-the-way place.
2 comments:
No, we thought Brownsville was a dirty, grubby, self-hating little border town. Quiet? Naaaaaaaaaaah. Too many chickens clucking the day away.
And to think, that part of this plot was planed in a bar in 6th street in Matamoros, Good memories.
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