Hutchison's "Vesco", written while the Watergate scandal was just coming to a head, attempts to track the history of one of the greatest, though now largely forgotten, financial debacles in modern history: the collapse of financier Bernie Cornfeld's Investor Overseas Services (IOS, a huge offshore mutual fund and financial services entity of the 1960s and early 1970s)and its subsequent almost certain plundering by Robert L. Vesco and his shadowy associates.

Although approached by the author as a history of the affair through the printing in 1974, the author's thinly disquised bias against Vesco taints the presentation as an objective accounting. Nonetheless, the work is well written (if very poorly proof-read in the reviewed edition), well researched in the main, and serves at least as a starting point in the unravelling of an extremely complex international financial fraud that cost fund investors and stockholders worldwide hundreds of millions of dollars. It is largely the story of black money, how Cornfeld's legitimate IOS funds attracted it, and how opportunistic Vesco grabbed it to the dismay of powerless international financial and police agencies. To this day, international authorities have yet to apprehend Vesco, now believed to be held up in Cuba, despite one of the greatest manhunts in law enforcement history.

The parallel narrative tracks the lives and careers of Cornfeld, mutual fund salesman cum financial services magnate /playboy extraordinaire, and Vesco, high-flying industrialist cum con man / international fugitive. The work centers around a crisis of confidence that rocked IOS in 1970 and led the corporate vulture Vesco, then desperate for a cash-rich acquisition to save his mini-conglomerate International Controls, to wrest control of unregulated offshore IOS from the flustered Cornfeld, and then, presumably, to loot IOS and the mutual funds, insurance outfits, and real estate investments it owned or managed, to the tune of no less than a quarter of a billion dollars.

Hutchison does a fine job of coloring in the story with unattributed quotes and doubtful supposed nicknames for the supporting cast and the sham corporations involved in the chicanery: this detracts from the professional, supported research throughout most of the book. At the time of the writing the author was an investigative journalist, and the book is written in such a style, which helps to captivate the reader and draw him into the web of big money, big promises, and big lies.

The foremost problem with the work is its presumption of Vesco's intentions and guilt, which, while clear in retrospect, were not at the time as documentable as Hutchison would have the reader believe.

While the book is lacking in some respects, and has some of the whitewash feel of it's Watergate-era contemporary "All The President's Men", it is certainly a worthwhile, if necessarily cumbersome read on a very tangled, intensely interesting subject for those intrigued by great true-crime stories. It tells yet another tale wherein, as the cliche' states, truth is far stranger than fiction. An edition including photos is a must. PJS 7/99.