Extradition: Tricks And Power Plays

Robert Vesco, 38, is a much-wanted man, for several very good reasons. The U.S. attorney in New York would like to try him on charges that he defrauded one company he controlled of $50,000 and that he obstructed justice (along with John Mitchell and Maurice Stans) by donating $200,000 to the Nixon re-election campaign in return for the blocking of an SEC investigation into his financial affairs. There is also a pending civil case alleging that he helped loot four foreign mutual funds of $224 mil lion. But the New Jersey financier has taken it on the lam from the U.S., and various other countries also want him -or at least will not give him up.

In Costa Rica, where Vesco has business interests and political friends, the Corte Suprema de Justicia last July turned down an extradition bid by the U.S. Then, when Vesco asked for an advisory opinion, a federal criminal court in Buenos Aires ruled that Argentina would not extradite either, should he decide to move there. Finally, in the Bahamas, where Vesco gives campaign contributions to the ruling party and now has extensive financial operations, another magistrate has turned the U.S. down. Last week U.S. Attorney Paul

Curran contemplated the shambles of failed extradition applications and concluded: "There are no other extraditable charges pending that I know of." For the moment, Vesco appears to be away from home free.

Theoretically, extradition is a straightforward business. The U.S. has bilateral treaties on the subject with 81 nations; in general, they hold that when one country provides prima-facie evidence that the wanted man committed a crime, the other country will hand him over. Bahamian Magistrate Emmanuel Osadebay decided that the U.S. had not made a prima-facie case against Vesco before him. While the principle seems simple, Vesco's situation is only one more example of the maddening difficulties, tricky technicalities and extra-legal power plays that characterize some of the 45 or so extradition requests that the U.S. makes each year.

For one thing, trouble often crops up when a country changes from a colony to an independent nation. Sometimes the old extradition treaty carries over, sometimes not. The U.S. has fallen behind in negotiating extradition treaties with new nations, and there are now about 50 with which no treaties exist. Algeria is one of them, and Washington gave up attempts to retrieve Parole Violater Eldridge Cleaver, who took refuge there. Another African asylum is Southern Rhodesia, which broke away from Britain in 1965. Louis Steinberg, 50, indicted in Chicago on charges of check kiting and embezzlement, is reported to be in Salisbury with a suitcase full of cash.

Extradition treaties do not, as a rule, cover minor offenses, those punishable by fines or short prison terms. Nor do they include orders that enforce civil judgments. Most important, political crimes are excluded. Thus, if a fugitive can convince the host country that his crime is political, then he has the right of asylum.

Run-of-the-street crimes like murder, arson and robbery-even when they have political overtones-have clear equivalents in all languages and systems of jurisprudence. They provide few extradition difficulties. A London magistrate had no trouble in deciding to order the extradition of James Earl Ray to stand trial for the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., even though Ray raised a political claim.

"A constant problem in extradition law," says Philip C. Jessup, a onetime member of the International Court of Justice and U.S. ambassador-at-large, "is whether the offense is a crime in both states. The exact label need not be the same, but it must be essentially the same offense. A Mohammedan country where you can have more than one wife would never extradite a man for bigamy."

The U.S. penchant for prosecuting conspiracies often meets resistance in other nations, but when the conspiracy involves narcotics it is a different story. Chile has recently been voluntarily expelling a group of its own citizens who allegedly were shipping cocaine to the U.S. Still more striking is the case of Auguste Joseph Ricord, 62, now serving a 20-year sentence for conspiracy to smuggle heroin into the U.S.

Born in France, Ricord was a pimp, dope peddler and Gestapo collaborator before he emigrated to Argentina and became naturalized. Then he moved to neighboring Paraguay and entered a syndicate that piped more than five tons of heroin into the U.S. Although he had never set foot in the U.S., he was convicted last year in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. For a year and a half he had fought the U.S. extradition demand. But impoverished Paraguay, threatened with the loss of U.S. aid (currently $9,000,000), finally gave him up. The State Department insists there was nothing unusual about the case. A person need not be present in a country to commit a crime against it. Ricord's Manhattan attorney, Herbert I. Handman, sees things differently. "If Ricord were involved in anything but a narcotics case," he says, "there would be a universal hue and cry." But the U.S. Supreme Court turned down his appeal.

Next Plane. Extradition is, by theory and by treaty, a judicial and diplomatic minuet, in which all the refinements are respected. In practice, as the narcotics cases suggest, it is often otherwise. The formula used to be that the expelling nation put the fugitive forcefully aboard "the next direct ship." In 1930 New York Gangster Jack ("Legs") Diamond was returned to the U.S. from Germany in just that manner. Today the formula is "the next plane out," and sometimes that happens even when there is no extradition treaty. Afghanistan has none with the U.S. but when Timothy Leary was in Kabul, Afghan authorities did some complex bureaucratic footwork that left him with no alternative to climbing onto a U.S.-bound plane. He is now serving the balance of his one-to ten-year sentence for marijuana possession in California.

To be sure, all the legal and diplomatic niceties are often observed. The exceptions sometimes occur because the final decision to extradite lies not with the judiciary, but with the executive. Even if the Costa Rican or Bahamian courts had upheld the U.S. application for Vesco, the executive branch of either country could have overruled or simply ignored the judicial extradition finding. The same is true in the U.S. No matter what the courts say, the Secretary of State has the authority to refuse to give up the fugitive.

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