<table> </table> H&#8194;AVANA, Cuba | Robert L. Vesco, the fugitive financier who spent most of his life eluding American justice, may even have managed to die on the sly.</p><p>Vesco, who was sentenced to a long prison term in Cuba in 1996 and was wanted in America for securities fraud and drug trafficking to political bribery, died Nov. 23 from lung cancer, say people close to him.</p><p>If so, it was never reported publicly by Cuban authorities, who said Friday they considered him a &#8220;nonissue.&#8221; U.S. officials said Friday they knew nothing about it.</p><p>Vesco, in nearly four decades on the run, was wanted for bilking some $200 million from investors in the 1970s, making an illegal contribution to Richard M. Nixon&#8217;s 1972 presidential campaign, and trying to induce the Carter administration to let Libya buy U.S. planes.</p><p>Vesco, 72, last made the news a decade ago when he was sentenced to prison in Cuba for a financial scam.</p><p>He emerged in recent years and lived a quiet life in Havana until he contracted lung cancer. After about a week in a hospital, friends say, he died and was buried in an unmarked grave.</p><p>Records at Colon Cemetery in Havana indicate that a Robert Vesco was buried there Nov. 24, and photographs and videos viewed by <em>The New York Times</em> show a man resembling him in a casket with his longtime Cuban companion looking over him.</p><p>Vesco&#8217;s associates and protectors included democratically elected presidents in Costa Rica, the left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the cocaine barons of Colombia, the terrorism-tainted government in Libya, and the communist government of Fidel Castro.</p><p>A high school dropout from Detroit, Vesco took over a bankrupt machine tools company and was a millionaire by age 30.</p><p>Vesco bought a troubled mutual fund company in 1970 for less than $5 million, gaining control of an estimated $400 million in funds. In 1972, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Vesco and others with stealing more than $224 million.</p><p>But Vesco had already fled, first to the Bahamas and then to Costa Rica. By 1978, he was forced to leave for the Bahamas, the beginning of years of hopscotching that included stops in Antigua and Nicaragua, before Cuba finally accepted him for &#8220;humanitarian&#8221; reasons.