The financial page: Tax Cheat, Inc.(The Talk of the Town)(offshore corporate taxation)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 22-APR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Mark Vicini was a local boy made good. In the early nineteennineties, this Monmouth County, New Jersey, entrepreneur built a computer company, Micro Rental & Sales, into a thriving business. He became a millionaire. He put a disabled relative through college. He gave to charities. But he did not give to the Internal Revenue Service. As Micro Rental boomed, Vicini funnelled a good portion of his profits into an account at an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands -- nine million dollars between 1991 and 1994, six million of which he hid from the I.R.S.

Unfortunately, of all the shady banks in all the Caymans, Vicini had to walk into John Mathewson's. In 1996, Mathewson, the chairman of Guardian Bank & Trust, was arrested for money laundering, and, to avoid a prison term, he turned over the records of all his bank's depositors, including...

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