Wall Street Journal

By Peter Fritsch
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BENQUE VIEJO, Belize – On this Caribbean nation’s secluded jungle border with Guatemala, no one knows the man whom locals call "Mister Jay" by his real name. He is actually Joseph Ross, a former aviation executive from Oklahoma who has been a fugitive since his 1986 U.S. indictment on tax-evasion charges.

Docking his skiff on the banks of the Mopan River here one recent morning, the 78-year-old Mr. Ross, a k a Gilberto "Jay" Picon, cast his gaze across the slow-moving water to the Mopan River Resort – a 10-acre luxury getaway he and his wife Pamella built recently for $1.4 million – and reflected on the twilight of a life on the lam. "Hell, these last 20 years have been the happiest of my life. This is a paradise here," he said.

A fiscal paradise anyway. While billionaire commodities trader Marc Rich won fame as America’s most nimble and well-connected tax dodger, Mr. Ross is one of more than 400 mini-Marcs wanted by the Internal Revenue Service. Using the surname of a former Mexican business associate, Mr. Ross, an impish man of Choctaw Indian ancestry who struck it rich as a U.S. government contractor, has had little trouble keeping a step ahead of Uncle Sam. "It ain’t so tough if you know what you’re doing," he says with a shrug.

Fleeing the U.S. before he was indicted 15 years ago, Mr. Ross has lived in Acapulco and at a ski resort in the French Alps. He has toured Asia and the Greek isles and sailed the Pacific aboard his former yacht, the "No Refund$." In 1988, he and his third wife acquired Belizean citizenship under a government program that sells passports to just about anybody for about $50,000. A year later, the "Picons" settled in a Vancouver condo purchased for $705,000 by a shell company in Liechtenstein. The retired couple lived large, and when Pamella became Belize’s consul general in Vancouver, the two joined the diplomatic set.

The good times almost came to an end in late 1996 when Canadian Mounties arrested Mr. Ross on his U.S. warrant and seized his Belize passport. Released on $50,000 bail that same day, he quickly skipped town. Pamella, who lost her title as well as the diplomatic plates on her maroon Cadillac, joined him in Belize soon thereafter. Asked how he managed to enter Belize without a passport, Mr. Ross says: "Not too difficult. Let’s just say it’s hard to break the law in Belize."

Godfrey Smith, Belize’s attorney general, concedes the point. "The sale of passports leads to just these kinds of problems," he says. "It’s an embarrassment to the country." In 1999, a suspected Sikh terrorist jailed in Canada bought a Belize passport from behind bars. Instead of deporting him to India, where he was wanted, authorities shipped him to Belize, a former British colony the size of Massachusetts, with a population of 250,000. The government of Belize says it plans to repeal its so-called economic-citizenship program, which earns the country about $3 million a year, according to the federal budget.

Joseph Belisle, the official who runs the program, confirms that the Rosses bought citizenship in 1988, but he can say no more. "We ourselves can’t find all the records on certain people," he says. "It’s all very nebulous."

While U.S. officials know where Mr. Ross is, it’s hard to lay a finger on alleged tax cheats once they have left the country. Only a few countries have extradition treaties with the U.S. that extend to so-called fiscal crimes, and those are rarely invoked. Several years ago, U.S. courts had become so discouraged with IRS efforts to locate fugitives that they began dismissing indictments. In response, the IRS agreed in 1999 to turn over the task of hunting down its tax fugitives to the U.S. Marshals Service. Neither agency will say how many fugitives that initiative has netted. Technically, U.S. tax evasion became an extraditable offense in Belize in March. Even so, individuals such as Mr. Ross are a low priority compared with drug smugglers and violent criminals. "This is very discretionary stuff," says George Bruno, former U.S. ambassador to Belize. Adds Mr. Smith: "The truth is, a small country has bigger problems than going after a man who provides jobs in a poor village."

That’s good news for Mr. Ross, a former airplane mechanic. In the 1940s, he got his start in business thanks to a government program that gave small-business loans to minorities. (His mother was three-fourths Choctaw). His company, Ross Aviation, instructed thousands of pilots, transported radioactive material for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and consulted on aviation matters for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "We trained 110,000 pilots for the Vietnam War," he says. By the 1960s, Mr. Ross was a rich man who had branched out into cotton and cattle raising in Mexico. Though he claims to have suffered huge losses there because of hurricane damage (which he says the IRS wouldn’t recognize), he prides himself as "one of the few gringos who made money in Mexico." His five-count 1986 indictment alleges he failed to disclose and pay taxes on more than $500,000 held in a Mexican bank account. He faces up to 20 years in prison and $2 million in fines if ever convicted. Mr. Ross doesn’t deny the charges against him but dismisses them as piddling.

He fled to Europe before he was scheduled to appear at a Tulsa grand-jury proceeding in 1985. According to a 1994 letter that he admits he wrote, and that was subsequently intercepted by prosecutors, Mr. Ross and his wife first headed to Geneva to pick up more than $1 million in bonds held at a Swiss bank. "We proceeded to drive across France to another country where we ... stashed our loot," the letter says. "All during the drive I had a grin on my face that was, as they say back in Oklahoma, like I had butchered a fat hog, which I had."

Skiing and yachting occupied the following years until the "Picons" settled in Vancouver. "After a while, you get tired of getting dressed for skiing and shoveling snow," he says.

In late 1999, the couple resurfaced on Belize’s western border as the owner-hosts of the Mopan River Resort. The local competition in luxury accommodations includes the Blancaneaux Lodge owned by director Francis Ford Coppola, who serves as Belize’s consul general in California.

Honeymooners have discovered the Picons because of ads in Bride & Groom magazine. Reachable only by private ferry, luxury thatched-roof cabanas equipped with cable TV and all "modcons" go for $898 per person for seven nights, including tours of nearby Mayan ruins, all meals, drinks, transfers – and taxes. Thai night is touted as a special treat; Pamella had taken cooking classes while the two vacationed in Bangkok.

Jay hosts cocktails at their 5,000-square-foot house and regales guests with tales of his tax troubles. Proximity to Guatemala’s narcotics-ridden border hasn’t been a problem: Rottweilers patrol the grounds after sunset. Furnishings hard to come by in Belize are trundled in from the U.S. by Mr. Ross’s in-laws.

"I’ve got a great life down here, even if my visits to the U.S. have been, shall we say, curtailed," says Mr. Ross.