Fugitive Tycoon a Suicide, Argentine Officials Say

In a startling twist to a mystery that has obsessed Argentina, a fugitive tycoon suspected of ordering the slaying of a magazine photographer shot himself to death Wednesday as police closed in on him at a rural estate, authorities said.

Alfredo Yabran, 54, who became a symbol of public suspicions of labyrinthine corruption, killed himself in the early afternoon at his estate in Entre Rios, the province where he was born, authorities said. Police said they heard the shot and burst into a locked room, where they found his body.

Authorities in Argentina and neighboring nations had been hunting for Yabran since Friday. He was accused of ordering his chief bodyguard and a gang of corrupt police and petty criminals to kill Jose Luis Cabezas, a photographer for Noticias magazine, the first publication to publish photographs of the reclusive Yabran.

The killing of Cabezas last year spurred Argentine politicians and citizens and international press organizations into a campaign of protest on behalf of journalists, who, in Argentina and throughout Latin America, are endangered front-line investigators of organized crime and political scandal.

And Yabran’s apparent suicide Wednesday came at a time when corruption dominates the public debate as never before, prompting comparisons to the era of Italy’s “Clean Hands” investigations, which brought down seemingly untouchable bosses of criminal mafias and political machines. The Cabezas case showed the determination of many Argentines to change their society.

“What the Cabezas case revealed in Argentina was incredible,” said editor Hector D’Amico of Noticias magazine, whose dogged investigation of his colleague’s death sometimes outpaced the work of police detectives. Yabran’s death left the staff of the magazine, who had just published a special issue about his flight from justice, “in shock,” D’Amico said.

Political rivals publicly accused Yabran of heading a mafia that allegedly controlled postal services, airports, judges, Cabinet ministers and private security companies operated by military veterans of the “dirty war” of the 1970s.

Yabran, a former truck driver, began his much-questioned rise to wealth during the 1976-83 military dictatorship, then consolidated power during the democratic governments of former President Raul Alfonsin and current President Carlos Menem, critics say.

His most prominent accuser, Congressman Domingo Cavallo, repeated Wednesday the extraordinary allegations that he first made in 1995 on the floor of Congress while economy minister. “This event confirms the dangerousness of a criminal organization that received protection from federal judges, from part of the security forces, from members of the executive branch,” Cavallo declared.

In contrast, a top presidential aide condemned leaders for politicizing the case. “This is a question that has to do with the death of Jose Luis Cabezas, so anyone who thinks in good faith has to see this as a judicial question and not a political one,” said Alberto Kohan, Menem’s chief of staff.

The drama of crime and politics in the Cabezas case has been the central battleground in a bitter combat leading up to next year’s presidential elections. Yabran described himself as a victim of persecution by Gov. Eduardo Duhalde of Buenos Aires province, whose presidential aspirations have set off a conflict with the Menem camp. Yabran said Duhalde was framing him so that Duhalde would look like a crusader.

Meanwhile, presidential aides and Cabinet ministers recently made comments distancing the Menem administration from Yabran. Last year, a justice minister resigned because of ties to the tycoon, and the Cabinet chief had received Yabran in the presidential palace.

There were immediate questions Wednesday as to whether Yabran really killed himself and about other circumstances of his death.

It was curious that the heavyset, streetwise multimillionaire, who had surrounded himself and his family with a platoon of bodyguards, turned up at the country house accompanied only by a pair of servants, observers said.

Citing his wealth, high-powered lawyers and access to leaders of the ruling party and opposition alike, some journalists and politicians found it hard to believe that Yabran would kill himself over an arrest warrant. They said the case will escalate as a political issue because of suspicions that Yabran knew secrets about people in high places.

Yabran’s lawyer, Pablo Argibay Molina, said early today that Yabran left a letter before his suicide blaming his death on political enemies.

He said Yabran took his life “to avoid paining his family and because of the manipulation to which he was being subjected.”

Yabran went into hiding after an imprisoned policewoman, the wife of the accused triggerman, broke down and testified that her husband had told her that Yabran ordered the killing because he was angry at the photographer for taking his picture. Yabran’s aversion to publicity was profound: He denied owning companies that were publicly linked to him but registered to close relatives. His bodyguards were charged with shooting at journalists. And he reputedly referred to himself as “the invisible man.”