Vladimir Lenin, Charlie Chaplin and Marc Rich found refuge in Switzerland. So did film maker Roman Polanski, or so he thought up until he was arrested in Zurich on US charges of having sex with a minor.
Switzerland's reputation as a haven will never be the same. That is a good thing if political refugees such as Chaplin, who fled McCarthyism in the 1950s, still get due consideration. On the other hand, maybe Lenin, the leader of the Communist experiment in the Soviet Union, should have been sent back to Russia.
There used to be a certain security associated with Switzerland. Polanski was just one of many who evidently felt safe there: he was even paying taxes on the mountain chalet he bought in Gstaad in 2006, one year after a new international arrest warrant had been put out for him.
Similarly, until last year, thousands of US citizens and UBS clients were reassured that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would never get a peek at their Swiss bank accounts. Those days are over. Switzerland can no longer hide behind its cherished neutrality or its attachment to financial privacy, two concepts now under attack by the outside world.
It was the international financial crisis that put the squeeze on tax havens: Switzerland, which accounts for 27 percent of the world's privately held offshore wealth, was clearly the most vulnerable.
The Swiss did the right thing in arresting Polanski. Once he appeared in the country to attend the Zurich Film Festival, the country would have been hard pressed to look the other way. The extradition treaty with the US doesn't allow any loopholes for statutory rape.
Switzerland has had loopholes, historically, for tax evasion. As rich people know, ducking foreign taxes isn't a crime there, but rather an administrative offence.
Ask Marc Rich, the commodities trader who fled to Switzerland in the 1980s to escape US charges and has lived there ever since.
The US set the ball rolling with its landmark case against UBS. Since then, country after country has reached a double-taxation agreement with Switzerland, which allow foreign authorities to pursue cases of tax evasion on Swiss soil.
Cracking down on tax havens was one of the first orders of business at last April's meeting of the Group of 20.
So the gig is up for those who sought shelter in Switzerland's banking secrecy laws. Take the example of Juergen Homann, a 66-year-old New Jersey man. On September 25, he became the fourth UBS client to plead guilty to US tax evasion, and could face five years in prison, all because he failed to file tax returns on a $6.1 million (R45.5m) Swiss bank account.
This month, more Swiss bank clients will have to come in from the cold: under its settlement with the US Justice Department, UBS has pledged to reveal 4 450 names to the IRS. Those clients have until next Friday to voluntarily disclose their offshore assets or start thinking about prison.
The US isn't fooling around. "Those who think they can 'stay below the radar' face a real risk of prosecution," said John DiCicco, acting assistant attorney-general in the Justice Department's tax division.
This talk is having a snowball effect. Now Switzerland's banks are telling Americans they can't open accounts unless their businesses are registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
When the gnomes in Zurich won't open accounts for American clients, you know Switzerland is no longer the haven it was.
Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist