Four more suspects in assassination of Haiti President Jovenel Moïse brought to Miami

U.S. authorities on Tuesday arrested a group of Haitian-American and Colombian suspects after transporting them from Haiti to Miami to face federal conspiracy charges in connection with the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, U.S. authorities said.

Three of the four suspects are accused of helping coordinate a failed kidnapping of Haiti’s president to remove him from office upon his return from a state visit to Turkey in June of 2021. The same three are also accused of conspiring in a final plan to kill him at his home in the hillside suburbs of Port-au-Prince the following month.

Those suspects are: James Solages, 37, who quit his job at a nursing home to go work for a security firm in the Miami area linked to a plot to remove Moïse from office; Joseph Vincent, 57, a former Drug Enforcement Administration confidential informant who lived in South Florida; and Germán Rivera Garcia, a retired Colombian colonel who is one of the alleged leaders of the deadly attack.

Also transferred with them to Miami: Christian Emmanuel Sanon, 54, a Haiti doctor and pastor who split his time between the United States and his Caribbean homeland and wanted to replace Moïse as president.

While Solages, Vincent and Rivera are looking at life in prison for their alleged roles in the kidnapping attempt and assassination plot, Sanon faces up to 20 years in prison on related smuggling charges. Despite assertions by Haitian investigators that he was the intellectual author of the plot to kill Moïse, Sanon is being charged with export violations in a separate criminal complaint.

According to the complaint, Sanon is accused of conspiring to smuggle goods including ballistic vests from the United States and failing to file export paperwork. The United States contends that the South Florida pastor and doctor was building his own “private military” force in Haiti. Although Sanon is not formally charged in Moïse’s murder conspiracy, a Justice Department news release said his and the other suspects’ actions “culminated in the assassination of the Haitian President.”

In the main criminal complaint, federal agents say that starting in April 2021, Solages, Sanon and others met in South Florida to discuss “regime change” in Haiti and their support for Sanon as the president’s replacement. They compiled a list of equipment and weapons for that effort, and Solages shared it with Sanon. The list included rifles, machine guns, tear gas, grenades, ammunition, bulletproof vests, and other weapons and equipment.

That June, a group of about 20 Colombian nationals with military training were recruited to assist in the “operation,” according to a criminal complaint charging Solages, Vincent and Rivera. The lead Colombian national in charge of the group was Rivera.

But according to the complaint, Sanon was no longer seen as a “viable” replacement for Moïse and a former Supreme Court justice, Windelle Coq Thélot, entered the picture as a stronger candidate for the presidency. However, over the next month, the goal of ousting the president in Haiti escalated from a kidnapping scheme to an assassination plot.

According to multiple witness interviews, on July 6, 2021, several conspirators [including Solages, Vincent and Rivera] met prior to the assassination at a house nearby President Moise’s residence, the FBI complaint and affidavit said. “Firearms and equipment were distributed, and Solages falsely told those gathered that it was a ‘CIA Operation,’ and, in substance, said that the mission was to kill President Moise.”

The following day, “several conspirators drove in a convoy to President Moise’s residence,” with Solages, Vincent and Rivera traveling in the same vehicle, the complaint said.

“Once they arrived outside President Moise’s residence, Solages announced that they were engaged in a ‘DEA Operation’ to ensure compliance from President Moise’s security and other civilians,” the complaint said. “A subset of Colombian conspirators was assigned to find the President and assassinate him, and in fact the President was killed.”

After they were brought into custody in Haiti, Solages told FBI agents that by mid-June, he knew the plan was to kill Haiti’s president, according to the complaint. Vincent told agents that the initial plan was to remove Moise from office or eliminate him completely. But the idea of killing him became acceptable to the group a few days before the assassination. Rivera also told agents that the assassination was the ultimate object and that the president’s arrest was a “pretense,” the complaint said.

The four defendants transferred from Haiti are scheduled to make their initial federal court appearances at 2 p.m. Wednesday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Alicia Otazo-Reyes in Miami. With these transfers from Haiti to Florida, a total of seven defendants have been charged in the murder conspiracy case filed in Miami federal court. The other men charged are Mario Antonio Palacios Palacios, 43, Rodolphe Jaar, 49, and John Joël Joseph, 51. They were arrested last year.

Vincent’s defense attorney, Regina de Moraes, said her client was relieved to be in U.S. custody instead of a Haitian jail.

“My client, his family and I are extremely satisfied that he is now on U.S. soil,” de Moraes said in a text message to the Miami Herald. “The conditions of his imprisonment in Haiti were the equivalent of torture. My client has always been forthcoming with his knowledge of the events leading up to the tragic death of President Moise.”

Jose Espinosa, an advocate for the roughly 20 ex-Colombian solders who have been detained in Haiti, said it would serve justice if all of them were brought to the United States.

“This is a very complex situation and we are asking ourselves, why are they only transferring one of the Colombians held instead of transferring the whole group to the United States,” Espinosa said. “It would serve justice better to have the testimonies of the whole group so that each one of them could provide officially their individual testimonies.”

The South Florida probe, led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, continues to focus on a Miami-area security company and its founder, Antonio “Tony” Intriago, who interacted with the suspects but has not been arrested or charged. Intriago’s attorney has maintained that he provided only bodyguard services for Sanon through his Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) Security as part of Sanon’s presidential aspirations and knew nothing about a plot to kill Moïse.

The U.S. investigation into the assassination has unfolded in fits and starts over the past year and a half, a period of unprecedented gang violence and political upheaval in Haiti. Meanwhile, the Haitian government’s parallel probe is currently on its fifth investigative judge and has regained a bit of momentum after being stalled due to the turnover of judges. The case in Haiti has netted over 40 arrests but so far no formal charges.

In recent weeks, the judge currently in charge of the case, Walther Wesser Voltaire, has summoned several suspects, including Solages and Sanon, to appear before him. Both men lived in South Florida prior to their arrests by Haiti’s national police after the July 7, 2021, assassination. They separately professed their innocence from behind the walls of Port-au-Prince’s National Penitentiary during interviews with the Miami Herald last year.

READ MORE: A who’s who in Haiti president’s killing and how they’re interconnected

In trying to understand what happened the night the president was killed and the motives for his slaying, Voltaire has not only questioned individual suspects but also pitted some against each other because of their contradictory testimony. His tactics, however, have not been welcomed by all.

In December, lawyers representing the slain president’s widow, Martine Moïse, asked for the judge to voluntarily remove himself from the case because of what they described as his “close ties with certain influential members of the INITE political party.”

One of those members is Paul Denis, a former justice minister. He had named Voltaire as a substitute prosecutor in the Port-de-Paix district as part of his previous job. Denis was initially named by police in the early days of their investigation as one of the political leaders who had met with Sanon before the president’s assassination. Denis was subsequently barred from leaving Haiti.

In an interview shortly after the killing, Denis told the Herald that he wasn’t involved with Sanon or any plot to overthrow or kill Moïse. The travel ban was eventually removed by another judge investigating the slaying.

In addition to Voltaire’s ongoing questioning of suspects, the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police is also digging deeper into how the assassination plot was funded. It is focusing on possible links to the use of government funds to pay the 22 Colombian commandos suspected of carrying out the deadly assault, according to sources in Haiti familiar with that probe. The police unit is also seeking to arrest more than a dozen officers who remain on the lam and are suspected of playing a role in the killing.

READ MORE: How a Miami plot to oust a president led to a murder in Haiti

The three newly charged Haitian-American defendants and the lone Colombian joined forces in the early part of 2021 to carry out the coup to replace Moïse, according to authorities in both Haiti and the United States. Sanon, who aspired to be Haiti’s president and held meetings in South Florida and in his volatile nation with other political leaders, was to replace him. To that end, Sanon met with various plotters to discuss how to depose and succeed Moïse, Haitian authorities have said.

U.S. authorities, in separate criminal complaints charging other suspects, have said a South Florida trip by Solages days before Moïse’s killing is key to justifying the United States’ jurisdictional right to investigate. During that trip, they said, Solages provided a written request to the owner of the security firm responsible for paying the Colombians, asking for assistance. That request is considered a critical development in the U.S. investigation, which speaks of a “co-conspirator #1.”

According to a jailed associate, “co-conspirator #1“ was “one of the leaders of the operation.” The Herald confirmed that, while not publicly identified, this person is Solages. He traveled from Port-au-Prince to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on June 28, 2021, and returned to Haiti on July 1, 2021, six days before the assassination.

Solages, who turned himself in to police after the attack, had run a small charity benefiting his native city of Jacmel in Haiti’s southeast. He introduced Sanon to the Doral-based security firm CTU and its owner, Intriago, a Venezuelan émigré. Intriago’s business partner was Arcángel Pretel Ortiz. He ran a sister company, CTU Federal Academy, which allegedly recruited the Colombian suspects via a WhatsApp group.

Pretel, several sources told the Herald, was an active FBI informant at the time of the assassination. Like Intriago, he has not been arrested. Both are suspected of recruiting and supplying the ex-Colombian soldiers to protect Sanon as part of the alleged coup plot.

Solages said his role was simply as a translator but admitted to the Herald that he was the person who falsely yelled “DEA!” through a bullhorn outside Moïse’s house when the attack was executed. Solages’ colleague, Joseph Vincent, also claimed to be a translator for the former Colombian soldiers accused of killing Moïse.

Phone records obtained by the Herald show that Vincent was in touch with several main suspects leading up to the assassination. After the killing, he phoned his old DEA handler and was then put in touch with the agency’s country director, who convinced him to turn himself in. Despite the phone call to the DEA, U.S. officials said Vincent was no longer involved with the agency.

In all, 18 Colombians were arrested in Haiti and three others were killed in the aftermath of the president’s slaying. Another Colombian, Mario Antonio Palacios Palacios, known as “Floro,” escaped to Jamaica but was later stopped in Panama during a layover on his way to being extradited to Colombia. During the Panamanian stop, he was informed that there was a U.S. warrant for his arrest and he agreed to fly to Miami, U.S. authorities said.

The Colombian commando leader, Rivera, known as “Col. Mike,” was inside the president’s home when the commandos ambushed Moïse, and he showed a digital image of his corpse to Solages and Vincent just after the murder. The two claimed to be outside the house at the time.

The transfer of the Haitian-American and Colombian defendants to Miami is the latest development in the high-profile federal conspiracy case that has dragged on for months because of logistical challenges in Haiti and political concerns in Washington, D.C.

Though these four have now been brought to Miami, others could follow, sources say. Among the other jailed suspects in Haiti who are of interest to federal authorities in Miami is Jean Laguel Civil, the former Haiti National Police divisional commissioner. Civil, reportedly a Haitian American, was in charge of coordinating Moïse’s security detail. He is accused by his own department of bribing guards not to show up to work the day of the attack or to stand down, while passing out $80,000 among 80 palace guards. He’s one of the people a desperate Moïse frantically phoned in vain for help. In an interview prior to his arrest, Civil told the Herald he’s innocent.

Until now, only three defendants, who had fled to Jamaica and the Dominican Republic after the president’s slaying, faced charges in Miami. They are Palacios, a former Colombian soldier who was recruited along with many other former commandos from his country; Rodolphe Jaar, a once-convicted cocaine trafficker who assisted the DEA as an informant but later allegedly joined the deadly plot targeting Moïse; and ex-Haitian Senator John Joël Joseph, who is accused of providing logistical support for the plotters.

Palacios was reputedly a member of the Delta team, the core unit that entered the president’s bedroom where Moïse was riddled with 12 bullets. His wife, Martine, was also shot but survived. Their two children were unharmed.

After fleeing to Jamaica, Palacios told FBI agents he was informed just hours before the attack that the plan had changed from arresting and kidnapping Moïse to killing him, according to federal court records. Jailed in Miami, he denied entering Moïse’s bedroom or knowing who shot him. He said only a few were aware of the plot turning from kidnapping Moïse to killing him.

Of late, Palacios and his lawyers have been fighting to keep his confession, given to the FBI in Jamaica, from being used by federal prosecutors against him. In court papers, they argue that FBI agents did not properly advise Palacios of his Miranda rights before he gave his statement.

Jaar, the former drug trafficker, owned a poultry business in Haiti. He attended meetings in Port-au-Prince with several alleged plotters, later admitting to U.S. investigators that he provided arms and housing prior to the assault on Moïse. He also admitted that he provided plotters with guidance after the slaying. He fled to the Dominican Republic before his arrest.

Joseph, who also goes by the name Joseph Joël John, is a well-known Haitian politician. He is alleged to be a central figure in the assassination. According to Haitian police, two weeks before the murder, Joseph went to rent five vehicles associated with the mission. He was joined by a powerful gang leader, Vitelhomme Innocent, and a former rebel leader known as “the Torturer,” Miradieu Faustin.

Faustin is currently in Haitian police custody following his arrest, a major breakthrough in the country’s stagnant investigation. Innocent remains free and is wanted by the FBI on unrelated kidnapping charges.

Joseph also attended meetings in South Florida and Haiti with key suspects, rented vehicles for the Colombian commandos and tried to acquire weapons for them, according to court records. He’s believed to have been an interlocutor between the various groups. On the night of the killing, he was in communication with several main suspects.

McClatchy’s Senior National Security and White House Correspondent Michael Wilner and el Nuevo Herald staff writer Antonio Maria Delgado contributed to this report.