‘Money and power’ fueled Haiti president’s murder, feds say after arrest of Floridians
U.S. federal agents arrested four suspects in South Florida Tuesday on charges of playing key roles in a plot to kill Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, who was shot to death in his home in the hills above Port-au-Prince, allegedly by a team of Colombian commandos, as his presidential guards stood down.
The local arrests of the owner of a Miami-area security firm; his business partner; a Weston financier; and an exporter out of Tampa mark a turning point in a probe that is now focused on the weapons, ballistic vests and financing that authorities say fueled the deadly plot executed on July 7, 2021.
The arrests came more than a year and a half after federal authorities launched their investigation. Despite significant progress of late, it’s still unclear who was the ultimate mastermind of the assassination plot targeting Moïse.
“While the murder of President Moïse occurred in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, most of the planning, funding and direction of the plot to violently overthrow the president occurred right here in the United States in the Southern District of Florida, beginning in early 2021,” said United States Attorney Markenzy Lapointe.
Lapointe said during a news conference at the U.S. Attorney’s office in downtown Miami that it appears that “money and power” fueled the overthrow of Haiti’s president.
Three of the new defendants — Antonio “Tony” Intriago, owner of Doral-based Counter Terrorist Unit Security, or CTU; Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, operator of the affiliate CTU Federal Academy LLC; and Walter Veintemilla, head of Miramar-based Worldwide Capital Lending Group — are charged with supporting a conspiracy to kidnap or kill the president of Haiti.
The fourth defendant, Frederick Bergmann Jr., was described as being part of the financing arm of the operation. He is charged with conspiring to smuggle ballistic vests to former Colombian soldiers who allegedly carried out the fatal shooting of Moïse and seriously wounded the president’s wife, Martine Moïse. He’s also charged with failing to file valid export paperwork when the 20 smuggled vests, which are bulletproof, were shipped on June 10, 2021, from Miami to Port-au-Prince before the assassination. The shipment was marked “medical x-ray vests and school supplies.”
The defendants had their first appearance in federal court shortly after the press conference, and three of them were appointed attorneys by the judge after saying they had no money. Veintemilla has his own attorney, Tara Kudman. Detention hearings are scheduled for Friday.
READ MORE: A who’s who in Haiti president’s killing and how they’re interconnected
There are now 11 defendants charged and in U.S. custody as part of the wide-ranging law enforcement investigation that has netted U.S., Haitian, Venezuelan and Colombian nationals as well as dual Haitian and U.S. citizens. Also on Tuesday, a South Florida grand jury returned a superseding indictment charging nine of the defendants with conspiring to kill and kidnap Haiti’s president and two with smuggling bulletproof vests — in an alleged assassination plot that also triggered a power struggle upon Moïse’s death and plunged Haiti deeper into crisis.
“Their actions violated U.S. law and now they face U.S. justice,” said Matthew G. Olsen, assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s National Security division. “The United States will not tolerate those who would plot from our soil to carry out acts of violence abroad, just as we will not tolerate those outside the U.S. who would plot to conduct violence in this country.”
He called the alleged assassination scheme “a human tragedy and an assault on core democratic principles.”
Lapointe said the individuals arrested can be divided into three groups: the planners and financier who were based in South Florida; the operators who served as the boots on the ground in Haiti; and the third group that hired soldiers who traveled from Colombia to Haiti to carry out the mission.
“The South Florida planners and organizers were defendants Arcángel Pretel Ortiz and Antonio Intriago,” Lapointe said, adding that the two men, who ran CTU, “devised the plan to depose the president.”
That plan, according to a criminal complaint, involved the two co-conspirators referring to themselves as “colonel” and “general,” utilizing nicknames for themselves and code words for guns and ammunition. They referred to Moïse as the “rat” and “a thief” in text messages, and to the coup operation as “the party,” according to the criminal complaint charging the three defendants. Also firearms were described as “instruments.”
In plotting out the operation, the suspects were counting on the president’s unpopularity and hoping for protests to provide them cover for his overthrow as they also placed their bets on getting immunity from a Supreme Court judge. The judge, Windelle Coq Thélot, who wasn’t named in the complaint, emerged as the new contender to replace Moïse after the group decided that a South Florida pastor and physician, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, lacked both popular support and the constitutional requirement to either be president or prime minister of Haiti.
According to the criminal complaint, Ortiz and Intriago began discussions in February 2021 with Sanon, who had opposed Moïse’s administration and had aspirations to become president. CTU agreed to support Sanon in his efforts and by the end of April, another company, Worldwide Capital Lending Corp., was brought into the scheme. The company’s owner, Veintemilla, agreed to finance CTU’s support for Sanon and provided a $175,000 line of credit to Sanon on April 30, 2021, the complaint said. The agreement was executed by Intriago and Veintemilla, and Ortiz signed as a witness.
Veintemilla, an Ecuador native who lives in Weston, would be repaid with future Haitian assets in a “peaceful transition of power,” Veintemilla’s lawyer previously told the Miami Herald.
An FBI investigator argued otherwise in the complaint. Referring to messages between Veintemilla and Ortiz, he said “electronic evidence establishes that Veintemilla knew that the operation involved President Moïse’s forcible and violent removal, rather than a peaceful transition of power.”
“Veintemilla expected to reap significant financial benefits through Worldwide should in fact President Moïse be replaced as president, as did Ortiz and Intriago through CTU,” Lapointe said. “Further planning and spending continued in South Florida from April to June 2021.”
The joint probe by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations initially targeted suspects apprehended in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, several of whom have been relocated to Miami while they await trial. Now, the investigation has zeroed in on the South Florida network that planned a violent takeover of Haiti’s presidency in the months leading up to the assassination, authorities said. That connection to South Florida enabled the U.S. Attorney’s Office to file conspiracy charges here in the killing of a foreign leader.
According to FBI criminal complaints, Intriago, Ortiz and Veintemilla played distinct roles in an initial plan aiming to arrest and kidnap Haiti’s president after Moïse returned from a state visit to Turkey in June 2021, and then in a final plot to kill him weeks later on July 7 inside his hillside home in the suburbs of metropolitan Port-au-Prince.
Sanon hired Intriago’s company, CTU Security, and then Intriago and Ortiz recruited Colombians with military experience from a closed WhatsApp group of former soldiers to provide security for Sanon, sources told the Herald. They then supplied them with rifles, ammunition and ballistic vests, according to the complaints unsealed Tuesday.
As early as April 2021, U.S. investigators said, meetings were held in the Miami and Fort Lauderdale area to discuss financing, logistics, acquiring weapons and military equipment, and security in the initial plan to remove Moïse from power and replace him with Sanon, the 64-year-old Haitian-American pastor and doctor.
In fact, a meeting at the Tower Club in Fort Lauderdale that Haitian authorities initially said had occurred in May actually took place on April 7, 2021. A photograph showed several of the suspects sitting around the table. Ortiz was present, though he did not appear in the photo, according to the criminal complaint.
“At the April meetings, CTU represented that it was associated with the United States Department of Justice and/or the FBI and took steps to falsely suggest that the United States Government sanctioned its operational plan,” the complaint said.
READ MORE: New details emerge in Haiti president’s slaying as newly charged suspects appear in court
Before his arrest, Intriago, a Venezuelan émigré, had maintained through his defense attorneys that he provided only bodyguard services for Sanon through CTU Security as part of Sanon’s presidential aspirations and knew nothing about a plot to kill Moïse.
One of the attorneys, Joseph Tesmond, had confirmed to the Herald that Intriago was arrested around 6 a.m. Tuesday. He no longer represents the businessman. Intriago was assigned a new attorney in court Tuesday after declaring he could not afford private representation.
The attorney from the federal public defender’s office assigned to Ortiz on Tuesday declined to comment. Ortiz, was an active FBI informant at the time of the president’s assassination, several sources previously told the newspaper. A Colombian national, he once testified in a cartel case for the agency.
The complaint, which acknowledged Ortiz’s FBI ties, said at one point Ortiz and some of his co-conspirators met with FBI investigators on or around April 6, 2021, to discuss Haiti. During the discussion, Ortiz and the others attempted to draw FBI investigators into a discussion about “regime change in Haiti.”
“In response, an FBI agent told the men, in substance, that the FBI could not help them because Haiti had to solve its own political problems,” the complaint said.
A Haitian American who allegedly helped coordinate logistics behind the scenes was James Solages, who quit his job at a nursing home in Palm Beach County to go work for CTU’s security firm. It was Solages who introduced Intriago to Sanon. He was CTU’s representative in Haiti prior to the assassination.
During the course of the conspiracy, Solages and the others exchanged a number of written and audio messages. In one such exchange on April 20, 2021, Ortiz told Solages that “the current President [of Haiti] is the thief ... delete the messages that could compromise you in case of being captured,” the complaint said. The next day, Solages sent Ortiz a list of military equipment needed for the operation. This included M-4 rifles, M-60 machine guns, “Kalashnikov rifles,” combat boots, hand grenades, gas mask, bulletproof vests and over 20,000 rounds of ammunition.
The plan, according to the criminal complaint, appeared to have initially targeted Moïse while he was at the presidential palace.
On April 27, 2021, Ortiz sent a text to Germán Rivera Garcia, a retired Colombian officer known as “Colonel Mike,” of a whiteboard with a drawing of the assault plan for the palace, whose structure collapsed in the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake. The whiteboard, according to the complaint, appears to describe the use of snipers and a militia team consisting of “10 warriors, neutralizers” and shows palace security. On May 6, 2021, Ortiz forwarded the same photo to Veintemilla.
By May 22, Ortiz was warning Solages about losing control and that he could “get 25 years in prison” for conspiracy as an American citizen. “You have to be very careful with everything you say, especially in a group, and I know you were very uncomfortable with everything I was saying, losing control,” he wrote, according to the complaint.
On June 2, 2021, Solages texted Intriago a photograph of himself sitting around a table with the message “conducting the hitting plans right now.” Also in the photograph: Joseph Vincent, a former Drug Enforcement Administration confidential informant who lived in South Florida; John Joël Joseph, a former Haitian senator, and other conspirators, the complaint said. The next day, Veintemilla messaged Bergmann that he just wired 15K to James [Solages] for screws.” That same day, Intriago alerted Solages that the “15K on the way” and “please make it happens [sic].”
According to the complaint, Veintemilla had provided the $15,000 to Solages to purchase ammunition. Also in their communication, he was reminded by Intriago that the Colombian nationals would need weapons and Solages “needed to obtain a variety of firearms,” referred to as short drills and long ones, for the operation.
“Using coded terms like screws, nails and tools to refer to weapons and ammunition, communication between co-conspirators was a calculated plan encouraged to carry out civil unrest that resulted in [Moise’s] death,” DOJ’s Olsen said, adding that the company owners had hoped to reap a windfall from security contracts following the president’s demise.
At the end of January, Solages and Sanon were transferred from Haitian custody to U.S. authorities along with two other suspects: Vincent and Rivera, the latter one of the alleged leaders of the deadly attack, according to criminal complaints.
Solages, Vincent and Rivera are charged with conspiring to kidnap or kill Haiti’s president, while Sanon is charged with conspiring to smuggle the ballistic vests from Miami to Port-au-Prince for the Colombian commandos. The shipment lacked the required export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the required export information, a complaint charging Sanon said.
All four new defendants have their arraignments on Wednesday.
The other defendants charged in the assassination case and currently in a federal detention lockup in Miami include Mario Antonio Palacios Palacios, an ex-Colombian soldier; Rodolphe Jaar, a convicted drug trafficker who once cooperated with the U.S. government; and Joseph, the former Haitian senator who participated in several meetings. They were arrested last year after fleeing Haiti and charged with conspiring to kidnap or kill Haiti’s president, pleaded not guilty and are scheduled for trial in late March.
READ MORE: How a Miami plot to oust a president led to a murder in Haiti
A group of about 20 Colombian nationals with military training were recruited to assist in the “operation,” and began arriving in Haiti around June 2021, according to a criminal complaint charging Solages, Vincent and Rivera. One of the lead Colombian nationals in charge of the group was Rivera. The other, Duberney Capador Giraldo, was killed along with two other former soldiers by Haitian police after the killing.
Soon, the goal of ousting Moïse in Haiti escalated from a kidnapping scheme to an assassination plot.
Moïse, who returned to Haiti from an official overseas trip to Turkey with his wife and others on June 19, 2021, was unaware of the plan. That plan was aborted when the getaway plane never arrived.
On June 28, 2021, Solages and Intriago exchanged text messages in which Intriago asked: “When do you think we’re going to have all the instruments ready for the party?” Instruments were a reference to weapons and party to the removal of the president. Then later that day, Solages traveled from Haiti to South Florida carrying a purported “immunity” letter dated June 22, 2021. It requested assistance from CTU’s Intriago, and promised “immunity, protection and security.”
The letter was signed by Thélot, who denied its authenticity in a Herald interview. In the complaint, an investigator said the signature on the letter did not match previous signatures by the judge and he could not collaborate its authenticity.
READ MORE: Ex-rebel leader known as ‘the torturer’ is arrested in Haiti president’s assassination
According to multiple witness interviews and cellphone records obtained by the Herald, on July 6, 2021, several conspirators (including Solages, Vincent and Rivera) met prior to the assassination at a house not far from Moïse’s residence. “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 Moïse,” the complaint said.
Hours later, “several conspirators drove in a convoy to President Moïse’s residence,” with Solages, Vincent and Rivera traveling in the same vehicle, the complaint said.
“Once they arrived outside President Moïse’s residence, Solages announced that they were engaged in a ‘DEA Operation’ to ensure compliance from President Moïse’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 2021, he knew the plan was to kill Haiti’s president, according to the complaint. Vincent told agents that the initial plan was to remove Moïse 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 goal and that the president’s arrest was a “pretense,” the complaint said.
Moïse was riddled with 12 bullets allegedly fired by the Colombian commandos. His wife, Martine, was wounded during the assault at the home. Their children were not injured.
Parallel U.S. and Haitian investigations into the assassination have unfolded during a period of unprecedented gang violence and political upheaval in Haiti. More than 40 people, including 18 Colombian nationals and three Haitian Americans with ties to South Florida, were arrested in Haiti in connection with the assassination. So far, no one has been formally charged in Haiti.
The Haitian government’s probe is currently on its fifth investigative judge and has regained a bit of momentum after being stalled due to the turnover of judges.
El Nuevo Herald reporter Antonio Maria Delgado contributed to this report.
