The high-stakes plot to remove Haiti President Jovenel Moïse that culminated in his July 7, 2021, assassination was carried out for roughly $343,000, and financed through a patchwork of loans, credit cards, wire transfers and pandemic relief funds, an FBI forensics accountant told a Miami federal jury.
Nestor Mascarell, a certified public accountant and 20-year veteran of the agency, said he tracked the financing through hundreds of accounts and transactions associated with four defendants on trial in South Florida for conspiring to kidnap or kil Moïse nearly five years ago. Among them were records from 28 bank accounts associated with the defendants and their companies, including Worldwide Capital Lending and Counter Terrorist Security Unit and its affiliate, Counter Terrorist Federal Academy, known as CTU, whose Miami-area partners are charged with hiring a group of former Colombian soldiers to carry out the deadly assault.
Mascarell broke down his analysis into four main funding sources: $22,850.60 from Frederick Bergmann, who in 2024 was sentenced to nine years in prison for sending ballistic vests to Haiti for 20 Colombians; $11,094.20 from CTU and $160,182.20 from Worldwide Capital Lending Group.
He also included in his total an estimated $150,000 that a Haitian businessman said he poured into the scheme. Rodolphe “Dodof” Jaar, a convicted cocaine trafficker who has pleaded guilty to the main conspiracy charge and testified on behalf of the government in hopes of reducing his life sentence, testified earlier this month that he funneled money to a fired Haitian government official to bribe members of the president’s security detail to stand down during the attack on Moïse’s home outside Port-au-Prince.
Mascarell was the government’s 44th and final witness as prosecutors rested their case on Monday after seven weeks of trial.
Eleven people were charged by federal prosecutors In South Florida in connection with the murder. Two others also were charged in connection with the conspiracy and have pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges. They are among eight people who have taken plea deals in connection to the case.
Three of the defendants on trial — Antonio “Tony” Intriago, Arcángel Pretel Ortiz and James Solages — worked for CTU. A fourth defendant, Walter Veintemilla, a Broward County mortgage broker, is accused of financing the plot through Worldwide Capital.
Until Mascarell’s testimony, much of the government’s evidence depicted a group struggling to acquire weapons, ammunition and cash in their various false starts to overthrow Moïse. But through the forensics accountant’s testimony, prosecutors sought to show how the defendants aimed to enrich themselves with lucrative security contracts in Haiti under a new president.
Mascarell testified that money was wired from bank accounts in South Florida to Haiti, and funds were raised through a variety of sources, including federal pandemic relief loans. He said about $30,000 in pandemic benefits, guaranteed by the Small Business Administration, were used to fund some of the plot.
At the center of his analysis was a loan agreement that had 21 draw requests, part of a $175,000 loan from Veintemilla’s Worldwide Capital Lending Group to Intriago and Pretel. The loan was made on behalf of Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haiti-born doctor and pastor whom the group was backing to replace Moïse, until the scheme changed to instead support a Haiti Superior Court justice, Windelle Coq Thélot. Sanon, who is ill, will be tried at a later date on the conspiracy charge.
“Mr. Veintemilla was the bank for these defendants to kill or kidnap Moïse,” prosecutor Jason Wu said Tuesday.
Transactions cited during Mascarell’s testimony included a $26,484 payment to fly in the 20 Colombians to Port-au-Prnce via the neighboring Dominican Republic; $20,000 to the owner of the hotel where the Colombians stayed in Port-au-Prince; $15,477.27 for a chartered plane that flew Sanon and others to Haiti from Fort Lauderdale, and a $15,000 bank transfer on June 3, 2021 to Phenel Gordon Désir, an associate of Sanon who served as executive secretary of the Ayiti2054 political party.
The money, according to text messages between Veintemilla and Sanon, was for Solages “to buy screws,” Mascarell testified. He said in total the defendants spent $21,234.26 for tactical gear and vests.
“’Screws’ is a reference to ammunition,” he said.
Eight weeks and jury instructions
The case has now entered its eighth week, and closing arguments could start as early as next week.
On Monday, after the government rested, defense lawyers began presenting their witnesses, the first of whom was Nicole Phillips. A legal adviser on human rights in Haiti, Philips testified about the role of gangs in political life in Haiti as well as the government structure. She also testified about the wave of opposition to Moïse in the months before his killing, including the view that he had exceeded his term in office — an issue raised by at least one of the government’s cooperating witnesses, former Sen. Joseph Joel John.
On Tuesday, defense attorneys negotiated jury instructions, tried to get charges dismissed against some of their clients and attempted to get additional witness testimony in, such as a pathologist to advance their argument that a bullet taken from the president’s forearm had been planted.
“We walked into a fairly impossible situation,” Orlando do Campo, a defense lawyer for Pretel, said as prosecutors challenged a last-minute request for expert testimony as the jury remained home on Tuesday.
The defense has faced some limitations. They’ve been unable to travel to Haiti, where some of the suspects in the assassination broke out of prison in February 2025, and U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra has imposed limits on evidence from a parallel investigation there. Also, because the case centers on an alleged violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act and one of the defendants, Pretel, served as an FBI informant, some of the evidence has remained confidential.
“There were a lot of witnesses that were outside of our control and not present, but within the government’s control, specifically the Haitian national police officers,” one of the lawyers representing Veintemilla told the court on Tuesday during a discussion about jury instructions.
She also noted that the defense wanted to call former Haiti National Police Director Leon Charles and a jailed former government official, Joseph Felix Badio, as witnesses. Badio, whose participation in the plot elevated it from a kidnapping to an assassination, has figured prominently in both the government and defense arguments.
« The Haitian government has been requesting that the U.S. take Badio for months, if not years, and the U.S. has refused to bring him over here… and Badio is material to our defense, and he was not accessible to us,” the defense attorney said.
Prosecutor Wu did not address the specific witnesses but did note that it wasn’t easy getting their one Haitian government witness, the country’s pathologist, out of Haiti to testify. They made inquiries, he said, “about whether certain Haitian law enforcement would be willing or able to travel, but we did not receive a positive response.”
It was the latest in a series of rulings against the defense over two days by Becerra, who on Tuesday reiterated her opposition to letting the defense suggest to the jury that the defendants were executing a valid arrest warrant signed by a Haitian judge. That judge testified that he had no authority to sign the arrest warrant and that it had been signed under duress.
“There is no evidence,” Becerra said, rejecting arguments that officials of the U.S. government or the Haitian government had authorized the defendants’ actions. “To suggest this was a valid warrant, to say the least, it is a stretch.”
On Monday, lawyers for the defendants moved for an acquittal on behalf of their clients, arguing that the government had failed to prove a conspiracy.
“There’s insufficient evidence that’s been presented,” defense attorney Marissel Descalzo said. She said only four cooperating witnesses mentioned her client, including one who recounted what she characterized as a joke — that there would be a protest and Moïse would “fall into the crowd.”
“There was no evidence that Mr. Veintemilla heard that statement, or even interacted with the statement, or understood the statement to mean anything other than a joke,” she said.
The defense has argued that the plot to arrest Moïse was ultimately hijacked and he was killed by his own security forces, not the Colombian commandos hired by CTU’s partners.
“Whoever ultimately assassinated the president was not part of the conspiracy that the government alleges commenced in the jurisdiction of the United States, because all of this actually materialized very early on the first week of July,” Emmanuel Perez, a lawyer for Intriago, said.
Simon Patrick Dray, one of Solages’ defense lawyers, noted that the 12-member jury “has heard multiple conspiracies and different plans” that shifted over time. He argued that if one were to believe the government’s case, the plan to kill the president occurred on July 6 when the men gathered at Jaar’s mountaintop house.
“That was in Haiti, not the United States,” Dray said. “There was no jurisdiction.”
Wu argued on each of the points, saying the government, through evidence that included a 900-page summary of text messages, has proven its case. Not only is the argument of multiple conspiracies “a very weak theory,” Wu said, but there is no alternate perpetrator in the form of Badio.
Becerra sided with the government, noting that the government’s cooperating witnessses “clearly set out that each and every one of these defendants was involved in a conspiracy to kidnap President Moïse and at some point, the conspiracy became a conspiracy to assassinate.”
Vodou expert
The day before she blocked an effort by the defense to bring in a Vodou expert.
The defense wanted to call a practicing Vodou priest as an expert about certain aspects of the religion. The priest was going to testify about a link between the religion and the mutilation of the president after he was dead.
The way in which Moïse’s blood-soaked body was mutilated has raised questions about whether the religion and cultural belief played a role. He wasn’t just shot a dozen times — both his arms and legs were broken, his face was destroyed, and he was shot through the wrist of his left hand.
This “is not the result of random gunfire. This was deliberate,” attorney David Howard, representing Pretel, said in support of calling the defense’s expert.
“I find it curious that a Vodou priest would be able to take the stand and say that he is well-versed in Vodou assassinations, which appears to me to be something, on its face, impossible because it’s not something that that religion condones,” Becerra said on Friday when the issue was first raised by defense lawyers.
Defense lawyers say they expect to rest their case on Friday. None of the four defendants are expected to take the stand.
Jonathan Friedman, a lawyer for Solages, has accused prosecutors of trying to block the testimony of at least one of the individuals he would like to call. He accused prosecutors of using intimidation tactics to pressure a potential witness not to take the stand on behalf of Solages, a Haitian-American handyman who was CTU’s representative in Haiti.
The witness, Jimmy Thompson, interacted with Solages in the days before the July 7 assassination and on the day of the attack. Earlier, prosecutors presented evidence showing that Solages flew to Texas to meet with Thompson and later told him on July 7 that “the contractors did it.”
Despite that evidence, Friedman said, Thompson could provide exculpatory testimony.
“He’s a critical witness to our case,” he said, adding that the information they want to elicit from Thompson “is unavailable from any other source.”
He told Becerra that after alerting prosecutors of plans to call Thompson, he was informed that the witness might be treated as a co-conspirator after “the government represented that Mr. Thompson was not a co-conspirator in this case.”
“There’s a memo suggesting that he was not going to be charged with any crime. So there’s sort of overtures of government intimidation and overreach,” Friedman said.
He asked Becerra to grant Thompson immunity or compel the government to do so.
Prosecutor Sean McLaughlin rejected the accusation of witness intimidation, telling the judge that he had “no idea” what Friedman is “talking about in terms of witness tampering or what the overtures are.”
“Mr. Thompson is the individual that Mr. Solages flies out to see in late June. He reports back … that he had this wonderful meeting, and God is guiding us. And then, of course, he comes back to Haiti, and they do the assassination,” McLaughlin said.
The fact that Thompson checked in with Solages while he was in Haiti, McLaughlin said, shows that “it’s clear” he was briefed on what they were going to do.
“This is the same person that Mr. Solages reaches out to once the gig is up, basically, and they’ve been cornered. And then Mr. Solages tells him, point-blank, that the contractors did it,” McLaughlin said. “So from the government’s point of view … he is a co conspirator.”
