Four South Florida men were found guilty on Friday of conspiring to kidnap or kill Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, who was assassinated in his home outside Port-au-Prince on July 7, 2021, plunging the Caribbean country deeper into political turmoil and gang-fueled chaos.

The verdict, delivered by a 12-member jury in federal court in Miami, came nearly five years after the assassination, following 39 days of testimony over almost nine weeks. The jury spent just over two days deliberating, after sending a question to the judge about one of the nine charges related to the shipment of bulletproof vests to mercenaries in Haiti, a country under a U.S. arms embargo.

Arcángel Pretel Ortiz and Antonio “Tony” Intriago, owners of Counter Terrorist Federal Academy and Counter Terrorist Unit Security in Doral — collectively known as CTU — were convicted along with James Solages, who worked for CTU, and Walter Veintemilla, a Broward-area mortgage broker whom prosecutors said helped finance the plot.

All the men were accused of plotting in South Florida and hiring a squad of former Colombian soldiers to violently overthrow Haiti’s president in a coup scheme that turned from his ouster to his assassination a couple of weeks before his death. The defense teams challenged those allegations by asserting that Haitian police and presidential security details killed Moïse before the Colombian hit squad arrived at his hillside home in the middle of the night.

But prosecutors argued that the South Florida group, in collaboration with a few key Haitians starting in April 2021, wanted to replace Moïse with a new president willing to hire them for lucrative security and infrastructure contracts in Haiti.

“This case is very simple,” lead Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean McLaughlin told jurors during closing arguments. “This is a case about greed, arrogance and power.”

After the jury’s verdicts were announced, one of the defense attorneys told a group of reporters outside the federal courthouse that the four defendants plan to appeal. They’ve been in custody at South Florida detention centers since their arrests.

“Of course we are disappointed,” said defense lawyer David Howard. “We thought the government’s case was insufficient, but we have to respect the system and respect the verdict.”

For dozens of Haitian Americans who attended the two-month trial in downtown Miami, the outcome was joyful — even though the voluminous evidence did not reveal the names of the mastermind behind the deadly plot or the assailant who fatally shot Moïse.

“I’m so happy, I nearly cried inside out,” said Kettly Lefevre, 76, of Boynton Beach, who added she was a supporter of Moïse, like a half-dozen others gathered with her outside the courthouse. “The people in Haiti would be happy, but the government, I don’t know. … I loved Jovenel.”

“It seemed that [this trial] was the only chance we had to have any little piece of justice,” added Jacques Defrant, 71, of Miramar, who attended every day of trial “We didn’t want to miss the boat on that.”

The verdict

The jury found the four defendants guilty of five counts, including a conspiracy to provide material support, a terrorism-related charge and conspiracy to lead a military expedition against a friendly nation, a violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act, which bans American citizens from waging war against any country at peace with the United States. Intriago, 63, also faced four additional counts related to shipping bulletproof vests to Haiti for about 20 former Colombian soldiers whom CTU recruited and sent to Port-au-Prince roughly a month before the killing. The jury found him guilty of three of those counts, but acquitted him of a fourth charge of violating U.S. export control laws.

Though the four defendants were tried at the same time, jurors were instructed they had to consider each one individually. A fifth defendant, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haiti-born doctor and pastor who lived in South Florida, will be tried at a later date due to health issues. Initially, the South Florida plotters backed Sanon, 67, to succeed Moïse, 53, after his removal, but they abandoned him for another political candidate, a Haitian Superior Court justice, Windelle Coq Thélot., in the weeks before the president’s assassination.

All four defendants could be sentenced to as long as life in prison by U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra, who plans to hold a sentencing hearing in late summer.

After she read the verdicts in a packed courtroom and excused the jurors, Becerra told both sides that “it was an emotional day.”

“This is a case of great significance,” she said.

Long before trial, six co-conspirators in the case had pleaded guilty to the conspiracy to kidnap or kill Moïse or to a lesser charge of smuggling the vests to the Colombians. Two additional individuals also took plea deals after being accused of money laundering charges related to the plot.

Federal prosecutors presented a sweeping case — one that ran parallel to and intersected with a still-unresolved sprawling investigation by Haitian authorities, who have charged more than 50 suspects, including the former first lady, Martine Moïse.

The U.S. case focused on more than 40 witnesses, photos of the crime scene borrowed from the Haiti National Police, as well as some of the weapons used by the Colombian commandos. There were 8,000 gigabytes of data gathered by FBI agents from more than 100 electronic devices in the United States, Colombia and Haiti. The evidence was part of a 900-page summary of text messages and voice notes showing the evolution of the plot, from plans to use gangs, to poisoning him, to detaining him at the airport after he returned from an overseas trip.

As they discussed their plans, the defendants referred to Moïse as “a rat” and “a thief,” and spoke in coded language about weapons and ammunition. They referred to them as “tools” and “screws” as they struggled to obtain them. They also adopted the names of angels and led others to believe they were acting on behalf of the United States government, including the military and the Drug Enforcement Administration, prosecutors said.

On the night the Colombian commandos raided Moïse’s neighborhood, Solages, 40, accompanied the squad and shouted that the operation was being carried out by the DEA and the U.S. Army.

One of the leaders of the commandos, a retired Colombian Army captain, testified for the government that the squad stormed the president’s residence at the direction of Solages, who had told an inner circle of plotters hours earlier that the goal was to kill everyone in the house.

A sweeping case

Moïse was fatally shot in the upstairs bedroom of his rented home outside Port-au-Prince. His wife, who was the government’s first witness when the trial began on March 9, was seriously wounded. The couple’s two college-age children who hid in a bathroom with one of their dogs were unharmed. Though the president had two semi-automatic rifles in his room, they were never fired.

During her testimony, Martine Moïse said she heard the assailants speaking Spanish during the attack and rummaging through the bedroom for a mysterious document. She also testified that a necklace and Kenneth Cole watch given to her husband by the Spanish ambassador were among the items stolen from the couple’s bedroom. She also commented on plastics bags of newly minted cash kept inside the couple’s bedroom and said her husband used the money to pay bribes and gather intelligence.

Defense lawyers for the South Florida men accused of hiring the Colombian commandos said they were accompanying Haitian authorities to provide security and execute a warrant for Moïse’s arrest — a story prosecutors insisted was created after the fact.

Prosecutor Jason Wu reminded jurors of the video testimony of Haiti investigative judge Jean Roger Noelcius, who signed the warrant and who said under oath, he had no authority to issue one for Moïse’s arrest and fled after he saw it used in a coup attempt on Feb. 7, 2021.

“In a real arrest you also have a valid arrest warrant, not a bogus warrant that they pulled off of social media or the internet,” Wu said during the government’s closing arguments. “It was a fake from the day he signed it.”

As the trial wrapped up Tuesday, McLaughlin told jurors that the defense could argue for hours, but it would not change the evidence and “devastating and overwhelming” testimony against the four defendants.

“The United States has proved the guilt of each one of these defendants overwhelmingly as to every single count, as to every single defendant,” he said, pushing back on defense lawyers’ attempt to cast the killing as a Haitian-led operation that used their clients as scapegoats.

McLaughlin also pushed back on the defense’s efforts to question the credibility of Martine Moïse’s testimony, which differ from what she initially told FBI investigators after she was airlifted to Jackson Memorial Hospital, and to cast Haiti as a corrupt country where even police evidence cannot be trusted.

“She is a woman who came in here with great strength and courage and told you what happened in her bedroom that night, and they cannot stand it because it blows a hole in the entire false theory,” McLaughlin said. “They cannot stand her, and they have done nothing but try to call her a liar, a con artist, a murderer, a terrible mother, a terrible person.”

The Haitian police investigation served as a blueprint for U.S. authorities, who did not get access to the weapons until two years after the killing.

Contrary to the defense’s theory and argument that Moïse was already dead by the time the Colombians arrived, McLaughlin said the killing happened between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m., and “was conducted by Spanish speakers, and two of them were referred to as “El Jefe” and “Pipe.” He identified “Pipe” as former Colombian soldier Victor Albeiro Pineda Cardona and “Jefe” as Javier Romero, the captain of the so-called Delta team, tasked with entering the president’s bedroom first. The two are currently imprisoned in Haiti along with 15 other Colombians accused in the plot.

Also imprisoned in Haiti is Joseph Félix Badio, a former government anti-corruption chief who paid $110,000 to Moïse’s guards to stand down during the assault and purchased $20,000 worth of ammunition ahead of the killing. Badio, who has not been charged in the U.S. case, obtained most of that money from Haitian businessman Rodolphe “Dodof” Jaar, who pleaded to the main conspiracy charge.

The defendants in Miami, McLaughlin and fellow prosecutors argued, were not at odds, but rather worked together “day after day, week after week for months to violently overthrow the government of Haiti and to kill or kidnap” Moïse.

After the president’s assassination, the country collapsed further into unprecedented gang-fueled chaos, which has driven nearly 1.5 million Haitians from their homes and worsened a humanitarian crisis in which 1 in 2 Haitians currently do not have enough to eat.

The defense cast the killing as the work of Haitian insiders who wanted Moïse gone because of his use of armed gangs to target opponents. At the time of his death, the 53-year-old president was enmeshed in a constitutional crisis over his tenure, and his ruling by decree following his dismissal of the Parliament.

While the U.S. said Moise still had a year left in office, Haitian constitutional scholars and opponents argued that he had overstayed his time, which had expired on Feb. 7, 2021, the day he was targeted in an earlier coup.

Defense attorney Emmanuel Perez said Haiti is not going to remember Moïse as a “martyred son.” Moïse’s own actions, he added, provoked prominent Haitians, including two of the government’s own witnesses — former Haiti senator JosephJoël John and Jaar —to plot against him.” Like Jaar, John pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge before trial and testified for the government.

The total budget for the coup, according to an FBI forensics expert, was about $343,000 and was raised through a variety of sources, including about $30,000 in federal pandemic relief loans. About half of that budget was financed by Veintemilla’s lending company in a loan to CTU to pay for Sanon’s security in Haiti, according to the government’s case. He was the plotters’ initial choice to succeed Moïse.

“The witnesses testified that Walter was giving money for security detail, and that’s not enough to convict him of a conspiracy to provide material support to kidnap and kill president Moïse,” Veintemilla’s lawyer, Marissel Descalzo, told jurors. “The people that gave the money to kill President Moise were in Haiti. That was Badio and Jaar. It wasn’t Walter.”

The government’s case, each of the defense lawyers argued, was based on flimsy evidence, including “cherry-picked” text messages and inconsistent witness testimonies. The forensics consisted of a broken chain of custody, including weapons provided to federal investigators by the Haitian police, and a lack of DNA and fingerprints.

“You cannot rely upon what you have been presented because it is unreliable,” David Howard, one of Pretel’s lawyers, told jurors. Pretel, 53, was an FBI informant at the time of the plot, and despite one of his handlers attending a meeting with him and his co-defendants, prosecutors have insisted the assassination was not endorsed by the U.S. government and that the federal agency was in the dark.

Moïse was shot 12 times with a bullet to his heart delivering the fatal blow, according to Jean Armel Demorcy, Haiti’s only forensic pathologist, who testified on behalf of prosecutors. But Demorcy’s extraction of only two bullets, one from the forearm and the other from the president’s back, came under scrutiny.

A defense team pathologist questioned how the two bullets lodged under the skin did not cause more damage if they were fired from a high-velocity rifle, as prosecutors claimed.

“Those two bullets that were extracted from the president’s body, it’s the defense’s position that those were planted,” said Jonathan Friedman, a lawyer for Solages.

Added Intriago’s lawyer, Perez: “The only ones that could have planted it are the ones who actually murdered the president because they wanted to make it seem,” like the Colombians killed him.

There was no DNA or fingerprints, he added, connecting the Colombians to the murder weapon, a Palmetto Armory assault rifle, that prosecutors presented in court during their closing.

But McLaughlin, the prosecutor, pushed back during closing arguments.

“This is not a place for gossip, rumor, innuendo, misrepresentation, conjecture, fiction,” he told jurors. “Facts, evidence and testimony matter.”

Four Defendants Convicted in Plot to Kill Haitian President Jovenel Moïse

A federal jury in Miami today convicted four defendants for their roles in the July 7, 2021, assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.

Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, Antonio Intriago, Walter Veintemilla, and James Solages were convicted of conspiracy to provide material support or resources to carry out a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 956, resulting in death; providing material support and resources to carry out a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 956, resulting in death; conspiracy to kill and kidnap a person outside the United States; conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States; and expedition against a friendly nation. Intriago was also convicted of a third count of conspiracy to commit offenses against the U.S.; smuggling goods from the U.S.; and submitting false or misleading export information.

“These defendants conspired to replace and ultimately to assassinate Haitian President Jovenel Moïse,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg.  “Using U.S. soil as a staging ground for a violent plot overseas is a grave violation of our laws and, more fundamentally, our sovereignty.  We commend the investigative and prosecution team for their exceptional work.”

“This verdict delivers justice for the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and holds accountable those who helped turn South Florida into a staging ground for a deadly foreign plot,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida. “These defendants pursued power, influence, and profit through violence. They supported a conspiracy that crossed borders, destabilized a friendly nation, and ended with the murder of a sitting president. The jury has spoken, and the rule of law has answered.”

“The FBI is going to leverage everything at its disposal to go after conspirators of assassinations,” said Assistant Director Heith Janke of the FBI’s Criminal Division. “Those convicted today played key roles in furthering the capacity for political violence with the aim of reaping the financial benefits of the disorder that followed. We would like to thank our partners who helped ensure that those involved faced justice for their disregard for the rule of law and the life of another human being.”

“Today’s verdict sends an unequivocal message: the United States will not serve as a staging ground for those seeking to destabilize foreign nations through violence. While the assassination of President Moïse was carried out on Haitian soil, the conspiracy was fueled by greed and orchestrated within our own borders,” said Special Agent in Charge Brett Skiles of FBI Miami. “By holding these four men accountable for their roles in this cold-blooded attack, we are honoring the rule of law and ensuring that those who profit from political chaos find no refuge.”

“This case exposed a far-reaching criminal conspiracy driven by power, profit, and political ambition that extended well beyond Haiti’s borders,” said Acting Special Agent in Charge Jose R. Figueroa of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Miami. “HSI and our partners followed the evidence across jurisdictions and international boundaries to help hold accountable those responsible for this heinous plot to assassinate a sitting president and destabilize a partner nation.”

According to court records and evidence presented at trial, Pretel Ortiz, Intriago, Veintemilla, and Solages embarked on a scheme in early 2021 to violently overthrow President Moïse and install their handpicked successor so that the defendants could obtain lucrative government contracts in Haiti. To carry out the plot, the defendants recruited allies in the U.S., Colombia, and Haiti, including 22 former Colombian Army soldiers and Haitian gang leaders. Eight of the co-conspirators, including two of the Colombian mercenaries and several of the group’s Haitian and American allies, pleaded guilty for their roles in the conspiracy, and six of them testified at trial.

Between April and July 2021, the defendants developed and refined multiple plans to kidnap or kill President Moïse. From late May to early June 2021, the group discussed a plan to kidnap President Moïse at his sister’s house, drug him, and force him to resign. When that failed, the defendants switched tactics and developed a new strategy for kidnapping President Moïse when he returned from an international trip on June 19, 2021. Many of these schemes relied on the defendants’ putative Haitian gang allies. Ultimately, the defendants decided to order their Colombian mercenaries to attack President Moïse’s home and kill him. In preparation, co-conspirators in Haiti obtained black-market weapons and ammunition for the Colombian mercenaries.

On July 7, 2021, Solages and a team of Colombian mercenaries carried out the attack on President Moïse’s residence with the help of several Haitian allies. During the assault, a squad of former Colombian special forces soldiers, called the Delta Team, along with other mercenaries stormed the residence, fatally shot President Moïse in his bedroom, and seriously wounded the First Lady of Haiti, Martine Moïse. Trial evidence established that bullets recovered from President Moïse during the autopsy, and another recovered from First Lady Moïse during surgery, matched a rifle carried and used by the Colombian Delta Team. Extensive digital communications introduced at trial further showed that the defendants spent months discussing and coordinating plans to kidnap or kill President Moïse.

Veintemilla played a central role in financing the conspiracy. Starting in April 2021, Veintemilla agreed to finance the scheme through a $175,000 loan agreement financed with proceeds derived from others’ Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) funds that were funneled through an account controlled by a co-conspirator. Trial evidence also showed that Veintemilla was involved in the operational details. After learning of the assassination in the early morning hours of July 7, 2021, Veintemilla immediately called a co-conspirator and proclaimed: “the rat (President Moïse) is in the box.”

Pretel Ortiz, who referred to himself as “Colonel Gabriel” and routinely wore fake U.S. military-style uniforms, rank, and insignia, directed the plot’s tactical planning and operation, including coordinating with the Colombian mercenaries. Hours before the assassination, Pretel Ortiz told his co-defendants: “I put my men on the ground and we are still fighting to reach the objective.”

Intriago, Pretel Ortiz’s business partner, handled the day-to-day logistical aspects of the plot, including payroll, equipment, and provisions for the co-conspirators.  On June 10, 2021, Intriago helped smuggle bulletproof vests and other tactical equipment—including radios, flashlights, and goggles—from Miami to Haiti for use by the Colombian mercenaries during the assassination. In late June 2021, Intriago traveled to Haiti and photographed himself with the group’s Haitian allies. On the eve of the assassination, Intriago messaged his co-conspirators: “We finally got the tools to do the work.”

Solages served as the defendants’ primary liaison in Haiti and repeatedly traveled between South Florida and Haiti to coordinate with Haitian gang leaders, obtain weapons and ammunition in Haiti, and conduct surveillance of President Moïse’s residence. Solages also accompanied the Colombian mercenaries during the attack and instructed them to kill everyone inside the house, including “the dog, the cat, and parrot.”

All four defendants face maximum penalties of life in prison. U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra for the Southern District of Florida will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

FBI Miami and HSI Miami investigated the case, with valuable assistance from the Department of State; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, Office of Export Enforcement; and the Department of Defense Criminal Investigative Service.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sean McLaughlin, Jason Wu, and Altanese Phenelus for the Southern District of Florida and Trial Attorney Andrew Briggs of the Justice Department’s National Security Division Counterterrorism Section are prosecuting the case.

This case is part of the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) initiative established by Executive Order 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion. The HSTF is a whole-of-government partnership dedicated to eliminating criminal cartels, foreign gangs, transnational criminal organizations, and human smuggling and trafficking rings operating in the United States and abroad. Through historic interagency collaboration, the HSTF directs the full might of United States law enforcement towards identifying, investigating, and prosecuting the full spectrum of crimes committed by these organizations, which have long fueled violence and instability within our borders. In performing this work, the HSTF places special emphasis on investigating and prosecuting those engaged in child trafficking or other crimes involving children. The HSTF further utilizes all available tools to prosecute and remove the most violent criminal aliens from the United States.