Haitian authorities have asked U.S. officials to take custody of a central figure in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, but he remains in Haiti, where he has neither been charged by the U.S. Justice Department nor interviewed by federal agents.
The revelation about Joseph Félix Badio, a former official in Haiti’s anti-corruption unit who was fired months before the brazen killing, emerged Monday during the cross-examination of an FBI official who served as a case agent.
“He’s a central figure in this matter, and not a single United States law enforcement agent — out of all the 200-plus investigation interviews that were done — decided to talk to that guy,” said David Howard, one of two defense attorneys for former FBI informant and Colombian national Arcángel Pretel Ortiz.
FBI special agent Nicholas Rahmer testified he had heard “both from the media and from people involved in the case” of Haitian authorities’ desire to have Badio transferred after he was arrested in Port-au-Prince following two years on the run. But it wasn’t his call, Rahmer said, stressing that he’s been off the case for two years.
Pressed about the importance of the former government official who has figured prominently in the Haitian investigation, Rahmer said: “I would say he’d be somebody who is important to the case.”
Pushing back on Howard’s assertion that the FBI’s investigation was “incomplete,” Rahmer said “the investigation is ongoing.”
Rahmer said federal agents on the case conducted a minimum of 250 to 300 interviews with individuals in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Haiti and across the United States. But none of those interviewed, he acknowledged, was Badio, a key suspect in the Haitian investigation who was arrested in October 2023.
“There was a significant amount of incidents that occurred in Haiti that made it very difficult for us to get down there,” he said.
Judge: Pick up pace
The ongoing trial of four South Florida defendants in the high-profile July 7, 2021, assassination, which plunged Haiti into gang-fueled chaos, is expected to last around two months. On Monday, the trial entered its third week, with U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra telling lawyers on both sides that they will need to pick up the pace.
Her order came after a juror passed a note asking if the trial was on schedule and after defense lawyers struggled to work the courtroom equipment on Monday. The judge also chastised prosecutors, describing Monday as “painful” because they moved so slowly during a financial analysis of contract attachments retrieved from one of the defendant’s laptops.
Prosecutors argue the South Florida defendants hired a squad of Colombian commandos to kidnap or kill Moïse to seize political power and secure lucrative infrastructure contracts from his successor. The prosecution said the defendants’ actions led to the president’s assassination.
In addition to Pretel, a permanent U.S. resident who helped hire the Colombians, the defendants in the Miami trial are Antonio Intriago, 62, a Venezuelan American who owned a Doral security company along with Pretel; James Solages, 40, a Haitian-American handyman who also worked for Intriago, and Walter Veintemilla, 57, an Ecuadorian American that prosecutors say helped finance the plan targeting Moïse.
A fifth defendant, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, also charged with the men, will be tried at a later date due to his poor health. A Haitian doctor and U.S. citizen, Sanon had positioned himself as possible successor to Moïse and claimed that he was working to bring development and infrastructure projects to Haiti such as solar-powered electricity and clean water.
The defense has said their clients’ involvement was legitimate, and that they were framed by high-level Haitian officials, including Badio, who has maintained he’s innocent. During an appeal last year of his indictment by a Haitian investigative judge, Badio accused Haiti’s judicial police of missing security lapses in the president’s detail.
Suspects not interviewed
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean McLaughlin and his team have submitted hundreds of pages of evidence including text messages, photographs and witness testimony to show the scope of the government’s murder conspiracy case. But the defense has sought at every turn to highlight what it describes as the investigation’s shortcomings — from a broken chain of custody and suspicions about the handling of evidence by Haitian police to a lack of forensic FBI evidence.
Defense lawyers noted Monday, for example, that two 9-mm spent shell casings seen in a photograph under the arm of Moïse’s bullet-riddled body on the floor next to his bed could have been fired from pistols on which the FBI failed to conduct ballistics testing. Sixteen pistols are among the evidence Haitian police seized, but they are not among the guns that the FBI had shipped back to the U.S. for ballistic testing.
The weapons that were brought to the U.S., Rahmer testified, were rifles including an Uzi, which is capable of firing pistol-caliber rounds, he said. The agent said the firearms were provided by Haiti to U.S. authorities “on loan” to help with the ballistics testing.
But it was the missing witness interviews that offered startling revelations. Among the key individuals who has not been interviewed is a Haitian businessman who owned a security firm tied to the killing. A memo from Haiti’s judicial police, introduced into evidence by prosecutors, said officers had seized multiple boxes of ammunition at the residence of Reynaldo Corvington and that the items had been in their custody since July 30, 2021.
The boxes bore the same lot number as ammunition found in Moïse’s home, according to a photograph also submitted by the government.
Asked about Corvington’s whereabouts, Rahmer said he had escaped from a Haitian prison. But the businessman had in fact been released by Haiti’s justice system, and Howard noted that he is living here in South Florida.
“You’re aware, are you not, that Reynaldo Corvington is living in Pembroke Pines, about 30 minutes from here, free as a bird?” Howard said to Rahmer’s surprise.
Millions to be made
At least 18 FBI and Homeland Security Investigations have taken the stand, including a senior FBI forensics recovery expert who retrieved Whatsapp text messages from a laptop at Veintemilla’s Miramar offices. The messages are among the “significant amount” of data from “well-over 60 electronic devices,” Rahmer testified.
In the case of the laptop, the messages and the images included photos of the defendants at a Fort Lauderdale restaurant in April 2021, when the government says the plan was partly hatched; a three-minute promotional video for Intriago’s and Pretel’s Counter Terrorist Unit set to the James Bond movie’s theme music midway through, and another advertising “classes available” showing people in a dark shooting range and jumping out of helicopters.
Veintemilla’s attorney, Tama Beth Kudman, sought to show that the videos were advertisements and the messages highlighted by prosecutors lacked context. McLaughlin sought to build the government’s argument over the monetary benefit the group sought in pushing contracts in Haiti, as he questioned Ricardo Soto, a senior digital examiner with the FBI over his recovery of the data.
McLaughlin pointed out that an agreement for clean water was for a period of 99 years and would rake in $136.8 million, according to his calculation, which he did for the jury. Another contract to bring electricity to the seaside port city of Jacmel in southeast Haiti, at 15 cents a kilowatt, would yield about $6 million in service fees, the prosecutor highlighted. A 40-year waste management contract would bring in $13.6 million.
Kudman fired back, asking Soto if he saw anything in the data calling for the killing of the president. He replied he had not.
