Miami trial opens for four charged in assassination of Haiti's President Moïse

Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys in Miami delivered opening statements Tuesday in the trial of four men accused of conspiring in South Florida to kidnap or kill Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, who was killed at his home near Port-au-Prince on July 7, 2021. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean McLaughlin told the jury the case was not complicated: the defendants wanted to seize power and get rich.

The federal trial, before U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra in Miami, centers on South Florida as a planning and financing hub for the killing of Haiti’s last elected president — an assassination that accelerated gang violence and deepened political instability across the Caribbean nation.

MIAMI — Federal prosecutors told a Miami jury Tuesday that greed, arrogance and a lust for power drove four men to conspire in South Florida to kill Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, opening a trial that centers on one of the Western Hemisphere’s most brazen political assassinations in recent decades.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean McLaughlin said the case against defendants Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, Antonio Intriago, Walter Veintemilla and James Solages was not complicated.

“So arrogant and confident in themselves, the evidence will show, and thinking so little of the Republic of Haiti and its people, they actually thought they could pull it off,” McLaughlin told jurors.

Defense attorneys countered that the investigation launched in Haiti was fundamentally flawed and that their clients were manipulated into bearing responsibility for what they described as an internal coup.

“Once you get off on the wrong foot, everything that comes after is hard to trust,” said Orlando do Campo, the attorney for Ortiz.

Moïse was killed on July 7, 2021, when about two dozen foreign mercenaries — mostly from Colombia — attacked his private residence near Port-au-Prince, officials said. The killing threw Haiti into turmoil and fueled a surge of gang violence that has continued to destabilize the Caribbean nation.

All four defendants face possible life sentences. Each has pleaded not guilty.

The South Florida connection

According to court documents, South Florida served as the central hub for planning and financing the plot to remove Moïse from power. Ortiz and Intriago led two companies collectively known as CTU — Counter Terrorist Unit Federal Academy and Counter Terrorist Unit Security — both based in South Florida. Veintemilla was a principal of Worldwide Capital Lending Group, also based in the region. Solages served as a CTU representative in Haiti.

Conspirators gathered in South Florida in April 2021 and agreed that, once in power, Christian Sanon — a dual Haitian-U.S. citizen the group initially backed to replace Moïse — would award contracts to CTU for infrastructure projects, security forces and military equipment, investigators said.

Worldwide Capital agreed to help finance the operation, extending a $175,000 line of credit to CTU and sending money to co-conspirators in Haiti to purchase ammunition, officials said. CTU recruited about 20 Colombian nationals with military training to provide security for Sanon. Conspirators also spent months obtaining weapons and body armor and attempting to build relationships with Haitian gangs, officials said.

By June 2021, the group determined that Sanon lacked the constitutional qualifications and popular support to become president and shifted its backing to Wendelle Coq Thélot, a former Haitian Superior Court judge. Thélot died in January 2025 while still a fugitive.

Defense arguments

Defense attorneys told jurors that Sanon approached their clients in early 2021 with plans to liberate Haiti from Moïse, who had overstayed his term as president and faced criticism from Haitian citizens, U.S. politicians and United Nations officials.

Emmanuel Perez, an attorney for Intriago, said the group worked alongside FBI agents, U.S. Embassy officials and members of the Haitian government in what the defendants believed was the lawful arrest of a criminal president.

Defense attorneys pointed to Joseph Félix Badio — a former Haitian government worker arrested in Haiti in 2023 — as the actual mastermind behind a plan to use a presidential arrest as cover for a killing. Defense attorneys argued Moïse had already been killed by men dressed as Haitian police officers by the time the Colombian security force arrived.

The group possessed a real arrest warrant signed by a judge, said Jonathan Friedman, the attorney for Solages — though the judge later claimed the warrant was signed under duress.

“None of the people here on trial knew that,” Friedman said.

Marissel Descalzo, the attorney for Veintemilla, reserved her opening statement until after the prosecution presents its case.

Witness testimony and trial schedule

After opening statements concluded, prosecutors called Martine Moïse as their first witness. Moïse, the president’s widow, was wounded during the July 2021 attack. She testified for about an hour before court recessed for the day and is set to return Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra has scheduled more than two months for the proceedings.

Five other defendants in the U.S. case previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and are serving life sentences. A sixth person was sentenced to nine years after pleading guilty to providing body armor to the conspirators. A separate trial for Christian Sanon has yet to be scheduled.

Seventeen Colombian soldiers and three Haitian officials face charges in Haiti, where gang violence, death threats and a deteriorating judicial system have stalled that investigation.