MIAMI — Four men accused of hatching a plot in South Florida that led to the gruesome death of Haiti’s president will finally face trial on Monday, almost five years after Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom, plunging his nation into gang-ridden chaos.

A fifth defendant charged with them won’t be present at the trial in Miami federal court. Christian Emmanuel Sanon, 67, a Haitian doctor and U.S. citizen who was drafted as a possible successor to Moïse in the group’s scheme, won’t be standing trial because of poor health. He will be tried separately at some point.

His absence, however, won’t likely change the dynamics of the government’s murder-conspiracy case stretching from South Florida to Haiti — or the central defense strategy: the four defendants will say they never intended to kill Moïse — who was tortured and killed on July 7, 2021 — they just wanted to remove him from power. To that end, they claim, they had the approval of Haiti’s government to arrest him, citing a Haitian judge’s warrant signed in early 2021 — a document prosecutors will argue had no legal force. The defendants also claim to have had the backing of the U.S. government to remove Moïse from office, which federal authorities flatly deny.

The defendants going on trial are Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, 53, a former FBI informant, Colombian national and U.S. permanent resident; Antonio Intriago, 62, the Venezuelan-American owner of a Doral security company that hired Pretel; James Solages, 40, a Haitian-American handyman who also worked for Intriago and was close to Sanon, and Walter Veintemilla, 57, an Ecuadorian American who helped finance the plan targeting Moïse. All have been in custody since their arrests.

Selection of a 12-member jury begins Monday, with opening statements expected later in the week.

The mission

The men’s mission was to replace Moïse, 53, and cash in on future government security contracts with Haiti under a new leader. But prosecutors say their plan, involving recruiting 24 Colombian commandos to carry out the ambush, evolved from removing to killing the controversial president in the days before he was slain.

The four men, along with Sanon, are charged with conspiring to kidnap and kill Moïse, who was shot a dozen times during a nighttime ambush at his home in the hills outside Port-au-Prince. Haitian national police and presidential guards stood down as the crew of Colombian mercenaries recruited by Ortiz and Intriago carried out the deadly assault, according to prosecutors.

All these years later, it is still not clear who the true mastermind behind the assassination was — nor the exact motive for killing Moïse, a divisive figure who refused to leave office after his critics and Haitian constitutional experts said his presidential term had technically ended in February 2021.

Moïse’s death left a vast leadership void and pushed a perennially unstable Haiti into a new chapter of violence, marked by an onslaught of illegal firearms smuggled into the country from the United States. Criminal gangs armed with high-powered weapons stepped into the power vacuum and plunged the Caribbean nation deeper into chaos as they terrorized fellow Haitians amid dire shortages of housing, food and medicine.

New revelations

Several revelations are expected to surface at the federal trial in Miami. Among them:

—When they ambushed him inside his bedroom in the hills above Port-au-Prince, Moïse’s killers were supposedly looking for a presidential order naming Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon, as his new prime minister. Henry, who eventually held the post and was forced to resign by the Biden administration and the Caribbean Community in March 2024, has been accused of harboring one of the Haiti suspects, which he has denied.

—The extent of Martine Moïse’s injuries during the attack. The injuries to Haiti’s first lady have long been a source of debate, along with her claims she hid under the couple’s bed during the attack. While the Haitian judge who charged her and 50 others in his murder said “not even a giant rat” could fit under the couple’s platform bed, defense attorneys in Miami plan to present evidence showing she did not receive multiple gunshot wounds as people have been led to believe.

—On the night of the assassination, one of Moïse’s neighbors took drone footage of the area, which defense attorneys believe will bolster their argument that the president was killed before the Colombian commandos arrived.

—A weapon “traced” to the assassination was purchased in a Miami-area gun shop by a previously unknown individual who has not been arrested but lived in South Florida before fleeing to Haiti.

Previous plea deals

Although it took years for the Miami case to go to trial because of the voluminous amount of evidence, more than half of the 11 defendants charged in the case have already admitted to playing a role in the conspiracy to kill Moïse or to a lesser charge.

Five defendants pleaded guilty to the main conspiracy charge and were sentenced to life in prison. The sixth pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of smuggling ballistic vests to the Colombian commandos hired by Intriago’s company, Counter Terrorist Unit Security, to execute the hit job, according to court records.

All six convicted defendants are expected to testify for the government, along with dozens of federal agents and other witnesses, during the three-month trial before U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra.

On a parallel track, the assassination case in Haiti — in which 51 suspects, including Moise’s wife, three Haitian Americans in Miami, high-ranking national police officials and a former Haitian prime minister, were initially charged — has stalled as the Port-au-Prince Court of Appeal ordered further investigation into the brutal killing after finding the initial inquiry was incomplete.

Federal prosecutors in Miami have largely ignored the evidence in the Haiti case, which focuses on the menacing political climate and the figures surrounding Moïse, who feared a plot to overthrow him.

The Miami judge won’t allow the defense to use any evidence from that case in the South Florida trial. But prosecutors have asked defense attorneys to accept as fact a series of stipulations, based on rumors and, in some instances, debunked in the Haitian investigation.

FBI informant, U.S. secrecy

The federal case has been wrapped in secrecy since an indictment was filed in the Southern District of Florida in November 2021 because a major portion of the evidence includes sensitive classified information, such as Ortiz’s role as an FBI informant and the U.S. government’s possible awareness of the imminent threats to Moïse’s life before he was killed. Months earlier the Haitian president announced that he had foiled a coup just blocks away from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.

Among the nearly 1,500 docket entries in the case is a government motion to prevent the four defendants trial from mounting a “public authority defense” — the claim that they committed no crime because federal agents supported their scheme.

The defendants provide “vague assertions that they were led to believe that federal officials sanctioned the undefined ‘mission’ in Haiti,” prosecutors said in a court filing.

In particular, prosecutors point out that “Solages quotes only one specific communication as his authorization.” They cite a statement from a federal agent to Ortiz during a meeting in South Florida in April 2021, when Ortiz, Solages, Intriago, Sanon and others discussed their Haiti mission with FBI agents in the Fort Lauderdale area. Solages claims an FBI agent who handled Ortiz told the informant that he was authorized “to commit federal violations in order to bring bad guys to justice.”

But prosecutors argue that Solages took the FBI handler’s comment out of context, saying “the full remarks show how no reasonable person could have interpreted that statement to authorize the crimes that Ortiz, Solages, and their conspirators committed in Haiti.”

Citing a sealed court document, the prosecutors say that Ortiz’s FBI handler “expressly” told him: “Regarding Haiti, don’t bring me anything regarding the people in (that April) meeting. … That situation went super bad with a lot of people. … If there is ever the ‘appearance’ that you or Tony (Intriago) were trying to use our relationship to benefit your company, everything will be over quickly.”

At that point, prosecutors say, the FBI handler reminded Ortiz that he was “someone who the U.S. has allowed, under the control of this agency, to commit federal violations in order to bring bad guys to justice. A trust has been placed in you. Don’t let a few Haitians take that away.”

In the court filing, prosecutors argue that the FBI handler’s “message did not endorse what Ortiz was doing in Haiti; it did precisely the opposite. The point was that Ortiz was performing useful work in valid law enforcement operations and that he should not jeopardize that work by getting into trouble in Haiti.”

The judge in the case recently denied the government’s motion to stop the defendants from raising their public authority defense at trial, so their lawyers could bring it up directly or through cross-examination of federal agents.

Despite that sensitive issue looming over the trial, the team of prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Justice Department are likely to zero on the testimony of the half-dozen defendants who are cooperating in the hopes of receiving reduced prison sentences.

A key witnesses

One of the key government witnesses will be a retired Colombian army officer, Germán Alejandro Rivera Garcia, aka “Colonel Mike.” Rivera was co-leader of the group and has pleaded guilty to leading the commandos in the assassination.

As part of his plea agreement, Rivera admitted that he met in late June 2021 with several co-conspirators in Haiti to discuss removing Moïse by force, including a plot to assassinate him the following month. During the secret gathering, Rivera received directions from Ortiz, via a video call, that he should follow the instructions of another man attending the meeting in Haiti, according to a factual statement filed with Rivera’s plea agreement.

That unnamed man “then told Rivera and another co-conspirator that the president would be assassinated as part of the operation,” the statement says.

Rivera and Solages, the other co-conspirator, then “relayed that information to other members of the conspiracy,” including another Haitian American, Joseph Vincent, a former informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration who went by the name “Blanc,” and a member of Rivera’s Colombian commando group, Mario Antonio Palacios Palacios. Like German, Vincent and Palacios pleaded guilty to the murder conspiracy charge and received life sentences.

The video-call exchange occurred within two weeks of the July 7, 2021, assassination of Moïse, U.S. authorities say, marking a strategic shift from kidnapping Haiti’s leader to killing him.

Another key cooperating witness will be a former Haitian senator who attended a meeting in Fort Lauderdale with Sanon, and later with some of the Colombian commandos, on July 6, 2021, the day before Moïse’s assassination. The former senator, Joseph Joël John, also known as John Joël Joseph, told FBI agents that he had met with some co-conspirators just before they “embarked on the mission to kill President Moïse,” according to a factual statement filed with his guilty plea to the murder-conspiracy charge.

John said the crucial meeting was held at the mountaintop home of Rodolphe “Dodof” Jaar, a Haitian businessman and convicted drug trafficker who also pleaded guilty to the murder conspiracy. Among those attending: Jaar, John, Solages, Rivera, Vincent and Palacios.

“At that time, Solages told John and others present … that the operation was going to result in the assassination of President Moïse.”

A dead judge

One central figure who could have connected the timeline of events leading up to the assassinaion won’t be testifying: Former Haitian Superior Court Judge Windelle Coq Thélot, who died a year ago. In June 2021 she had gained the support of the suspected plotters in South Florida as a replacement for Moïse when they decided that Sanon “was not a viable option to take over” the presidency.

Thélot’s “apparent signature” appeared on a written request for assistance to arrest Haiti’s president that “purported to provide Haitian immunity” to Intriago and the other conspirators in South Florida, according to an FBI affidavit filed. Her letter cited a Moïse arrest warrant signed by another Haitian judge in early 2021, which was used in a failed coup that February and again in the assassination that July. Though Thélots and her supporters denied her involvement, the defense is expected to present evidence showing otherwise.

Jean Roger Noelcius, the Haitian who signed the arrest warrant, was recently deposed in Miami federal court via Zoom from Canada, and testified that the warrant was illegal, and he had no authority to remove a sitting head of state.

Still, Solages, Ortiz and others say they used the warrant as a basis for Moïse’s arrest at his home and now plan to use it again in their defense at trial.

Key piece of evidence

A key piece for government prosecutors will be the travel log of Solages, who styled himself as a translator, but according to one of the Colombians deposed did not know Spanish. He was close to Sanon and worked as Intriago’s representative in Haiti. On June 28, 2021, he traveled from Port-au-Prince to Miami to deliver the “purported immunity letter” signed by Thélot, seeking help from Intriago, the owner of CTU Security.

Solages traveled back to Haiti on July 1 and five days later met with several conspirators at Jaar’s house in Thomassin, not far from Moïse’s Pelerin 5 residence. Solages “falsely told those gathered that it was a ‘CIA Operation,’ and, in substance, said that the mission was to kill President Moïse,” the FBI affidavit states.

Wearing ballistic vests shipped from South Florida with “DEA” emblazoned on the front, Solages and other suspects drove in a comvoy escorted by Haitian police to the president’s home on the night of July 7. Once inside the neighborhood, Solages ,using a bullhorn, said the men were involved in a “DEA Operation” to ensure “compliance from” Moïse’s security team, the affidavit stated. Some of the former Colombian soldiers recruited for the mission were assigned to find and kill the president, according to court records.

On July 22, federal agents questioned Solages while he was in Haitian custody. After he was read his Miranda rights, Solages admitted to the agents that by mid-June 2021, “he knew that the plan was to ultimately assassinate President Moïse.”

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