By admin 
A jury was selected Monday evening after a day of dueling federal court proceedings in the plot surrounding the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Twelve jurors were chosen along with four alternatives for the trial, paving the way for opening statements Tuesday in the conspiracy trial of Christian Emmanuel Sanon.
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Sanon, who lived between Palm Beach County and Haiti, is accused of joining with others in a conspiracy prosecutors say took root in South Florida and involved other countries, including Colombia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic. The plot culminated, prosecutors say, in the July 7, 2021, assassination of Moïse, after a squad of former Colombian soldiers stormed his residence in the hills above Port-au-Prince in the middle of the night.
Moïse, who was in his second-floor bedroom, was shot a dozen times. His wife was seriously injured, while their two youngest children were unharmed.
More than a hundred potential jurors had been summoned to the Wilkie Ferguson Courthouse in downtown Miami.
Federal prosecutors say Sanon, 67, and his associates conspired “to launch, and participated in, a military expedition against Haiti” by hiring and sending a “team to the country to instigate a violent coup against its lawful leader, President Jovenel Moïse.” The conspiracy charge carries a possible life sentence. Sanon also faces charges stemming from the illegal shipment of bulletproof vests to Haiti for the Colombian commandos prosecutors say were recruited for the operation, and providing misleading information about the shipment.
Prosecutors argue that the South Florida group, in collaboration with key Haitians, wanted to replace Moïse with a new president willing to hire them for lucrative security and infrastructure contracts.
Some of the suspects, including members of the Colombian team, also had bond hearings on Monday. Among them was Joseph Felix Badio, 63, a former Haitian government functionary who has emerged as a central figure, and Samir Handal. Badio’s hearing was rescheduled for Oct. 14.
Handal’s criminal defense lawyer, Paul Petruzzi, pushed for a $1 million bond before Magistrate Judge Lisette Reid, and said he would surrender his U.S., Haitian and Palestinian passports and only leave his home to attend church and appointments with doctors and lawyers. Handal has been living in Miami and was arrested along with others a week ago after federal prosecutors decided to dramatically broaden their investigation into the plot and a grand jury returned a sixth superseding indictment in August.
Trial delay
Sanon, who was connected to AYITI2054, a Haitian political party, was initially scheduled to stand trial with four co-defendants: Antonio “Tony” Intriago and Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, the owners of Counter Terrorist Security and Counter Terrorist Security Federal Academy, collectively known as CTU; Walter Veintemilla, a Broward County financier; and James Solages, a Haitian American handyman who served as CTU’s representative in Haiti.
But Sanon’s case was severed on March 6, 2026, because of health reasons, and his trial was delayed. After a nearly nine-week trial, the other four defendants were found guilty in May of conspiring with former Colombian soldiers to assassinate Moïse. Their sentencing has been delayed until early February 2027. All four face up to life in prison.
Sanon heads to trial alone
Sanon, wearing a gray suit and tie, listened intently and took notes as jurors answered questions about their experience with law enforcement and ability to be objective. Among the jurors who was disqualified was a Haitian man who said his wife had been kidnapped in the southern outskirts of Port-au-Prince by an armed gang and brutally beaten during her captivity.
“I can put it aside,” the man said in response to a question from U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra. ”But I can’t forget about that because the damage that it left with her… she was beaten with a baseball bat, burn with a plastic bottle and punched.”
Prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed that given that gangs will be repeatedly mentioned during the trial — prosecutors say the plotters initially planned to recruit gang leaders to help them topple Moïse, and have since indicted one of Haiti’s most notorious gang leaders in the case, Vitel’homme Innocent — that the potential juror be excused.
The inclusion of Innocent is part of the broadening of the case by prosecutors, who have now included individuals accused of financing the plot and supporting the logistical network around it.
Last week, U.S. authorities transferred 18 suspects from Haiti, including 17 former Colombian soldiers and Badio, the former Haitian government official who emerged during the earlier trial as a central figure in the plot. They are among 29 additional defendants named in the superseding indictment.
The expanded indictment asserts that the $343,000 traced to the financing of the scheme involved government loans, including COVID-19 pandemic relief funds, that were fraudulently obtained.
Sanon has not been charged with participating in the financial fraud and his lawyers have sought to have the references removed. They also argued that because the case has dramatically expanded after they spent two years preparing, he should be allowed to go to trial on the previous indictment or get a 30-day trial delay.
Becerra, who presided over the earlier trial, rejected the defense’s request for a delay, although she granted some of their requests on removing some of the additional allegations. She also scheduled a hearing for Tuesday before opening statements to hear arguments on the defense request to have three of the new charges dropped.
Prosecutors say they intend to prove that “Sanon recruited and gathered the group of conspirators who ultimately arranged President Moïse’s assassination. Sanon enlisted those individuals to provide material support to the conspiracy to kidnap or kill President Moïse, and Sanon himself provided material support.”
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That support included participating in the scheme; fundraising, mostly from recipients of pandemic-era government loans; arranging travel to Haiti and lodging for Sanon, Intriago and Solages and two dozen Colombian commandos. Sanon is also accused obtaining an arsenal of weapons, ammunition and ballistic vests, culminating in the dead-of-night operation coordinated by his allies to storm Moïse’s private residence.
Sanon’s trial is likely to turn on a more complicated question: How much responsibility does he bear for what happened to the 53-year-old Moïse?
Evidence and witness testimony during the first trial showed the plot repeatedly changed, and Sanon’s allies began having conversations without him as they left him out of group chats on text.
The government’s cooperating witnesses testified about meetings in South Florida and text messages. Recovered messages showed that after a plan to kidnap Moïse failed, the group began souring on Sanon and chose a new replacement for the Haitian president, Superior Court Justice Windelle Coq Thélot.
Sanon’s defense lawyers are trying to distance him from the plan to kill the president, saying he had nothing to do with it. They note he was not present when the Colombian commandos gathered at a mountaintop house hours before Moïse was killed and left from there in a convoy toward the residence.
Long witness list
Sanon’s witness list includes two former prime ministers of Haiti, Claude Joseph, who was in charge when Moïse was killed, and Ariel Henry, who had been tapped to replace Joseph by the president before his death. His lawyers, Humberto Dominguez and Zeljka Bozanic, also said they intend to call Michel Soukar, a Haitian political analyst.
Prosecutors Sean T. McLaughlin, Jason Wu and Altanese Phenelus have put together a witness list of 58 individuals, including cooperating witnesses already sentenced to life imprisonment, FBI analysts, forensics experts and former first lady Martine Moïse, the government’s first witness in the first trial.
Also on the list is Joseph Joël John. A former senator in Haiti who pleaded guilty and is hoping to get a reduction in his sentence, John — also known as John Joël Joseph — flew to Miami to meet with Sanon and others about seizing power from Moïse.
At one of the meetings John attended, an FBI agent was present, testimony during the previous trial revealed. The agent did not immediately report the gathering, according to testimony.
Prosecutors now say that in addition to the individuals they previously identified at an April 2021 meeting in South Florida, including the owners of CTU, there was also another person, Bryon Rainer, who was previously unknown to them. They’ve since tracked down Rainer and charged him with financing-related offenses.
John testified about conversations in which Sanon spoke of organizing protests and having people storm the grounds of the national palace. But John also testified that the group moved away from Sanon in favor of the judge and that Sanon was not present at the mountaintop house.
In addition to conspiracy, Sanon faces lesser charges related to the shipment of bullet-proof vests on June 10, 2021, to Haiti. According to prosecutors that arrangement was done with the help of Frederick Bergmann Jr., a Tampa businessman and friend of Sanon who previously pleaded guilty and was sentence to nine years.
Badio and others in court
Before the first trial, several co-defendants pleaded guilty to the assassination conspiracy or lesser charges, including Keegan Harricharan, 42, of Coral Springs, who was sentenced to 20 years after a money-laundering conspiracy plea. Harricharan admitted that he fleeced a COVID-19 government loan program in 2020, and the following year, he transferred $255,000 to Veintemilla to help fund the assassination plot.
At the same time prosecutors and defense lawyers will be questioning jurors, some of those recently transferred to Miami from Haiti will be involved in their own bond hearings.
Among them is Badio, who last week was the subject of a protest note by Haiti’s Superior Council of the Judiciary. The council argued that he and the 17 Colombians are under the authority of a Haitian investigating judge and could not legally be transferred to the U.S. without that judge’s authorization.
Critics note that Haiti’s judicial system had five years to bring the assassination case to trial, and though an investigative judge indicted 51 individuals, the appeals process turned into political theater with no resolution in sight.
This story was originally published September 28, 2026 at 8:27 AM with the headline “South Florida pastor indicted in Haiti president’s assassination goes on trial.”
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