Miami bond-jumper, accused of stealing boat and smuggling migrants, is in federal custody
A Miami man who jumped bond amid the coronavirus outbreak after being charged with smuggling more than a dozen migrants from the Bahamas to South Florida has been arrested and is being held at the Federal Detention Center.
Milton Morgan Ferrell III — son of the high-profile Miami lawyer and Democratic political fundraiser Milton M. Ferrell Jr., who died in 2008 — was taken into federal custody in Tampa and transferred to Miami. The defendant lasted one month on the lam.
A federal magistrate judge ordered last week that Ferrell, 37, be detained, after conferring with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the federal public defender representing him. Ferrell pleaded not guilty to a multi-count indictment charging him with smuggling undocumented migrants in a stolen vessel for profit.
Ferrell was stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard on the evening of March 13 — when the coronavirus pandemic was starting to grip South Florida — as he commandeered a sport fishing boat with 13 undocumented migrants on board.
The vessel, a Sea Fox 286 Commander reported stolen from a North Bay Village marina three days earlier, was stopped about 18 miles east of Key Biscayne, according to court records.
At first, Ferrell said he was the boat captain and that he was traveling with his girlfriend and 13 friends on a trip from Coconut Grove to the Bahamas, according to the federal criminal complaint. When he was asked to identify any of them, Ferrell said he didn’t know their names.
“You all know what this is,” Ferrell told the Coast Guard crew, according to the complaint affidavit. “I tried, and I got caught.”
The crew officers took Ferrell, his girlfriend, Fiona Bucher, and the 13 migrant passengers to the Coast Guard station in Miami Beach, where the boat captain was questioned by Homeland Security Investigations agents. Three of the passengers — Nicholas Carvell Brown, Dexter Andrew Carindon and Oral Dwayne Williams — had been previously deported from the United States, the affidavit said.
Ferrell told agents that he had stolen the boat and gone with his girlfriend to Bimini, where he met a Bahamian friend who made arrangements for him to smuggle the migrants to South Florida, according to the affidavit. Ferrell said he agreed to transport the undocumented passengers because he was broke and wanted to use the money to buy an apartment in Miami.
Ferrell had $3,600 in U.S. and Bahamian currency on him when was arrested, the affidavit said. Ferrell admitted that he had smuggled migrants from the Bahamas to the United States in the past, and that the latest load was his biggest ever.
Agents also interviewed some of the migrant passengers, who said they paid between $3,000 and $6,000 to be smuggled to the Bahamas and then paid the same amount of money to be illegally transported into the United States, according to the affidavit.
After his arrest, Ferrell made his first appearance in Miami federal court on March 16, when he was granted a $50,000 bond co-signed by his mother. After Ferrell and three of his undocumented passengers were charged by indictment a few days later, he was scheduled for arraignment on March 30.
But before the arraignment, Magistrate Judge Lauren Fleischer Louis issued a bench warrant for Ferrell’s arrest after investigators said he had “absconded.” When he failed to appear in federal court for the arraignment, Magistrate Judge John J. O’Sullivan ruled he was a fugitive and issued another warrant for his arrest.
This story was originally published April 29, 2020 at 4:18 PM.
