Defendants in murder-for-hire case awaited ‘a little gift’ from Sergio Pino, per recorded call
The day before Sergio Pino killed himself amid an FBI raid at his waterfront home in mid-July, a man who did some work on the developer’s roof got a phone call from another man who had spent time with him in prison.
The roofer, Fausto Villar, seemed paranoid, wondering aloud why Avery Bivins had not responded to his frantic call a few days earlier. The two had been hired to kill Pino’s estranged wife, according to the FBI, though their attempts up to that point had been unsuccessful.
Villar said the wealthy Miami-Dade developer was deeply worried that a few of the murder-for-hire crew members were already under arrest and might be talking to FBI agents, according to an audio recording and court transcript of Bivins’ cellphone conversation with Villar on July 15. What Villar didn’t know was that Bivins was already working with the FBI and had agreed to allow the agency to record the phone call.
The Miami Herald obtained a recording of the call after filing a motion to intervene in the case, at which point a judge ordered its release. That made the recording available to the general public for the first time, including for other Miami news outlets.
Although Villar didn’t mention Pino by name in the nearly half-hour call, he alluded to the developer and Pino’s grave concern about the feds closing in on him.
In the FBI-taped call, Villar pressured Bivins to join a cover-up, including urging him to “delete” his WhatsApp text messages and Instagram account “until the smoke clears” — clueless that his former prison mate had been approached by the FBI three days earlier and had already agreed to inform on the roofer and his boss, Pino.
Bivins’ cooperation would mark a critical turning point in the federal investigation into Pino’s alleged recruiting of two different crews to kill his wife, Tatiana, by stalking her, ramming her car and threatening her with a firearm, according to court records.
Villar said Pino “thinks how f------ things went and got worse on him” when “these cats” were arrested and worried what might happen next if Bivins got “pinched” and the FBI investigation turned into a “conspiracy” case leading back to the developer, according to the FBI recording. Villar told Bivins that he had to keep himself and the others in their crew in line to prevent the probe from escalating, suggesting to Bivins that an armed assault on Tatiana at her Pinecrest home in June should be recast as a botched robbery.
“It’s a conspiracy. ... A conspiracy is not hard to prove — you don’t even have to prove it,” Villar told Bivins. “Like, you just gotta go ahead and show this guy knew this guy, and this guy knew this guy. That’s it. You’re done. Bye. Ciao.”
Afraid of being locked up again in prison, Villar confided in Bivins: “I’m going to go f------ zero dark thirty on this s---, like for a while. Dark. ... I’m letting you know now, I’m going dark because of what’s going on. You hear me?”
Villar could not have been more telling in his paranoid state of mind. After his phone conversation with Bivins, Villar spoke with Pino for about three minutes on WhatsApp and exchanged text messages — and by the next morning, federal agents were swarming both Pino’s Cocoplum estate and Villar’s Cutler Bay residence.
Nine men charged
Pino, 67, killed himself with a handgun on July 16 before he could be arrested, and Villar was taken into custody — one of nine men charged with playing roles in the murder-for-hire conspiracy to kill Tatiana Pino, 55, who had filed for divorce in 2022.
Pino, a Cuban American who headed one of Florida’s biggest home-building companies, had an estate worth at least $150 million. The divorce case grew nasty over a prenuptial agreement and the division of marital assets. Tatiana Pino was demanding half his fortune, according to court records.
By the time Bivins made his cellphone call to Villar on July 15, three other suspects in their crew had already been arrested: Clementa Johnson, his cousin, Vernon Green, and another associate, Diori Barnard. Barnard had been arrested on drug and gun charges on June 25. Johnson was arrested on July 2 in connection with the FBI’s murder-for-hire probe. And Green, who was suspected of threatening Pino’s wife with a handgun at her home, was arrested on July 15.
In the FBI-recorded phone conversation, Villar expressed his suspicions of Bivins and even asked him to turn on the video feature of his cellphone so that he could see him. Bivins made the “controlled” call from his car in a parking lot. But by the time the call was over, Bivins seemed to have won over Villar’s trust, just as the FBI was zeroing in on Villar and Pino.
“So at the end of the day when it’s all f------ said and done, I’m sure that there will be a little gift for me and, like, for you,” Villar told Bivins. “So let’s just do what the f--- we gotta do. ... Know what I’m saying?
“Yeah. You gotta — you gotta take care of your boy, though,” Bivins said.
“I know,” Villar said.
Villar, who was arrested the day after the phone call, was denied bail by Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman on Aug. 9, after prosecutors Brian Dobbins and Abbie Waxman played the recording in court to argue that Villar should be detained before trial because he was a danger to the community and had obstructed justice by tampering with a government witness, Bivins.
Waxman said Villar “accepted a contract to kill a woman he has never met” and then “took steps” to recruit Bivins to assemble a crew for the hit job — “all in an effort to kill her.”
During the hearing, Villar’s lawyer, Saam Zangeneh, said his client is a married man and father of two who has been trying to rebuild his life after prison, arguing he’s a danger to no one. Zangeneh said the “dangerous” person was the “mastermind” of the murder-for-hire scheme, Pino.
“The unindicted co-conspirator here, which we all know, is Sergio Pino,” Zangeneh said. “This is an unbelievably dangerous and unbelievably powerful man. ... [But] Sergio Pino is no longer with us.”
Goodman was unpersuaded. The judge cited Villar’s statements about “going dark” and “zero dark thirty” when he ordered him to remain detained before trial.
Goodman also noted that Villar told his former prison mate to destroy electronic and social media evidence — “delete, delete, delete” and “delete Instagram,” among other instructions, according to his detention order. In addition to his “intent to obstruct justice,” Villar, who goes by the nickname “Cuba,” has “ties to several countries around the world,” making him a flight risk, Goodman found.
On Thursday, Villar’s lawyer, Zangeneh, said that even though Bivins is cooperating with prosecutors to help himself, he believes the FBI recording of their conversation shows Villar’s true intentions.
“One of the takeaways of the recording is that my client and Bivins seemed mainly interested in trying to get more money from Sergio Pino and really had no intention of harming his wife,” Zangeneh said.
Breakthrough in the case
The breakthrough in the FBI investigation came on July 12, when agents contacted Bivins, saying they had a federal search warrant for his cellphone and other evidence and wanted to talk with him.
Bivins’ lawyer advised him to do so. FBI agents learned that Bivins knew Villar from their time together in prison about 10 years ago.
Villar, 42, had done six years in state prison on charges involving armed robbery. Bivins, 36, served 12 years in state prison on charges related to drug trafficking, theft and attempted murder.
Villar reached out to Bivins in the fall of 2023 about a “wealthy man [Pino] who contracted him to kill his estranged wife,” according to FBI criminal complaints and affidavits. Villar “enlisted Bivins to gather a group for the job,” which included contacting Bivins’ friend Johnson to execute the hit on Pino’s wife, the documents say. Johnson then brought in his cousin, Green, the gunman who allegedly assaulted Tatiana outside her home.
Bivins agreed to the arrangement, according to FBI documents, and he and Villar met multiple times. According to Villar, Pino’s wife “wanted half of what Pino owned and would not settle for the offered 20 million dollars” in their divorce case, the FBI documents say.
“Pino was willing to pay $150,000 for the murder contract’s completion and there would be an additional $150,000 if the contract was carried out without detection,” according to the documents. “Villar also provided two cash payments of $30,000 and $45,000 up front during two separate meetings” with Bivins.
Villar also provided syringes, vials and injections for use in the plot targeting Pino’s wife, according to charging documents and a superseding indictment filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“Co-conspirator 1 [Sergio Pino] provided the second crew with a financial incentive to ensure the crime was not traced back to him,” according to the indictment, which doesn’t name Pino as a defendant because of his death. “Co-conspirator 1 suggested that the second crew should kill Victim 1 [Tatiana Pino] by injecting her with a provided liquid substance to make her death appear to be a heart attack.”
There are no other details about the alleged injection scheme in the indictment, though a source familiar with the plan said it was abandoned in favor of trying to shoot Tatiana outside her home while making it look like part of an armed robbery.
The indictment also states that Sergio Pino recruited a man who had worked on his yacht to assemble the first crew in the developer’s initial murder-for-hire scheme in 2022, alleging that the first crew planned to poison Tatiana with cyanide and arsenic, in addition to fentanyl. The FBI had previously made a general statement about the planned use of “other drugs” to harm her.
At a July 17 news conference, U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe said the first crew “actually obtained fentanyl to assist Pino in his effort to kill his wife.” But it’s unclear if the first crew actually made any attempts to poison her before that plan was abandoned.
This story was originally published October 3, 2024 at 5:43 PM.
