‘He didn’t have to die.’ Ex of supermarket owner testifies about affair that led to murder

From the outside, Jenny Marin’s life seemed storybook perfect.

She married Manuel Marin, the wealthy owner of several South Florida Presidente Supermarkets, at a wedding featuring a Hummer limo. They lived in a seaside penthouse condo, then moved to a sprawling house in Coral Gables. They had several maids and their two children went to private schools.

But, she told Miami jurors on Wednesday, she increasingly felt isolated, lonely in an ice-cold marriage. Then, came the email from an old friend. “Hi, how are you?”

It was from Camilo Salazar, a Coconut Grove interior designer. He too was married. And what mushroomed into a torrid affair — complete with a burner phone and secret rendezvous at hotels — ended in Salazar murdered, his body mutilated, his throat slit, his penis set on fire in the dark woods near the Everglades.

Jenny Marin, 45, took the witness stand to detail the secret relationship that prosecutors say culminated with Manuel, enraged when he discovered the truth, enlisting a group of men to kidnap and kill the man in June 2011.

In much-anticipated testimony, Jenny Marin spoke to jurors from the witness box in a Miami courtroom, just a few yards from Salazar’s then-wife. Daisy Holcombe, surrounded by family in the front row of the gallery, watched stoically as her husband’s lover recounted how she fell deeply in love with Salazar.

It was the first time the women had ever seen each other in person. Holcombe had given birth to Salazar’s daughter just a few months before the murder.

“Is this difficult?” Miami-Dade prosecutor Gail Levine asked Jenny.

“Yes, to remember all of this, to relive it,” Jenny said, tears forming in her eyes. “He didn’t have to die. What happened didn’t have to happen.”

“You feel responsible?” Levine asked.

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Right now?”

Jenny replied: “Yes.”

She took the stand on the third day of trial for Alexis Vila Perdomo, and his friend, Roberto Isaac. They are accused of orchestrating and carrying out the brutal kidnapping and murder on behalf of Manuel Marin, who spent years on the lam in Spain but now faces his own trial next year.

Vila, 48, a former pro MMA fighter and Cuban bronze-medal winning wrestler, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder for allegedly helping arrange the plot. Prosecutors say Isaac took part in the murder itself.

Salazar and Jenny had known each other years before.

Jenny hailed from New Jersey, but had moved to South Florida with a boyfriend in the early 2000s. Salazar was one of his friends, and when Jenny’s relationship fell apart, he became a close confidant.

She moved back to New Jersey, working in marketing when she reconnected with Manuel, whom she’d dated once before when he was separated from his first wife. He surprised her with his divorce papers — and a diamond ring, Jenny testified.

Manuel, 65, owned markets in New Jersey, but lived primarily in South Florida, where he ran a string of Presidente Supermarkets, one of the country’s fastest growing Hispanic grocery chains. He had two grown children from an earlier marriage.

Life in South Florida, Jenny testified, was lonely. She didn’t work and had no one to talk to. Manuel, a native of Cuba, was also much older and used Spanish slang she didn’t understand. “Our cultures were much different,” said Jenny, a Colombian American born in the United States.

For prosecutors, Jenny’s testimony was important in setting the stage for the murder motive — and to prove Manuel was close with Vila, the former wrestling champ he’d helped defect from Cuba.

“He was proud of him,” Jenny testified. “Him coming to this country, bring a prominent wrestler, being a success at the Olympics ... he cared about him.”

Jenny began communicating with Salazar soon after the birth of her second son. At first, she claimed, Salazar never talked about his own love life outside of mentioning he was a divorcé.

“Did you notice you were falling in love with him? prosecutor Levine asked.

“Yes,” she said, adding however: ”I wasn’t going to be with Camilo. That was never our plan. It was never our plan to be together. We didn’t have a plan. I did not want to divorce my husband at the time.”

But even as Salazar’s wife became pregnant, the secret affair blossomed. Jenny went to Radio Shack to buy a phone, just to communicate with Salazar.

As Manuel worked running the supermarkets, Jenny and Salazar began meeting at the Galleria Mall in Fort Lauderdale, where Salazar would pick her up. Then, they’d go to the Sun Tower hotel to be intimate.

But the dam burst in February 2011, when Jenny was meeting Salazar for coffee at a South Miami-Dade bakery. As she waited in line, suddenly Manuel appeared.

“He had a crazed look. Kind of smiling, kind of serious. He was walking very rigid,” she testified.

Manuel grabbed her by the arm, led her into his car, took her keys and normal phone and began screaming at her, peppering her with questions about Salazar. A few blocks away, she managed to escape his SUV, later getting a rental car to go home to Lighthouse Point.

Using the burner phone hidden in her purse, she called Salazar. He told her Manuel had confronted him when he pulled up to the bakery, pounding on the window and telling him “to get out of the car like a man.” Salazar drove off.

Jenny testified that Manuel later apologized, but the relationship became even icier. They barely even spoke, although he regularly checked her phone. She stopped speaking to Salazar for about a month, until he sent her a text on the secret phone. Soon, they began their relationship anew, following the familiar pattern of visits to the mall and hotel.

“I was not happy. I was looking for a separation,” Jenny said.

By May 2011, Manuel, Jenny and their family took their yacht to Bimini for a vacation for a few days. Her father was on the trip. He noticed his daughter barely spoke to her husband.

On the trip back, Jenny recalled Manuel said something she felt was a threat.

“He told me he loved me, and he told me I needed to stop doing what I was doing, or I was going to cause a disgrace,” she said.

During the boat trip, Jenny said, Manuel was on his phone an inordinate amount of time. Prosecutors say they believe he was communicating with Vila and Isaac, who had enlisted another ex-MMA fighter, Ariel Gandulla, to help kidnap Salazar from the street.

When they finally docked back at their latest home in Lighthouse Point on Wednesday, June 1, 2011, Manuel and his boat captain rushed off the yacht, which was unusual because they normally cleaned the boat. He claimed he had to deal with a work emergency. Jenny went to Publix.

“Not Presidente?” Levine asked.

“No,” Jenny said.

Prosecutors, citing cellphone and toll records, believe Marin drove to meet up with Isaac and Gandulla, who had already kidnapped Salazar and were holding him hostage. Vila was in Las Vegas training for a fight. Gandulla left, but Marin and Isaac took Salazar to the rural field in West Miami-Dade, where he was tortured, murdered and set ablaze, according to prosecutors.

Manuel, she recalled, did not come home until later that night, oddly wearing a baseball cap. For the next couple of days, she could not get a hold of Salazar — and Marin vanished too, taking his passport.

It wasn’t until Jenny went to visit a lawyer the following Monday that she learned the awful truth. She asked the lawyer to help her track down Salazar. The attorney researched his name online and immediately found a news article about Salazar’s corpse being discovered by police.

As she recounted the moment, Jenny’s face became anguished. In the gallery, Holcombe closed her eyes for a few moments.

Marin, prosecutors said, fled to Spain. He called his wife a couple of times from an international number, apologizing for leaving the family but saying nothing else. She gave a sworn statement to Miami-Dade homicide detectives. She did not attend Salazar’s funeral.

Later, his son, Yaddiel Marin, armed with power over his father’s affairs, arranged the couple’s divorce — and agreed to leave her the house and pay $10,000 a month in child support.

Jenny, in March 2018, traveled to Cuba with her two sons, so they could meet up with their father. She insisted that she never asked her former husband what happened between him and Salazar.

“My emotions were crossed,” she said.

“For you, it was better to just not know,” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Levine asked: “Are you proud of yourself?

The reply: “No.”

This story was originally published October 30, 2019 at 3:58 PM.