FBI agent met with Moïse assassination suspects at request of informant
An FBI agent testified this week that he attended a meeting with a confidential informant and his colleagues at a Doral security company just three months before the assassination of Haiti’s president, which prosecutors say former Colombian soldiers carried out nearly five years ago at the behest of four South Florida men standing trial in Miami.
Among those attending the meeting hosted by Counter Terrorist Unit Security were Special Agent George Nuñez and his informant, Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, a Colombian national and CTU executive. Also present were a dozen others, including a Haiti-born doctor and pastor who sought to replace Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.
Nuñez testified that he attended the meeting at CTU, but he was unaware of any plot to kill Moïse beforehand and had warned the informant not to use his relationship with the U.S. government for personal gain.
Although Nuñez wrote a report about the meeting on April 6, 2021, he did not disclose its full contents — including the presence of Pretel’s CTU partner, Antonio “Tony” Intriago — until after Moïse was shot a dozen times in his bedroom on July 7, 2021, and U.S. and Haitian authorities arrested the group of Colombian commandos and others tied to the meeting.
Nuñez acknowledged under oath that he amended the report a few months later after consulting with a federal prosecutor. “Once the events of July 7 had occurred ... I started seeing individuals that were being investigated,” Nuñez, who served as Pretel’s primary handler between August 2020 and July 2021, told the jury.
Pretel’s secret role as an informant for the FBI surfaced in the aftermath of the Haitian president’s slaying, but Nuñez’s testimony marked the first time that the agent spoke publicly about his relationship with the now-dismissed informant.
What U.S. authorities knew about the plot to oust Moïse has long been a point of contention in the federal investigation that led to charges against 11 people, including Pretel and Intriago. They are among four defendants, along with James Solages and Walter Veintemilla, on trial in a Miami federal court, accused of conspiring to kidnap and kill Moïse. Before trial, six other defendants pleaded guilty to the main conspiracy charge of killing Haiti’s president or to a lesser charge.
Solages, a Haitian American, worked for CTU in Haiti after leaving his maintenance job in Palm Beach County. Veintemilla was a Broward-area mortgage broker accused of financing the operation. He provided a loan to the company on behalf of Christian Emmanuel Sanon, the Haiti-born doctor and pastor vying to replace Moïse. Faced with the same charges, Sanon will be tried separately due to health reasons.
Prosecutors say the group’s plan evolved from a kidnapping into an assassination as it struggled to secure weapons and funding in the weeks before the assault and shifted its political support from Sanon to a Haitian Superior Court judge, Windelle Coq Thélot.
Informants, confidential human sources
While a few people tied to the case had previously worked as informants for federal agencies, only Pretel was active. He was an FBI “confidential human source” for a decade until the assassination of Haiti’s president. Pretel had two handlers: Nuñez, with the FBI, and Daniel Gonzalez, a task force officer with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Nuñez told jurors that he attended the April 2021 meeting because Pretel said his associates had information about criminal activities in Haiti.
“He was very enthusiastic, as far as the work that he did with us, and historically, he was very proactive, with good intentions,” Nuñez testified under cross-examination by one of Pretel’s defense attorneys, David Howard.
“So when he says, ‘Hey, I have some people that I want to bring in that may be able to provide some criminal information,’ that’s going to interest us,” Nuñez said.
Nuñez told jurors that he was introduced, among others, to former Sen. Joseph Joel John and Jacmel Mayor Marky Kessa, as well as to Sanon and Solages. Sanon was introduced to him as “a presidential hopeful for Haiti” and Solages as a “former member of U.S. military.”
Participants discussed narcotics trafficking, money laundering and human trafficking tied to Iranian and Syrian operations in Haiti, Nuñez said. But when the conversation turned to Haiti’s political crisis, raised by John, Nuñez said he “shut down” the conversation.
“He was complaining about the political situation in Haiti and a lack of support by the United States,” Nuñez said.
Asked by prosecutor Jason Wu how he responded, Nuñez said he made hand gestures to “basically cut him off and explained that we weren’t really interested in politics. We were just there for the intel, information on criminal activities, on our national security.”
Defense lawyers suggested that Nuñez later amended his report on the meeting to protect himself and failed to recognize warning signs.
“We were not looking at it as a diplomatic mission,” he said under cross-examination from one of Solages’ lawyers, Simon Patrick Dray. “We were looking to obtain criminal information.”
Criminal complaint
The meeting at CTU’s office was first mentioned in an FBI criminal complaint charging Pretel, Intriago and Veintemilla in 2023. While prosecutors have downplayed its significance, some observers speculate that had the agents been more aggressive, they could have prevented the president’s assassination nearly five years ago in Haiti.
“Those present attempted to draw the FBI personnel attending the meeting into a discussion about regime change in Haiti,” an affidavit filed with the complaint said. “In response, an FBI agent told the men, in substance, that the FBI could not help them because Haiti had to solve its own political problem.”
A footnote on the same page further stated: “At that time, [Pretel] was a confidential source for the FBI with respect to matters unrelated to the plot to remove President Moïse. It appears that [Pretel] may have tried to use that pre-existing relationship and the above-referenced meeting to suggest to others that CTU was affiliated with the FBI and/or the Department of Justice. It was not, and [Pretel] did not disclose to the FBI the criminal conduct alleged” in the complaint charging him and others with conspiring to kidnap and kill Haiti’s president.
Gonzalez, who took the stand after Nuñez this week, was even more blunt in his testimony as well as in his text exchanges with Pretel, which prosecutors introduced as evidence.
“Stay the F out of Haiti,” he wrote in a text message shown to jurors, later describing it as an “informal admonishment.”
“With no disrespect at all to Haiti, but it was very difficult for us at that time to work” in the country, Gonzalez testified, saying he warned Pretel about introducing people to FBI agents.
“There’s rampant corruption in the government,” he added. “Unless there were narcotics on a container ship leaving Port-au-Prince and heading to the United States to where we can have some sort of viable investigation into a U.S. extradition of somebody, then we don’t want the information.”
Prosecutors have portrayed the assassination plot as a get-rich, profit-driven scheme that aimed to replace Moïse with a new president willing to give CTU’s owners and associates lucrative contracts for security and infrastructure projects in Haiti.
Defense lawyers counter that their clients were not trying to conceal their involvement in Haiti, and argue that the president was killed by his own Haitian security members before the Colombians arrived at his hilltop house.
They noted that the defendants standing trial did not crush their phones like others who have already pleaded guilty, and instead turned over their phones to federal agents.
“You were fully aware that Mr. Pretel Ortiz had developed a private business relationship with Mr. Sanon and Mr. Solages, and that business relationship entailed him providing some measure or manner of security?” Howard asked Nuñez, to which the FBI agent answered in the affirmative. “You knew he had a security company, and he didn’t hide that from you either.”
To emphasize their point, lawyers pointed to a visit by Intriago to the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. Intriago told the embassy staff that “he was with security company out of Miami” and wanted to receive information on how to set up a business in Haiti, according to a memo.
Intriago, according to trial evidence, dropped Nuñez’s name.
During cross-examination, Nuñez admitted being incensed about Intriago using his name but downplayed any ramifications. Gonzalez, however, testified that the incident had caused a lot of problems and suggested as much in a text to Pretel.
“Regarding Haiti, do not bring me anything from the people involved in the meeting with George,” the Customs agent texted Pretel.
Trusted informant
Nuñez and Gonzalez both described Pretel as a trusted informant. In exchange for his assistance, he was granted a special visa to remain in the United States and was paid at least $138,000 for his work with the FBI, as well as the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security Investigations.
But all that would change after the July 7, 2021, slaying of Haiti’s president, when both agents would eventually cut off contact with Pretel and the FBI terminated its contractual engagement with him.
Nuñez testified that Pretel attempted to contact him after the assassination, but that he was on vacation and saw only missed calls. He also said that when agents later sought to review his communications, his work phone had been wiped after it was turned in.
Gonzalez testified that although Pretel reached out to him on July 7, he found there to be “a lack of urgency.” He described Pretel as “overly communicative,” but noted that the informant never said he had a team in Haiti or mentioned any plans targeting the president.
“He never discussed the president of Haiti,” Gonzalez said.
In the days after the assassination, Pretel was interviewed multiple times as investigators examined possible violations of the Neutrality Act, created to prevent the United States from being embroiled in foreign wars. Gonzalez said it became clear that Pretel himself would most likely become a subject of the investigation.
On July 23, the day Moïse was buried in Cap-Haïtien, Gonzalez told Pretel he was cutting off all communications with him. Four days later, the FBI closed him out as a source.
