Haitian-American pastor accused in killing of President Moïse to go on trial this month

The last of the defendants in U.S. custody in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse is set to go on trial later this month.

Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haitian-American pastor who hired former Colombian soldiers to protect him in Haiti while he aspired to replace Moïse, is schedule to go on trial Sept. 28 in federal court in Miami.

His trial before U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Bacerra, who also presided over the month-long trial of four co-defendants, is expected to last six to eight weeks.

“We’re looking forward to proving our client’s innocence in this whole thing,” said Zeljka Bozanic, the lawyer defending Sanon along with attorney Humberto Dominguez.

READ MORE: Funding, false promises fuel slaying of Haiti President Jovenel Moïse

Like his co-defendants, who were found guilty earlier this year, Sanon, 67, is charged with conspiring to kidnap and kill Haiti’s leader.

He had initially faced lesser charges related to the shipment of bullet-proof vests to Haiti for the Colombians in violation of U.S. export laws, and plotting a military expedition against a friendly nation, a violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act.

Federal prosecutors later expanded the case against him to include the more serious charges, which carry life imprisonment. The decision came on the heels of a Haitian investigation indicting Sanon and 50 others in connection with the July 7, 2021, assassination. That Haitian indictment included former first lady Martine Moïse among the defendants. The Haitian case has since been delayed for further investigation.

Martine Moïse is expected to be a key witness for federal prosecutors in Sanon’s trial as she was during the earlier trial, which opened in March with her testimony. The four South Florida defendants who stood trial and were convicted are Arcángel Pretel Ortiz and Antonio “Tony” Intriago, owners of Counter Terrorist Federal Academy and Counter Terrorist Unit Security in Doral; James Solages, who worked for CTU, and Walter Veintemilla, a Broward-area mortgage broker whom prosecutors said helped finance the plot.

Sanon had initially been scheduled to stand trial alongside the men, but his case was postponed because of an undisclosed illness. His co-defendants were ultimately convicted and face life in prison. Becerra delayed their sentencing until February, presumably to allow Sanon’s trial to conclude before then.AA

Amended indictment

In their amended indictment, federal prosecutors placed Sanon smack in the middle of the deadly plot. They are expected to argue in court that his ambition to be president helped set in motion the chain of events that culminated in Moïse’s killing inside his bedroom in the hills of Port-au-Prince. They have amassed a witness list of 57 individuals, including FBI analysts who combed through roughly 8,000 gigabytes of data from over 100 devices across Haiti, Colombia and the U.S., and visited the mountaintop crime scene in Port-au-Prince.

Among the cooperating witnesses expected to testify is Joseph Vincent, a former Drug Enforcement Administration informant who did not testify in the first trial. One of three Haitian Americans involved in the plot, Vincent was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to kill Moïse and admitting he attended strategy meetings ahead of the slaying. The other is Frederick Bergmann Jr., a friend and business associate of Sanon’s who helped him smuggle the bulletproof vests to Haiti for the former dColombian soldiers and in turn was sentenced to nine years in prison for violating federal laws.

Bergmann, 67, had no idea the vests were going to be used in the conspiracy to kill Haiti’s president, according to federal prosecutors and his defense attorney.

In court documents, prosecutors said they intend to call Bergmann as a witness and will admit text messages about the financial strain he had been in because of his prior investments and funds provided to Sanon.

“Bergmann will testify that, by the time of the charged conspiracy, he was frustrated and increasingly desperate to recoup the millions of dollars he invested,” prosecutors wrote. “The prospect of the defendant successfully overthrowing President Moïse and ultimately assuming the presidency offered Bergmann an opportunity to recover his investments—and potentially receive far more.”

Sanon excluded

Sanon’s defense lawyers, who appeared periodically during the 42-day trial of his co-defendants, are expected to offer a different account. Through the government’s own corroborating witnesses, they will try to argue that as the conspiracy evolved and Sanon failed to gain popular support, CTU’s owners lost coincidence in him and increasingly sidelined him. At one point, they were even demeaning him in text messages, something that prosecutors themselves presented to show the plot’s evolution.

Testimony at the earlier trial showed that as the plot evolved, Sanon was excluded from discussions. A turning point came during a botched attempt on June 14, 2021, at the Port-au-Prince international airport to arrest Moïse upon his return from a trip to Turkey.

Though Sanon was still in the running to be president, according to earlier testimony, the plotters had already turned their attention to another candidate, Haitian Superior Court Justice Windelle Coq Thélot, along with Joseph Félix Badio, a former Haitian government official accused of playing a central role in the conspiracy.

Thélot was never charged by U.S. authorities and died in January of 2025 after spending nearly four years as a fugitive in Haiti. Badio was arrested in Haiti and was among those initially charged, but he was not added as a defendant to the South Florida indictment. His outsized role, including arming the Colombians, mapping out the presidential residence and giving the green light for the attack, emerged during the previous trial through the testimony of the squad’s co-leader, former Colombian special forces soldier Germán Alejandro Rivera García, who was at the Haitian president’s home on the night he was killed.

Testimony also showed that Sanon was not present on the night the Colombian mercenaries stormed the president’s private residence. Former Sen. Joseph Joël John, who testified on behalf of the government in hopes of reducing his life sentence, said that Sanon called him the night of the assassination to tell him “the guys” had asked him to head to the National Palace.

Before his arrest, Sanon had lived on and off in Florida for more than 20 years, from the Tampa Bay area to Hollywood, Boynton Beach and Margate.

In all, 11 defendants in the case were extradited to the U.S. Six pleaded guilty and have cooperated with federal authorities, providing evidence about Sanon’s alleged role in the conspiracy, which was coordinated in South Florida, Haiti and Colombia. Of those six, five received life sentences and are hoping to get them reduced in exchange for their cooperation.

More convictions

In connection with the main case, two additional South Florida defendants, Keegan Harricharan and Jacob Israel, pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy in March. Harricharan was sentenced to 20 years in July, and Israel faces sentencing in December. Both men admitted fleecing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a COVID-19 government loan program in 2020 and then transferring some of that money to Veintemilla to help fund the assassination plot.

At the previous trial, an FBI agent testified that the plotters spent a total of $343,000 on the kidnapping and assassination scheme, financed through a patchwork of loans, credit cards, wire transfers and the pandemic relief funds. Federal agents and prosecutors have had years to review cellphone records, emails and text messages that align with the testimony of cooperating witnesses.

Sanon’s defense lawyers have maintained that while he had hoped to replace Moïse as Haiti’s president, he was not aware or part of any conspiracy to kill him.