PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Five days after returning to Haiti from South Florida, where he had delivered a letter signed by a Haiti Supreme Court justice seeking help to overthrow Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, James Solages was at the airport in Port-au-Prince headed back to the U.S.
Then his phone rang.
“They said to ‘come.’ I have a meeting to go to,” he said. “I was sitting at my hotel for a very, very long time. I never, never had an opportunity to know what was going on until they came to pick me ... up.”
Hours later Moïse, 53, was dead, tortured and shot a dozen times inside his bedroom in the hills above the country’s capital. Solages, later accused of involvement in the July 7, 2021, assassination alongside fellow Haitian American Joseph Vincent, surfaced in a grainy video outside of the president’s house posing as a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent yelling, “This is a DEA operation.”
“They told me to say that,” Solages, 35, told the Miami Herald in an exclusive interview from inside the Haitian prison where he is detained. He declined to say who “they” were and maintained his innocence, while accusing unnamed “high-ranking” individuals of using him.
“Truly from the bottom of my heart, they set me up; very professionally. I have a clear conscience, a very clear conscience that I did not do what they accused me of doing.”
Solages’ comment about the phone call is his first public statement since his arrest by Haitian police after he and Vincent surrendered to authorities on a Petionville street in the hours after Moïse’s bloody corpse was discovered in his second-floor bedroom.
U.S. authorities say Solages, who is identified as “co-conspirator #1” in a federal complaint, had traveled from Haiti to Miami between June 28 and July 1 to seek help in the coup plot targeting Moïse. His trip is critical to the U.S. investigation alleging a murder conspiracy extending from South Florida to Haiti.
A year after Moïse was assassinated and his wife wounded, the public is no closer to knowing who masterminded the attack or fired the fatal shots. Was it an inside job carried out by people close to the president, including bodyguards, political operatives and possible criminals? Or was it a hit job executed by Colombian commandos who had been recruited by a Miami-area security company? All are questions Haitians have asked themselves in trying to understand how someone could have killed their president, a polarizing figure who was nearing the end of his presidential term and had selected a neurosurgeon to run the country as his No. 2 in the midst of a raging political crisis.
U.S. agents who are running a parallel investigation have been tight-lipped, but are clearly building a murder conspiracy case that could link suspects in South Florida to the Haitian perpetrators.
In the U.S. case, three suspects have been charged with participating in the assassination plot and are in federal custody in Miami. Two of them — former Colombian army soldier Mario Antonio Palacios Palacios and convicted drug trafficker-turned-businessman Rodolphe Jaar — have been charged in a murder conspiracy indictment claiming they provided housing, weapons or vehicles to support the deadly plot.
Jaar pleaded not guilty Wednesday and Palacios entered the same plea earlier this year. Both defendants face up to life in prison on charges of conspiring to kill Haiti’s president and providing material support resulting in his death.
The third suspect, John Joël Joseph, a former Haitian senator, was arrested on similar charges after being extradited from Jamaica in May. Joseph has not been indicted by a federal grand jury and is believed to be cooperating with authorities.
Solages would not identify the person who called him hours before the assassination. But sources aware of the call told the Herald the person on the other line that afternoon was Joseph, the former senator. In the weeks leading up to the assassination, Joseph attended several meetings and was in contact with gang leaders and others looking for weapons — which were to be used to outfit former Colombian soldiers who had been recruited for the job, according to a Haitian police investigative report.
What exactly was discussed in those meetings could hold the key to one of the most puzzling questions about the killing. The U.S. criminal complaints says the plan initially was to kidnap Moïse and fly him out of the country, but it changed to assassinating him. The reason why remains a central question in the investigation.
“I’m very pessimistic about any positive evolution of this case,” said Samuel Madistin, a human-rights advocate and lawyer in Haiti who is representing two people accused in the plot. “This case is now a year old and there has been no notable advancement in the investigation.”
He noted that four investigative judges have dropped out since the assassination, and the fifth, who lacks experience with such high-profile cases, just started working the case this week.
“When you have a crime, the longer you take for an investigation to happen, the less chance you have to find the information you need, to timely examine the evidence,” Madistin said.
The Haitian Supreme Court justice who signed the letter Solages was ferrying, Windelle Coq Thélot, remains a fugitive. So does another key suspect, former Haitian Justice Ministry official Joseph Felix Badio.
Cellphone logs obtained by the Herald show that Badio was in contact with several of the suspects, including Joseph Vincent, who according to Solages was with him that night, right before and after the assassination. Badio’s phone number was picked up by cellphone towers as he went down the road to the Pèlerin 5 neighborhood of Petionville where the president lived right before the killing. At least one of his calls pinged the same cell tower that Moïse’s did, raising questions of whether he was inside the house.
Another suspect, Haitian-Palestinian businessman Samir Handal, was freed Monday by a Turkish court. Haitian authorities failed to prove their extradition request and Handal’s lawyers argued in court that if he were sent back to Haiti, he “will be tried unfairly, tortured and killed.”
Handal has been accused by Haitian authorities of hosting a meeting with Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haitian American pastor and physician accused by Haitian police of being the mastermind of the assassination.
Sanon, who rented a house from Handal in the Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, has denied the accusations to the Herald.
Currently, there are 42 suspects jailed in two Haitian prisons, including 18 Colombian former soldiers accused of storming the president’s residence along with Haitian police officers, Solages and Vincent. One of the original suspects, Marie Jude Gilbert Dragon, 52, a former police commissioner, died of COVID-19 complications in November. Three other suspects, all police officers, were released by the only investigative judge to have done significant work on the case.
The second judge assigned to the investigation after the first withdrew days after his appointment, Garry Orélien, was removed after failing to meet a legal deadline to bring charges and after he and his clerk were accused of corruption in connection with the case. His replacement declined to take on the investigation after his family became concerned for their safety. The fourth judge asked for eight U.S. visas for his relatives, an armored vehicle and a substantial allowance each month in order to oversee the investigation, according to a Haitian justice ministry official. His request was never granted and he never worked on the case.
The high turnover of judges in Haiti has hindered the Haitian police, whose initial questioning of the suspects has served as a foundation for U.S. investigators and who need an order from the judge to continue. It also means that the only movement in the investigation is in the United States by FBI and Homeland Security Investigations agents.
Federal authorities have hinted at the possibility of seeking the transfer to the U.S. of some of the suspects in Haiti: Solages, Vincent and Sanon. All three have told the Herald, directly or through their lawyers, that they welcome such a move. All three could be helpful to federal agents in linking a Miami-area security company, Counter Terrorist Unit Security, and its owner, Antonio Intriago, to the assassination plot.
Standing inside a barren concrete room inside the prison’s courtyard, Sanon insisted that he had no presidential ambitions and that Haitian police portrayal of him as a man with political ambitions seeking to replace Moïse is false. He also distanced himself from a signed petition that had been sent to both the State Department and the Herald promoting him as Moïse’s replacement, ahead of the assassination. He had nothing to do with the letter he said, insisting that he’s just a man who cares about his country and has been trying to bring change through development projects.
“I’ve been targeted for years in Haiti because of my plans,” Sanon said. “Even here they say I should be president of Haiti.”
Sanon, Vincent, Solages and the Colombians are all imprisoned inside Haiti’s National Penitentiary near downtown Port-au-Prince. For weeks now, prisoners have faced a food and water shortage, and the prison director was recently arrested on corruption charges. Even without the shortage, most prisoners must rely on outsiders to bring them food.
“I am not comfortable here,” Solages said. He told the Herald he said he was set up by “high-ranking individuals” who have used him “as a shield and put me in front of the world to make me look like a criminal.”
Police, he said, kept him handcuffed for 29 days to another suspect before finally transferring them to the prison.
“They can do whatever in the hell they feel like doing,” he said. “All I know is I’ve been entrapped, betrayed, used and wrongly manipulated by these high-ranking individuals.”
How Solages, who ran a small charity on behalf of his native city of Jacmel and worked as a maintenance director at a senior-living center in Lantana until April 12, 2021, found himself in the middle of the international whodunit and a key suspect in the U.S. investigation isn’t entirely clear.
He quit his job, he said, because of issues at work. Then he started working for CTU Security, the Doral-area firm run by Intriago, who is accused by Haitian police of hiring and training the Colombians.
“That’s when CTU called and said, ‘We have an opportunity for you,’ ” Solages said. That opportunity, he said, was an economic development project for Haiti.
“I can’t tell you anything about Intriago because I don’t know,” he said.
Solages declined to go into details about the events that led to his arrest. He insisted he’s “a humanist” who has “never killed anyone in my life.”
“I’m a proud American and everything I’ve been building is related to the American dream,” he said. ‘“I am about empowering women and helping kids.”
Sanon told the Herald he was introduced to CTU by Solages and that his discussions with the firm were about building a hospital and bringing electricity and water to parts of Haiti.
The hiring of former Colombian soldiers, Sanon said, was the idea of Intriago and his partner, Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, who ran Counter Terrorist Unit Federal Academy LLC. Both men wanted the Colombians “to help them with the security,” Sanon said.
He denies reports that the Colombians were with him when they left for the president’s house the night of the assassination.
Sanon, 63, told the Herald during an interview at the prison that it was the first time in about two months he had been out in the sunlight. Ill with diabetes and a heart condition, Sanon has been sleeping in the prison’s infirmary, where he said he spent a month sleeping on the floor before finally getting a mattress. Built for only 58 inmates, the infirmary inside the National Penitentiary sometimes has as many as 140, he said.
“It’s the worst place in the world; you are dealing with the worst,” he said. “There is no sanitation.”
Nowadays, his fellow inmates, who called him an “assassin” when he first arrived, seem to have forgotten about him. Though he welcomes being left alone, he still doesn’t feel completely safe, he said. He accused Haitian police of wanting to kill him when they came to arrest him on July 9 and says a Haitian prosecutor later asked him, “Why didn’t they kill you? You should have been dead.”
“They kept harassing me every day, saying I’m an assassin,” he said, adding he has yet to see a judge. The FBI, he said, has only questioned him once, while he was in police lockup following his arrest.
“I am innocent,” he said.
Asked who killed the president, Sanon said: “I have no idea. It has to be some government people.”
He called the allegations against him both absurd and upsetting.
“How would I kill a president for me to become president when I don’t have any contacts with anyone in the palace?” he said. “I would be crazy.”
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