Hours after Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was shot to death inside his bedroom in the hills above Port-au-Prince, one of the Haitian Americans involved in the plot to oust him from power was desperate.
“I’m in real danger, very bad,” James Solages, a Broward county handyman who had accompanied a group of Colombian former military soldiers to Moïse’s residence that night, texted a man in Texas.
Haitian police had surrounded a house not far from the crime scene where Solages and several of the Colombians had taken cover, and were shelling its walls with high-powered rifle fire.
Solages, who hours earlier had informed the man in Texas that “phase one” was complete, was running out of battery power and growing increasingly afraid that he and Joseph Vincent, a former Drug Enforcement Administration informant, would not make it out alive.
“Why are you even there?” Jimmy Glenn Thompson Jr., 61, asked Solages, according to a text message read out loud in a Miami federal courtroom earlier this year.
Thompson, whom federal prosecutors describe as a confidant and mentor to Solages, reminded him that he had advised him against being there, and texted he didn’t understand “this plan of yours.”
Then Thompson asked Solages a pointed question: Had his contractors, the Colombian former soldiers, done the deed?
“The contractors did it,” Solages texted back before his phone died.
That exchange, coupled with other text messages and flights records showing that Solages traveled from Port-au-Prince to Dallas to meet with Thompson a week before Moïse’s July 7, 2021, assassination, has now drawn Thompson into the sprawling conspiracy that federal prosecutors say was plotted out in South Florida, Colombia and Haiti.
In opening statements this week in the trial of Christian Emmanuel Sanon, the Haitian-American pastor accused of conspiring to violently overthrow Moise so he could become president of Haiti, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean T. McLaughlin told jurors that Sanon sent Solages from Haiti to Texas to meet with Thompson, a former U.S. Marine, to “discuss the group’s assassination plans and its best chance of success.”
Thompson, prosecutors say, wasn’t just someone receiving frantic text messages from a mentee in the hours after Moïse was killed. He was briefed on the operation beforehand, shared a common vocabulary with one of the co-conspirators, Solages, and received details in the aftermath.
Two federal offenses
For that, Thomspson has joined a growing list of individuals facing federal charges in the sprawling U.S. case stemming from Moïse’s assassination. Federal prosecutors have charged Thompson with two federal offenses related to the conspiracy case stemming from the U.S. investigation into the slaying.
Thompson isn’t charged with participating in the conspiracy itself. Instead, prosecutors accuse him of knowing about the assassination conspiracy and not reporting it. Prosecutors say that from at least June 29, 2021 – the date Solages arrived in Fort Lauderdale from Port-au-Prince to head to Dallas – through August 2023, Thompson had “actual knowledge of felonies,” but concealed the information and failed to promptly inform authorities. The count carries a maximum of three years in prison.
Prosecutors have also charged Thompson with mishandling classified material. They say that while working as a U.S. government contractor, he obtained classified documents and removed them without authority with the intention to retain them at unauthorized locations. The charge carries a maximum of five years in prison on conviction.
Forty-five people have now been charged in the case, including Solages and three other South Florida men who face life in prison after being convicted in May of conspiring to kidnap or kill Moïse, providing material support and participating in a military expedition against a friendly nation, a violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act. Unlike most of them, who were indicted by a grand jury, Thompson is among a small group who have been charged by prosecutors directly in what is known as an information, which indicates his likely cooperation with the government.
Earlier federal trial
Thompson’s name first surfaced earlier this year as prosecutors laid out their case against Solages and co-defendants Antonio “Tony” Intriago and Archangel Pretel Oritz, who hired the Colombians through their respective Doral-area security firms, Counter Terrorist Unit Security and Counter Terrorist Federal Academy, collectively known as CTU; and Walter Veintemilla, the Weston financier who provided a $175,000 loan to CTU on behalf of Sanon.
As the first trial wound down, Solages’ lawyer, Jonathan Friedman, sought to call Thompson as a witness on his behalf. But after sending notice to the government, Friedman was dismayed to learn that prosecutors had now considered Thompson to be a co-conspirator.
A lengthy discussion ensued before U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra, who is also presiding over the Sanon trial. It was then revealed that Thompson had Fifth Amendment concerns over self-incrimination. Friedman asked Becerra to use her “extraordinary powers” to either grant him immunity from prosecution or compel the government to do so. Thompson, he said, was “a critical” witness for Solages.
“It sounded like there was some intimidation overreach by the government,” Friedman told the judge, “given that they represented that Mr. Thompson is not a co-conspirator.”
McLaughlin rejected the accusation of intimidation and said the defense had known about Thompson and his connection to the case since lawyers were appointed to the case. “He’s all over the summer, especially in July,” McLaughlin said referring to the days ahead of the attack on Moïse.
The judge said she had no power to grant immunity or force the government to do so and warned Friedman that forcing Thompson to take the stand could backfire.
Now it appears Thompson will be a government witness in the ongoing case against Sanon.
The government insists that Solages was an “underling” of Sanon. However, his lawyers are expected to argue the opposite. They say Sanon, who lived between Palm Beach and Haiti, was not privy to any plot to kill the president and by the time the day of the killing arrived, he had already been isolated by the group.
Text messages presented by the government in the first trial and which are expected to be part of the evidence against Sanon show that the team had decided to back a new replacement for Moïse, Haitian Superior Judge Windelle Coq Thelot. As the polit evolved, the group removed Sanon from text messages and even cursed him out. In at least one message, Solages told them not to tell Sanon about pending plans connected to the plot.
©2026 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Read the full article here