A $5 million reward is offered for Jimmy Cherizier’s capture or conviction. Photo / Getty Images
A federal grand jury has indicted Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, the leader of a powerful coalition of gangs that has paralysed and terrorised Haiti, on charges of conspiring with Haitians and members of the Haitian diaspora in the United States to evade sanctions, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro said.
The State Department is offering a US$5 million ($8.4m) reward for information leading to Cherizier’s arrest or conviction.
The self-styled revolutionary is believed to be in Port-au-Prince, where last week his gang coalition launched a new round of attacks as he threatened again to overthrow the country’s transitional Government.
A one-count indictment filed in Washington DC federal court alleges that Cherizier, 48, and several others conspired to violate US sanctions from 2020 to 2025, an offence that would be punishable by up to 20 years in prison – if Cherizier can be taken into custody, prosecuted, and convicted.
Cherizier, who posts frequently to social media and has given interviews to the Washington Post and other international news outlets, is perhaps the most notorious of Haiti’s warlords.
A former officer with the Haitian National Police, he has been accused of perpetrating some of the country’s worst massacres, including a 2018 attack in the La Saline neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince that left at least 70 people dead and hundreds of homes destroyed.
Cherizier has for years led the G9 Family and Allies, a gang known for killings, mass kidnappings, sexual violence, and extortion.
In 2023, he united the G9 with enemy gangs to form Viv Anasnm, a coalition that has launched waves of co-ordinated attacks against Haitian neighbourhoods, government buildings, prisons and critical infrastructure.
It has also repeatedly attacked healthcare facilities and blocked humanitarian aid.
The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Cherizier in 2020, and several countries followed.
The State Department this year designated Viv Ansanm and Haiti’s Gran Grif gang as foreign terrorist organisations, saying their “ultimate goal is creating a gang-controlled state where illicit trafficking and other criminal activities operate freely and terrorise Haitian citizens”.
Prosecutors allege that Cherizier and Bazile Richardson, a naturalised US citizen from Haiti, led a conspiracy to transfer funds from the US to Cherizier to fund his gang activities in violation of the sanctions.
Richardson, a trucker who lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was arrested on July 23 in Pasadena, Texas, and was expected to make his initial court appearance today in the District of Columbia.
Prosecutors allege that the pair sought money transfers from members of the Haitian diaspora in the US through social media and direct messaging apps, which Cherizier used to pay his soldiers and buy illegal firearms from black-market dealers in Haiti.
The funds were sent to intermediaries in Haiti, they allege, to conceal Cherizier’s involvement.
The alleged plot involved several other unnamed co-conspirators in Haiti, Massachusetts and New York, prosecutors allege.
They allege that Richardson sent Cherizier photos of wire transfers intended for him and they say communicated frequently with him.
“You are always there for me and for anything that I have needed,” they allege Cherizier said in a voice memo sent to Richardson in May 2022.
Richardson said in a voice message quoted in the indictment that he had grown up with Cherizier and spoke with him daily.
“I am defending my country [Haiti], which the US Embassy is destroying,” the indictment quotes Richardson as saying. “Two things are waiting for me, prison, or death.”
Court records today did not indicate whether the defendants were represented by lawyers.
Gangs have long had a presence in Haiti, but their influence has grown since the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise and the subsequent collapse of the rule of law.
The groups, armed mostly with weapons smuggled in from the US, control 90% of the capital, according to UN estimates, and are pushing into the countryside.
In the year since an international police force deployed in the country, the gangs’ footprint has grown.
US authorities in recent years have charged several Haitian gang leaders with hostage taking and other crimes and offered millions of dollars for information leading to their capture. But Haiti’s foremost gang leaders remain at large in the country, even as authorities there use armed drones to target their strongholds.
Pirro said it was the first federal indictment to charge violations under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act of 2016. A State Department official, Chris Landberg, said US officials hoped to work with informants and Haiti’s national police to take Cherizier into custody.
“Anyone who is giving money to Cherizier … cannot say, ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know that he was sanctioned by the US government,’” Pirro said. “They will be prosecuted.”
- Jeremy Roebuck in Washington contributed to this report.