[Repost Puello arrest] In case you missed it...

In case you missed it, US and Dominican authorities recently arrested Jorge Puello, [aka Jorge Torres, aka Yoram Migdal], an Interpol fugitive wanted on charges of sex trafficking in El Salvador and various charges (bank fraud, parole violation) in the United States. The Wall Street Journal story follows below.

Puello was arrested weeks after he first appeared in Haiti as the self-styled 'lawyer' named Jorge Torres for Laura Silsby, a US missionary from Idaho, who was jailed along with 9 other US Baptist missionaries on charges of possible child kidnapping in a case that has drawn global attention to the plight of Haitian orphans and vulnerable children. Puello, who is not a lawyer, maintains he is innocent of past criminal charges and that he did not know Silsby or her group prior to offering his services. He recently spoke to Haiti Vox and alleged that other Dominicans had been helping Silsby and her group to bring Haitian orphaned children across the border to a new orphanage she was establishing in the Dominican Republic. (see earlier posts in this blog).

For his part, Puello disappeared from sight after Salvadoran officials identified him as a man wanted on trafficking charges in El Salvador. He went underground and claimed to be in Panama, but he remained in open email and telephone contact with journalists (including Haiti Vox) looking into the Silsby case. Web sleuths like The Daily Bastardette tracked his internet IP address to the Dominican Republic. He continued to boldly flaunt his open fugitive status despite an Interpol warrant out for his immediate arrest. He even launched a website, Jorge-es-Innocente, to declare his innocence -- a true demonstration of his chutzpah.

Puello remained in contact with Haiti Vox via initial email and then telephone communication. He claimed he was changing phones and using phone cards to stay ahead of the law. But he also claimed his arrest was unlikely, given that he had cooperated with US law enforcement agents in the past and therefore "knew too much." His arrest suggests otherwise.

Puello's statements to Haiti Vox and his allegations about the involvement of other Dominicans in Silsby's case, among others, recently led Haitian Judge Bernard St. Vil to examine new allegations and further probe the Silsby case. The judge recently added a second charge to original charges against her for her group's attempt to pick up a group of 40 Haitian children on January 26 in Port-au-Prince and ferry them to the Dominican Republic -- three days before picking up another group of 33 children for which her group was arrested on January 29.

The Silsby group was stopped on Jan. 26 after a local resident in the Petion Ville neighborhood alerted a policeman, who detained the group and ordered the children to disembark. He then escorted Silsby to the office of the Dominican consul, to determine the validity of Silsby's claim that Dominican authorities had given her written permission to bring the children across. As Haiti Vox reported in several weeks ago, the Dominican consul told reporters he warned Silsby that she lacked necessary paperwork or permission to take the 40 Haitian children out of Haiti, and that she would be regarded as trafficking is she continued in her pursuit of that goal.

According to a timeline that is still not completly clear, a US pastor and self-declared 'advisor' to the Silsby 'New Life Children's Refuge' group named Jean Sainvil (no relation to Judge St. Vil) apparently met Silsby the next day (Jan. 27) in the border town of Ouanaminthe. He then personally helped her find the 33 children her group attempted to ferry across the border on January 29th. To date, te

Pastor Sainvil claims he had never previously met Silsby -- even though she had visted the orphanage he is affiliated with in December 2009 and had handed out presents to children there. Her prior contact with the orphanage was with another man, Pastor Daniel. Sainvil told reporters his nondenominational Haiti Sharing Jesus Ministry has 25 churches in the country. (But a website bearing the name Haiti Sharing Jesus Ministry posted a public notice that their group was not affiliated with Pastor Jean Sainvil.)


One scenario that Silsby-watchers have proposed is that Silsby had made earlier plans to pick up children from the Ounaminthe orphanage after the December visit. She arranged for help on the Haitian side from Pastor Daniel and possibly his US associate, Pastor Jean Sainvil, who initially told reporters he was a 'member' of the New Life Children's Refuge group, then changed it to 'advisor' before he fled Haiti in the wake of Silsby's arrest and has stayed mum and out of the media limelight ever since his return to Atlanta.

What's most likely is that these two knew each other or of each other and made contact after Silsby was stopped by the policeman mid-week. Sainvil boasted to reporters that had he been with Silsby during her attempt to cross, she would have succeeded, but he was ill and not with them. It's clear that Silsby had contacted other Dominicans to help her. Whether alleged trafficker Jorge Puello was one of them remains uncertain, despite Mr. Puello's denials. At this point, various statements made by the three parties -- Silsby and Puello and Jean Sainvil - appear to demonstrate what Judge St. Vil has delicately labeled 'certain discrepancies' in Silsby's account of what took place that fateful week in January.

Judge St. Vil is also looking into other allegations detailed in a Haiti Vox Special Report on this case, released her earlier (see blog archive).

Haiti Vox will continue to report on the Silsby case.

Stay tuned.

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By JOSé DE CORDOBA And EVAN PEREZ
PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti—Dominican police accompanied by U.S. agents arrested the former self-styled legal adviser to a group of U.S. missionaries whose detention on charges of abducting Haitian children after the earthquake caused an uproar.

The emergence in January of Jorge Puello, 32 years old, reignited pending charges against him in the U.S. and El Salvador.

Mr. Puello was arrested Thursday night in the capital of Santo Domingo. Agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were present, U.S. law-enforcement officials said.


Jorge Puello, seen in February, was detained in Santo Domingo.

These officials said they were acting on warrants from the U.S., where Mr. Puello is wanted in Vermont on charges of human trafficking and alien smuggling, and in Pennsylvania for parole violation on a bank-fraud conviction.

The U.S. plans to seek his extradition, the officials said.

In interviews last month conducted by telephone and email, Mr. Puello said he had also been known as Jorge Torres, the name on a 2003 Vermont indictment on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement human trafficking investigation.

That case went dormant but was revived when Mr. Puello stepped into public view carlier this year, according to a U.S. official.

Mr. Puello said he was also the person wanted in an El Salvador probe in connection with a sex-trafficking ring, broken up last year, in which women and girls from the Dominican Republic and elsewhere were lured into prostitution.

In the interviews, Mr. Puello said he was innocent of all charges. He couldn't be reached to comment Friday.

Soon after Haiti's Jan. 12 quake, Mr. Puello presented himself as the lawyer representing 10 U.S. Baptist missionaries arrested on Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic on Jan. 29 as they tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country.

The missionaries said they were rescuing children, including orphans from the quake, and taking them to a facility in the Dominican Republic that was being remodeled into an orphanage.

The children turned out not to be orphans. They had been given up by their desperately poor families to the missionaries, who promised the children would be cared for. They have since been returned.

Mr. Puello later acknowledged that he wasn't a lawyer.

The missionaries spent weeks in detention in Haiti while a judge investigated charges of child abduction. All but their leader, Laura Silsby, have since been released. Ms. Silsby is in jail, awaiting the judge's decision on whether to press formal charges.

Haitian officials complained that the attention given to the case was frustrating efforts to deal with the disaster that killed more than 220,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless.

Mr. Puello's relationship to the missionaries also jeopardized their defense when it came to light that the dual U.S.-Dominican national was wanted in El Salvador on charges of leading a prostitution ring.

The revelations cast a shadow over the missionaries, characterized by their defense lawyers as naive do-gooders seeking to help Haitian children. The judge investigating the case said he needed to deepen his inquiry to see whether Mr. Puello had known the missionaries prior to their arrest. Both Mr. Puello and the missionaries denied any relationship before the missionaries' arrest.

Since 2004, Mr. Puello had also represented himself as a Sephardic Jew in the Dominican Republic and in El Salvador who had discovered large communities of "lost" or "crypto" Jews—descendants of Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in Spain and Portugal during the 15th century. He obtained more than $5,000 from Kulanu, a U.S. Jewish foundation to support his work with "lost Jews."

Since Mr. Puello's background came to light, Kulanu has issued a statement repudiating him.

Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com and Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com