INSIDE AN EPIC VENEZ-FAILURE
Debt-saddled US Army vet’s true coup motive: cash
WHILE planning his invasion of Venezuela, Jordan Goudreau compared his mercenary forces to those of Alexander the Great in his most decisive battle against the Persian Empire.
Like the ancient warrior, Goudreau, a 43-year-old decorated former Special Forces soldier, planned to strike “deep into the heart of the enemy,” capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and collect a multimilliondollar bounty.
But when his ragtag group of guerrillas docked last weekend in Macuto, a coastal city 20 miles from the capital of Caracas, they seemed to have more in common with the fumbling characters in Woody Allen’s “Bananas” — a 1971 spoof about a band of misfits who unwittingly get caught up in a Latin American revolution.
The mercenaries, including Venezuelan dissidents and two Americans, were overwhelmed by a group of local fishermen when they washed ashore — largely because Maduro’s forces knew they were coming and were lying in wait, a US law-enforcement source told The Post.
Cuban spies, who run all of Venezuela’s counterintelligence, had tracked Goudreau, who is also a former Green Beret and self-styled security consultant, for months as he helped train a small cadre of combatants in Colombia. Goudreau himself strangely bragged about the coup in a tweet to President Trump on May 4: “Strikeforce incursion into Venezuela. 60 Venezuelan, 2 American ex Green Beret @realDonaldTrump”
Despite the death of eight guerrilla fighters and the arrest of 13 others, including former Special Forces soldiers Airan Berry and Luke Denman, who have been paraded on Venezuelan national TV, Goudreau praised the operation and said there were numerous
“cells” still active in Venezuela ready to attack Maduro and his cronies.
“I’ve got troops in the field,” Goudreau told Factores de Poder, a Miami-based YouTube channel that reports on Venezuela, shortly after the failed coup. “I’ve been a freedom fighter my whole life. These people have a right to fight for their country.”
But his main reason for organizing the coup may have had less to do with freedom fighting, and more with an urgent need for cash, the law-enforcement source said. Goudreau, whose nascent security consultancy business is struggling, was bent on claiming a $15 million reward from the State Department for the capture of Maduro, who was indicted on drug trafficking charges in Manhattan federal court in March.
“Goudreau was clearly after the money and to promote his new security company,” said the source, who did not want to be identified. “But the whole thing was incredibly amateurish. We’re still trying to piece it together. This was no coup, not even close.”
And while Maduro is exploiting the failed coup for maximum propaganda purposes, attacking the US government and political enemies in Venezuela who at one point backed the bizarre plot, Goudreau has other problems.
The brawny commando with the square jaw and buzz cut has not only become the subject of ridicule but he is now under federal investigation for arms trafficking in Colombia, the source said.
JORDAN Guy MacDonald Goudreau always wanted to be a hero, a modern-day G.I. Joe. But he was also an opportunist who was desperate to monetize his combat experience after he left the service, friends told The Post.
The Canadian-born US soldier first joined the Canadian Armed Forces, while completing a computer science degree at the University of Calgary in the mid-90s, according to his LinkedIn profile. In 1999, he moved to Bethesda, Md., where he worked as a systems analyst for Employee Health Programs, a drug testing firm.
But he longed for the battlefield, and two years later moved to Fayetteville, NC, where he trained at Fort Bragg to be a medical sergeant and “fire infantryman” assigned to the 10th Special Forces Group, an elite unit that specializes in unconventional warfare and counterterrorism.
He deployed to Iraq from November 2006 to April 2007 and served two tours in Afghanistan — in 2011 and 2014 — and was awarded three Bronze Stars. His military career ended in 2016 after he suffered a concussion in a parachuting accident and numerous back injuries.
“Jordan is the kind of dude who the military calls to do the top tier stuff that guys do that keep people safe,” friend Frank Riley told The Post. “He’s well trained and has a heart for people. He would give his life for his country.”
Another friend, who served with Goudreau in Iraq, remembered him as a fearless warrior. “He was incredible,” Drew White told Canada’s Globe and Mail last week. “He was who you wanted in the trenches with you.”
White, who now lives in Colorado and runs a home inspection company, teamed up with Goudreau after they retired from the military to start Silvercorp USA, a security firm launched in 2018, public records show. The Melbourne, Fla., firm was incorporated on Feb. 26, 2018, days after the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 dead
Goudreau apparently thought he had hit pay dirt with a scheme he devised to protect students from random shooters. He wanted to charge parents $8.99 each to embed former Special Forces soldiers at schools posing as teachers to gather intelligence from students that could uncover potential threats.
“The beauty of it is it’s all for the price of a Netflix subscription, so it’s really hard to argue with me about, ‘Well it costs too much.’ You can’t tell me that,” Goudreau told the Washington Post that November, when he was pushing his ser
vices at an Orlando expo on school safety. When a colleague suggested Goudreau could go to school boards and the government for the cash, he gave a firm response.
“But we don’t want to,” he said. “We don’t want that. We want private money because it’s faster.”
GOUDREAU did need money fast. He had debts that topped $100,000 in 2018, said Riley, an Afghanistan War veteran who also helped Goudreau set up Silvercorp. That year, as he was launching his business, Goudreau moved in with Riley, who he had met through Warrior Games, a US Special Operations competition for wounded ex-combatants,
“He was having a lot of problems with debts,” Riley said. “He had separated from his wife and he was still paying her expenses in New York.”
According to Riley, Goudreau’s wife, June, lived in New York while Goudreau was training in Germany. Public records show the last known address for Goudreau is a post office box in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 2012.
Beginning in 2012, Goudreau was investigated for allegedly defrauding the US Army of $62,000 in housing allowance payments. Goudreau, who did not return calls for comment, said in other interviews that the investigation was closed with no charges.
Still, desperate to pay off his debts, Goudreau began to take on private security work, and boasted on Silvercorp’s Web site that he participated in “international security teams for the President of the United States as well as the Secretary of Defense.”
In February 2019, he was part of a team at a concert for Venezuelan aid organized by billionaire Richard Branson in Colombia, where the scheme to invade the country and liberate impoverished Venezuelans from Maduro’s iron grip began to take shape.
Later, Goudreau met with Venezuelan soldiers who had deserted the country, including Cliver Alcala, a retired major general in the Venezuelan army who was trying to lead a ragtag group of 300 low-ranking deserters in Colombia to invade Venezuela.
Goudreau agreed to train the men and lead the operation, according to the AP. Last month, Alcala surrendered to US authorities after his indictment on drug trafficking charges. He is now in custody in New York awaiting federal trial in the case that alleges that Maduro was the ringleader of a massive cocaine cartel.
MONTHS after his first trip to Colombia, in September 2019, Goudreau met with Juan Jose Rendon, a Miami-based political strategist and Maduro opponent who fled Venezuela in 2013. Rendon headed up a clandestine coalition searching for ways to help Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido remove Maduro from power. Guaido, who won elections in 2018, is seen as the country’s legitimate president by more than 60 countries, including the US.
At their meeting, Goudreau told Rendon that he had 800 mercenaries ready to swoop into Venezuela and asked for more than $200 million to complete the job, The Washington Post reported. Although Rendon and his partners initially agreed to the operation, they began to get cold feet when Goudreau could not produce any evidence of a small army and demanded an immediate payment of a $1.5 million retainer.
After the failed mission, it was the money that became a sticking point for Goudreau. In the interview with Factores de Poder, he said he never received “a single cent” for his work but continued to prepare his troops anyway, going further into debt.
A few weeks before the failed coup, Goudreau contacted Rendon through a lawyer in order to collect on the retainer and “made it known that if they didn’t pay up he would release the agreement to the press,” Stars and Stripes reported. Goudreau provided Factores de Poder with copies of pages from the contract and complained of never receiving the retainer. Nevertheless, he said he ordered the operation to help Venezuelans.
“I just want to say to the Venezuelan people that there’s people fighting on your behalf,” he said.
Riley said he wasn’t surprised that Goudreau launched the failed coup with almost no backing. “He’s not a red-tape kind of guy,” he said. “He’s the right man for the job and he’s used to doing things on his own. He doesn’t wait for anyone to help him.”