Miami judge lets verdicts stand against ex-BVI premier after questioning juror; another was a no-show
In a rare move, a judge subpoenaed two jurors who expressed some misgivings after a Miami federal jury voted unanimously to convict former British Virgin Islands premier Andrew Fahie of drug trafficking a month ago.
On Thursday, one showed up in the judge’s courtroom, but the other did not.
In a series of short questions, U.S District Judge Kathleen Williams asked the one juror whether her guilty verdicts at the end of Fahie’s Feb. 8 trial were her decision. The female juror’s response: “Yes.”
With that answer, Williams allowed the 12-person jury’s guilty verdicts to stand, leaving Fahie vulnerable to a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years up to life in prison on the main charge of conspiring to import cocaine through the British territory into the United States. Fahie, 53, was also found guilty of three other charges involving money laundering and racketeering. His sentencing is set for April 29 in Miami federal court.
“I think we’re done,” Williams told both federal prosecutors and defense attorneys, ending a month-long controversy over the jury’s verdicts. “There is no room at all to maneuver.”
Williams also said she would not make a renewed effort to bring the other subpoenaed juror into her courtroom for questioning, as she described him as “elusive.” Williams said of the two jurors in question, he was a “lesser player” because he did not hesitate like the other one had when they were polled by the judge on their original guilty verdicts.
The unusual dispute surfaced just after the jurors found Fahie guilty last month and the judge polled each of them on their verdicts before discharging them. Within minutes of being let go, two of the jurors contacted the judge’s office to say they had second thoughts about their verdicts.
Federal prosecutors Kevin Gerarde and Sean McLaughin argued the judge should stick to the original verdicts, contending there was no legal basis to bring the two jurors back into court to question them. The prosecutors pointed out there was no evidence of a verdict mistake, internal or external pressure on the jury or racist attitudes toward the defendant, who is Black.
Defense attorneys Theresa Van Vliet and Joyce Delgado countered that, despite constitutional limits on questioning a jury about deliberations, there was no reason why the two jurors could not be polled again by the judge.
In the end, the judge found herself bound by legal precedent to let the verdicts stand after questioning the one juror on Thursday. “I think it was important to brief this matter,” Williams said. “I think it was important to be transparent.”
JUROR CALLED ONE OF THE DEFENSE ATTORNEYS
During the dispute, the judge’s concern heightened because one of the jurors with apparent misgivings spoke by phone with one of the politician’s defense attorneys the day after the guilty verdicts, according to a court document.
“He told me who he was and I said I remembered him,” Delgado wrote in a Feb. 9 email, pointing out that she was returning the juror’s calls left at her law office.
“He then blurted out that he wanted to know what was happening with the case because he’s worried that if all the jurors are asked to return that they will ‘never come to an agreement’ so he wants to know what the process is,” Delgado wrote in the email, summarizing the exchange to her colleague, Van Vliet.
Delgado said she didn’t know and told the juror that it was “inappropriate” for them to talk and hung up.
That conversation — along with two prior phone-call attempts and a voicemail message from the same juror — became part of a growing body of evidence in the post-verdict dispute.
Fahie was arrested in April 2022 in Miami following a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sting operation. He was free on a bond and living with his daughter before trial, but after his conviction he was ordered held at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami.
The U.S. government made its cocaine-smuggling case against the former British Virgin Islands premier by casting a confidential informant as a Mexican cartel trafficker. The informant, who went by the name “Roberto,” collected hundreds of recorded conversations and text messages with Fahie while they discussed million-dollar bribery payments for access to the British territory, prosecutors said.
Fahie agreed to let thousands of kilos of cocaine pass through the country’s ports to be sold in the United States because of his “greed, arrogance and corruption,” prosecutors added, claiming Fahie needed the bribery payments to build a waterfront mansion in the British Virgin Islands.
Fahie’s defense team argued he had no intention of using his power to enrich himself on cocaine shipments to the United States. Rather, his lawyers argued he was “framed” by the United Kingdom, which controls the BVI archipelago as an overseas territory.
Nonetheless, the trial evidence revealed the sting operation was directed by the DEA, not the British government. At the time of the DEA sting, the U.K. government was concluding a corruption investigation of Fahie’s administration — but British authorities noted it was not related to the DEA’s sting.
VISIT TO MIAMI LED TO DEMISE
Fahie’s demise came on April 28, 2022, when he and BVI’s port director, Oleanvine Pickering Maynard, were visiting Miami for a cruise convention. During their visit, they were lured to Miami-Opalocka Executive Airport to check on a $700,000 payment that was promised to them by the DEA informant pretending to be a member of the Sinaloa cartel.
The sting culminated with the arrests of Fahie and Maynard, 61, leading to an indictment charging them with conspiring to import cocaine and engage in money laundering, along with attempted money laundering and racketeering. Maynard’s son, Kadeem Stephan Maynard, 32, was arrested in the Caribbean, brought to Miami and added as the third defendant.
Both the mother and son pleaded guilty to the cocaine-smuggling conspiracy charge. Last year, the son was sentenced to five years in prison. The mother, who testified for the U.S. government at Fahie’s trial, awaits sentencing on March 28.
After his arrest, Fahie was stripped of his official position as BVI’s premier, which he held from February 2019 to early May 2022.