Inmate’s campaign of charm and cash
Police called it Operation Rico Suave. They charged him and 8 people in murder alibi attempt.
He’s an accused killer and courthouse escape artist with such charm and powers of persuasion that the cops call him Rico Suave.
In the past year, 22-year-old Dayonte Resiles apparently talked at least 15 people, old friends and new, into breaking the law for him, investigators say. He masterminded an escape plot and a more recent effort to manipulate evidence in a murder case against him, they say.
He became a student of pulling people’s strings so they would do his bidding. While in jail, records show, he asked that at least three books be sent to him: “How To Get People To Do What You Want,” “The Obstacle is the Way” and “Trust Me, I’m Lying.” Some of the books were not delivered.
Several people are accused of helping him pull off a brazen escape from the Broward County courthouse
and stay on the lam for six days last July. Hauled back to his maximum-security jail cell at the Broward County Jail, Resiles, of Lauderdale Lakes, was apparently undeterred.
Eight friends, including one whowas charged in the escape, were part of an equally audacious attempt to try to manufacture a fake alibi and false evidence for him, authorites said Tuesday. His goal: to beat a first degree murder charge in the 2014 stabbing death of Jill Halliburton-Su in her Davie home.
Resiles offered cash to some of the alleged co-conspirators but seemed to offer nothing but friendship to the others, investigators said.
They dubbed the investigation into the plot— which led to the arrestsTuesday of Resiles, a woman also charged in the earlier escape, and seven others — “Operation Rico Suave,” a nod to Resiles’ smooth way of talkingwomen into helping him.
“He was suave with the girls, with the women. He played the women, he used them,” said Sgt. Jason Hendrick, the head of the Broward sheriff ’s public corruption unit.
Resiles’ attorney expressed concern Tuesday.
“If the new allegations are true, they’ll have an impact on his murder case,” said Resiles’ attorney, H. DohnWilliams. “If your client’s voice is on recorded phonecalls, it’snever a good thing.”
Resiles’ effort to manipulate evidence apparently began in December, five months after he was returned to jail after the escape. Locked up in the jail’s eighth floor maximum-security unit in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Resiles tried to recruit and bribe a rookie sheriff’s detention deputy, investigators said.
Resiles passed handwritten notes to the deputy and tried to flatter and befriend him. Someof the noteswere signed“Love& Loyalty.” Resiles bragged he was going to be a millionaire when he got out of jail. He offered the deputy money to smuggle a cellphone into the jail so he could orchestrate his plan, according to investigators.
Resiles gave the detention deputy a note that he wanted turned over to a woman, Crystal Therisa Isaacs, 33, of Sunrise, described in court records as his “jailhouse girlfriend and confidante whom he first began a relationship with after his capture on the escape charge.” They are now engaged to be married, investigators said.
The deputy did what he was supposed to do and promptly notified his bosses, setting off an undercover investigation carried out by the BrowardSheriff’s Office, the Broward State Attorney’s Office and the FBI, according to court records.
Detectives arranged for the deputy, whose name was not released by investigators, to act like he was happy to help. He gave Resiles the cellphone— which was wiretapped so all calls and text messages from it were recorded. He also agreed to pass along messages to some of Resiles’ associates.
The phone was used to make more than 1,200 calls and texts during December, officials said.
Investigators listened in and said they discovered Resiles had hatched a convoluted series of lies totry to manufacture a fake alibi to make it seem like he was in Georgia on Sept. 8, 2014, the day of the Halliburton-Su murder inDavie.
Investigators say Resiles left behindDNAthat proves he was at the Davie murder scene. Information from Facebook and his cellphone also place him in South Florida, they said, though he had visited the Atlanta area a few days earlier.
Resiles could face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted of killing Halliburton-Su, 59. Prosecutors have not decided whether to seek the death penalty.
As detectives listened in on the tapped cellphone, they say, they recorded Resiles asking his friends to make it look like he had been set up for two burglaries in the upscale gated communityofHawksLanding in Plantation a few days earlier on Sept. 2, 2014.
This was the story investigators say Resiles concocted for friends to swear to: Hehadgotten into a fight with a man whom he had underpaid for two Rolex watches. The man had stabbed him and somehow saved samples of Resiles’ blood, which the man then planted at the scene of two separate burglaries in Hawks Landing, according to the recorded phone calls and court records.
He wanted one of the women to pretend to be the girlfriend of Albert Eugene Jones, 21, a Broward man who was shot dead by a homeowner during a November 2016 burglary in Sunrise, investigators said. Resiles apparently hoped to pin the Plantation burglaries on the dead man.
AfterResiles escaped and spent six days on the lam before being captured, he wrote a letter to the judge handling his case and said he had been trying to find evidence that would clear his name.
But investigatorswhoexamined the phone he used during those six days said it showed he just watched pornography and news accounts of his escape, looked at photos of his family and friends, and checked his Facebook account.
Resiles is now facing at least 70 criminal charges. He was already charged with 33 offenses linked to the murder, the escape and numerous burglaries, jail records show. Detectives filed 37 more state charges against him Tuesday.
Resiles also made it clear that, if the cases were not turning out in his favor, he planned to escape again and never be found, investigatorswrote.
“If push ever came to shove, if my back ever got put against thewall again or whatever, or there’s no way for like to wiggle out ... I’m leaving again,” Resiles said in one call. “But this time, I’m leaving for good, I’m vanishing off the earth.”