AMERICAS NEWSMARCH 20, 2010

AMERICAS NEWSMARCH 20, 2010
U.S. Aids Arrest of Player in Haiti Abductions



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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.

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Associated Press
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