Inset: Sergio Pino (Century Homebuilders Group). Background: Pino’s South Florida home (WFOR/YouTube).
A wealthy South Florida real estate developer allegedly tried to kill his wife of over 30 years by poisoning her with fentanyl and hiring two separate bands of hit men to murder her in a scheme that rivals an episode of “Miami Vice.”
Sergio Pino died by suicide Tuesday as FBI agents were set to arrest him at his Coral Gables mansion for solicitation for murder. Now nine other people are facing charges in the murder-for-hire plots to kill Pino’s wife Tatiana.
Feds allege Serio Pino became enraged after his wife filed for divorce in 2022.
“This case is about a husband, Mr. Pino, who decided after years of marriage that he was going to kill his wife,” Markenzy Lapointe, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, told reporters at a press conference.
According to a criminal complaint, Pino tried to poison his wife multiple times and hired people to kill her in a hit and run crash. He also allegedly paid people to set his sister-in-law’s vehicle on fire.
When those attempts failed, he hired a second group of people to murder her and make it looked like an armed robbery gone wrong, the FBI said. Around 11:30 a.m. June 23, Tatiana Pino returned home and idled in the driveway at the gate to enter the property. As she began to drive inside, a man later identified as Vernon Green allegedly came running out of a Dodge Ram pickup truck armed with a gun and wearing a beanie, face covering and yellow boots.
Tatiana Pino slammed on the gas, squeezing her car between a fence and a tree and into the backyard with Green allegedly giving chase. She honked the horn numerous times in an attempt to alert others to her danger. Green came up to the car and “pointed a pistol with a silver slide inches from” Pino’s adult daughter’s face who had come out from the house after hearing the commotion, the complaint said. Green grabbed the daughter’s arm and ordered her to go inside the home. The suspect ran back into the pickup and he fled the scene with the help of a getaway driver, per the feds.
Agents recovered surveillance camera footage from throughout the neighborhood that showed the people in the truck were working in tandem with people in a Tesla. The videos reportedly showed the suspects casing the home earlier in the day and making their move when Tatiana Pino returned home. Feds tracked the Tesla’s license plate back to a home in Miami. They also recovered license plate reader photo from May that showed the Dodge Ram, which had an aftermarket LED light on the front bumper in front of the home where they found the Tesla, the complaint said. Feds recovered the truck the day after the attempted murder not far from the Pino residence.
Cops discovered the truck had been stolen from the Orlando area in March. The suspects had also swapped the license plate with another Dodge Ram to further avoid detection, the affidavit said.
Federal agents later learned that Sergio Pino allegedly offered the suspects $150,000 to carry out the hit on his wife, and another $150,000 should Pino’s involvement in the plot not be revealed. He gave the hit men a deadline of June 24 to murder his wife so she could not attend the couple’s next divorce proceeding, feds allege. The suspects began surveilling Tatiana Pino on June 11, according to the complaint.
Feds uncovered several phone calls and meetings between the hit men. They also listened to a July 15 phone call between two of the suspects — Fausto Villar and Avery Bivins — where Villar told Bivins to lay low until “the smoke clears,” the affidavit said. Villar also allegedly told Bivins to delete his Instagram and phone call logs and to get rid of his burner phone.
A separate criminal complaint details Pino’s previous attempt to kill his wife. Tatiana Pino was returning home from a divorce proceeding on Aug. 30, 2023, when a man in a Home Depot flat bed truck rammed her car as she returned home. The truck had been waiting for her outside the house and it was “apparent that this was an intentional act and not an accidental collision,” the complaint said.
Tatiana Pino previously said in divorce proceedings that she suspected her husband was poisoning her, Miami NBC affiliate WTVJ reported. She said in a deposition that she had been suffering from an unknown ailment for at least two years. Doctors originally thought it was epilepsy but specialists at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore uncovered the cause of her health problems as fentanyl use, the outlet reported.
An attorney for Sergio Pino, Sam Rabin, said his client is innocent.
“Sadly, I no longer have a living client to allow me to respond to the government’s new allegations,” he told the Miami Herald. “That is because prosecutors ignored my emails and phone conversations where I volunteered to surrender Mr. Pino if they wanted to arrest him. Although I have not seen any of the evidence that the government claims to have, the narrative that they are putting forth is contrary to the person and character of Sergio Pino.”
Sergio Pino began Century Homebuilders Group in 1995. He estimated his and his wife’s combined wealth to be $153 million, per WTVJ.
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