Had somebody poisoned the brussels sprouts?
That was the question asked by 30 powerful Miami women after a “Ladies’ Friendsgiving” dinner in Christian podcaster Lisa Lorenzo’s 7,000-square-foot Miami home on November 22, 2019. The impressive guest list included Florida lieutenant governor Jeanette Nuñez, who arrived with both her covered dish and her security detail; Jeanette Rubio, wife of U.S. senator Marco Rubio; and State Representative Alina Garcia.
The evening began happily, a night of love and prayer during which the women enjoyed appetizers and expressed their gratitude before sitting down to dinner. “It was a bring-your-own-dish; everyone had brought something,” says Florida state representative Vicki Lopez.
But all heads turned when Tatiana Pino, who had been struggling in her marriage to Miami developer Sergio Pino, walked into the room. Mainly because she “looked so incredibly beautiful,” remembers Vicki Lopez, who in the preceding months had witnessed Tatiana’s dramatic physical deterioration and near-death experiences, the causes of which doctors had been unable to determine.
“I remember her losing some of her hair,” says Lopez, “and they put a heart monitor on her, and she kept getting sicker and sicker. All of the girls began to wonder, How can she go from perfect health to systematically getting so sick?”
Some, including Tatiana, would allege that her husband—a Cuban-American who arrived penniless in Miami but would eventually be worth an estimated $153 million—was trying to poison her. But those rumors seemed far away that November evening, when Tatiana, then 50 years old, arrived looking healthy and gorgeous at the home of her best friend, the threats and terrors she had suffered seemingly behind her.
After the cocktail hour, the 30 women gathered around Lorenzo’s long dining-room table. Amid the love and the laughter, the giving and the praise, came a bounteous buffet: sushi, meat and seafood, vegetables, desserts, and, lurking within the culinary delights, something dark and evil.
“I sat down and I must’ve taken two bites, and immediately became dizzy, disoriented, and sick to the point where I rushed to the bathroom and threw up,” says Vicki Lopez. “I thought, ‘How odd. What could this be?’ I hadn’t ingested enough food to have such an immediate reaction.”
She returned to the table, where she saw other women in similarly dire straits.
“By the time I got out of the bathroom, people were dropping like flies,” she says. An epidemic of nausea had overtaken the sunny event, with more than 10 women rushing to the toilets and returning to lie on couches or on the floor throughout the house.
“Then they realized, ‘O.K., we have a real problem here,’ and they started calling the ambulances,” says Lopez, who was carried out on a stretcher to one of seven or eight ambulances that lined the street, their lights blazing and sirens screaming.
Soon, a woman on another stretcher was loaded into the ambulance beside Vicki Lopez. “It turned out to be Tatiana, who was way too sick to talk. I sat there and just held her hand, and I said to her, ‘Oh my God, this is so nuts. We came to have a good time and here we are in an ambulance.’”
At 3:30 a.m., Lopez finally felt well enough to leave the hospital. On her way out, she ran into Tatiana’s husband, Sergio—whom she had long known as “a pillar of the community”—in the hallway. When he asked her why she was there, she explained that many of the women at the party had been struck down with something like food poisoning.
“He looked like he was worried, but not worried for her.”
The next day, Lopez received a call from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “Because there were obviously important people there, and they had opened an investigation,” says Lopez. “They were asking everyone what they ate, trying to determine what it might have been. I think they said, ‘It was the brussels sprouts.’”
“Tatiana brought the brussels sprouts,” Lopez says.
It didn’t take long for the women who had attended the Friendsgiving to agree that Sergio seemed somehow to be behind the episode.
“He may have poisoned the food thinking she was going to eat it that night, without knowing that she was taking it to a party,” says Lopez. “But there was a lot of speculation, and it was mere speculation, that he was trying to kill us all, because we were her friends, and we were telling her, ‘We think he’s poisoning you,’ and, God knows, maybe he found out about it.”
Florida highway patrolman Joe Sanchez, then head of security for Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez, would later tell The Miami Herald that the brussels sprouts were tested in the crime lab and came back negative for traces of toxins. Sergio also denied any involvement in the Friendsgiving food poisoning, saying under oath in a deposition, “No, of course not. I don’t do those things.”
But events would arise in the coming years that made people think otherwise.
“Later, as the situation between them escalated, I came to believe that Sergio had lost his mind,” says Lopez.
Till Death Do Us Part
It is a case that shocked the seemingly unshockable state of Florida, a state about which novelist Carl Hiaasen once said, “Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I’ve ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.”
“This case is about a husband, Mr. Pino, who decided after years of marriage that he was going to kill his wife,” U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe would later say in a press conference. “First, he tried to poison her over a period of time. When that failed, he put out a contract on her head on two separate occasions, hiring separate groups of hit men to do the job.”
When Tatiana Pino arrived at a deposition in her extremely contentious divorce from Sergio Pino in December 2023, she was flanked by two armed Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers. “She has been attacked in her home,” explained her attorney, “so there is a safety concern.”
She told her story in fits and starts, beginning with the love she shared with Sergio, her husband of 32 years, whose company is said to have become the largest Hispanic-owned homebuilder in the country during their marriage. Eventually, she divulged the things he did that made her fear for her life.
In Coral Gables, Sergio Pino’s sand-colored Century Homebuilders Group headquarters commands a prime stretch of Ponce de Leon Boulevard. And in Miami, five miles to the east, Sergio personified—at least up until a couple of years ago—power and achievement, building more than 20,000 homes, running the lucrative duty-free concessions at Miami International Airport, and donating large sums to both political parties in the state, including the campaigns of his friend former governor Jeb Bush.
The immigrant who rose to such prominence arrived in Miami from Havana at age 12 in 1969 with his younger brother, Carlos, and his parents, Eugenio and Helia, after his father’s small Havana grocery store was confiscated by the Cuban government. Fleeing the Communist regime, the family moved into an efficiency apartment, where Sergio immediately began working, “cleaning hotel welcome mats,” according to a 1997 Miami Herald profile of him entitled “An Idea That Grew into Millions.” His father, Eugenio, initially worked as a plumber’s assistant, making $1.35 per hour.
In 1977, eight years after his arrival, Sergio borrowed $6,000 from his father and put a down payment on a little shop called Cruise Plumbing Supply, which he eventually built into a behemoth whose name reflected his outsize ambition: Century Homebuilders.
At 29, amid a divorce from his first wife, with whom he had two children, Sergio walked into a food market two blocks from his office and saw an apparition behind the cash register: Tatiana Linares. Also the child of Cuban immigrants, she was a devoutly religious, raven-haired, Future Homemakers of America member working part-time at her parents’ store while still a student at Miami Senior High School. She was 17.
And though in 1992 Sergio listed his assets at more than $15 million and Tatiana listed hers as “none,” the financial disparity did not, at least in the early passion of their South Florida love story, seem to matter.
After she turned 18, a whirlwind romance ensued. They skied in Colorado, sailed in the Bahamas on Sergio’s yacht, and after five years of courtship, in 1992, they were married, first in a civil ceremony, and then, a month later, before a gathering of 600 family and friends.
But Tatiana would later claim that shortly before their wedding she saw a darker side of her husband, who advised her “that she would need to sign a marital agreement drafted by [the attorney] who also handled [Sergio’s] first divorce,” she would state in an affidavit. It was an onerous 20-page post-nuptial agreement, whose purpose, Sergio explained, “was to ensure ‘that anything that was owned by me and companies that were owned by me, and profit from those companies that were owned by me would continue to be owned by me, Sergio Pino.’”
“Later, as the situation between them escalated, I came to believe that Sergio had lost his mind,” says Lopez.
Among other things, the contract stated that if the couple divorced, neither party would be able to lay claim to any assets the other party had acquired during the marriage. It also stipulated that if Tatiana and Sergio split, she wouldn’t be entitled to alimony.
Tatiana, who was a 23-year-old community-college night student and was still living with her parents when Sergio proposed to her, felt she had no choice but to sign. She also felt that she dare not even mention the agreement to family or friends, because if she refused, “in my young mind the parties’ love relationship would appear to be tarnished, in turn causing … extreme embarrassment and shame.”
What’s more, according to Tatiana’s divorce petition, “Husband assured his young bride that … the agreement would only be in place for ten years.”
“I was madly in love with him,” she said in the deposition. “I trusted him. But after the fact I felt … it was very ugly … one-sided.”
Twenty-five years later, in 2017, after discovering that Sergio was having an affair with a Miami real-estate broker with whom he had business dealings, she and Sergio went to marriage counselors. But, as she would say in the deposition, “I just don’t think that Sergio was getting it.”
By 2022, they were embroiled in a venomous divorce that stretched out over two hellish years and featured endless exhibits of evidence. Fighting for alimony and half of the property and the homebuilding company that Tatiana felt she and Sergio had built together, she claimed in divorce documents that she had been coerced into signing the 1992 post-nuptial agreement, and she asked that the court decide whether it “should be set aside or modified because it was the result of husband’s coercion … overreaching … (and) the result of husband’s fraud and/or misrepresentations.”
If the court decided in Tatiana’s favor, the assets would be split according to Florida Statute 61.075, which stipulates that assets be distributed equally—or 50-50—in a divorce.
Sergio, however, would adamantly insist that Tatiana had willingly signed the 1992 agreement “and did not express in any way that she felt rushed or pressured.” He would refer to the 1992 post-nup in his response to her divorce petition, repeating the line more than a dozen times:
“Any award of equitable distribution must be in accordance with the parties’ marital agreement dated May 1, 1992.”
Murder, Inc., Miami-Style
Coral Gables, where Sergio and Tatiana raised their two daughters and became as prominent socially as they were professionally, is a flourishing city of 49,000 people. But it feels like the tropics. The heat is oppressive, the rains are torrential, and the streets are overhung by the canopies of banyan trees, which fan out like gigantic umbrellas over lucky residents—the city’s average household income is more than $190,000.
“We have the lowest crime rate in 25 years: no murders, no hard crime,” says Mayor Vince Lago. “We’re a community with a very small-town feel where everybody knows each other. And people want to live their lives in a tranquil fashion.”
He pauses to consider the specter of a murder-for-hire scheme in the peaceful city.
“In 30 years of living in this community, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he adds. “You never expected an individual of this professional background and accomplishment to be embroiled in a horrific scandal of this magnitude.”
Sergio Pino’s life here was much like the lives of rich men in other wealthy enclaves the world over: he had a multi-million-dollar modern home in Cocoplum, a private gated community; his $8 million yacht, the Century Star, was docked in a canal in his backyard; he had a beautiful girlfriend on the side; and a wife he desperately wanted out of the way.
But the remedy was uniquely Sergio.
“Pino would pay $150,000 in the first disbursement,” the U.S. attorney later revealed of the two murder-for-hire contracts. “And another $150,000 if the murder did not connect Mr. Pino to the activities. Lastly, Mrs. Pino had to die before their next divorce proceedings.”
Being a builder of homes, Sergio was accustomed to assembling crews. This time, though, they were designed for destroying, not building. The two successive “Murder Crews,” as the government called them, comprised a total of nine would-be hit men.
To insulate himself from potential future investigations, Sergio insisted on dealing only with the leaders of each crew. The first, Bayron Bennett, reportedly worked part-time on Sergio’s yacht. The second was Fausto “Cuba” Villar, who, according to local news reports, had served six years in prison for armed robbery and was working as a roofer on the Pinos’ home.
The leaders were given their marching orders: kill Tatiana Linares Pino. And while those who would later appear in court would plead not guilty, “Omerta Bloody” was a crew member’s nickname, according to the D.O.J.
Before the guns and the goons, Sergio tried a more genteel approach to convincing his wife to settle the divorce: a threatening letter and “spoof telephone calls from Colombian telephone numbers, urging a quick divorce settlement,” according to a court exhibit from the divorce proceedings. And in 2018, he placed a tracking device on Tatiana’s car, after which “Ms. Pino put a tracking device on [Sergio’s] vehicle, as well as a voice recorder.”
Sergio retaliated with arson, a “staged” robbery in her home, and attempts at poisoning her with arsenic, cyanide, and, most prevalently, fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that’s 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. (According to a later criminal complaint, the fentanyl was administered by tampering with Tatiana’s prescribed medications, and at least one member of the first “Murder Crew,” believed to have been contacted in 2019, helped Sergio obtain the drugs.)
By July 2019, Tatiana’s life had been turned upside down. When asked to describe her symptoms in the deposition, she said, “Just some symptoms of nausea, of weird tastes in my mouth, weird sensations.... In November of 2019, I had what I called an episode.”
A previously robust woman of 50, Tatiana would “fall down [and] have bouts of diarrhea,” she said. Soon, ambulances were arriving, with technicians giving grim diagnoses and saying she looked like “an overdose … foam coming out of my mouth.”
Countless lab tests, doctors’ visits, and epilepsy evaluations ensued, and Tatiana had a pacemaker installed, which she felt was unnecessary. Hospitals became her home: the Mayo Clinic in early 2020, the Cleveland Clinic shortly after that, and, finally, Johns Hopkins in 2022. “My veins are shot,” she said, referring to all the blood work she’d had done.
The medical saga came to a head in February 2022, when one of the Pinos’ daughters found Tatiana “purple on the floor.”
“She believed he loved her,” Tatiana’s sister would say of Sergio in a deposition, adding, “She saw herself dying on a daily basis. She was resuscitated three times. . . . Honestly, the last year she had hardly no energy to speak.”
Finally, the doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins had a breakthrough. “They found fentanyl,” Tatiana recalled.
When she returned from the hospital in March 2022, Tatiana reported the incidents to the D.E.A., which opened an investigation, “because I certainly was not taking fentanyl.”
She knew it was over. Her marriage was “irretrievably broken.” Her husband was “the only possible suspect.”
Tatiana moved out of the Cocoplum home, and her health immediately improved, the near-death experiences she’d been having abruptly ending.
But then, when Tatiana filed for divorce in April 2022, claiming “we were 50/50 in Century Homebuilders,” and therefore entitled to half of Sergio’s fortunes, including much of what Sergio insisted was his “separate property,” things took an even more violent turn. According to a member of one of Sergio’s Murder Crews, the ex-con Fausto “Cuba” Villar, Sergio gave his estranged wife an offer that would turn out to be an ultimatum:
“The wife wanted half of what Pino owned and wouldn’t settle for the offered $20 million … ”
With Tatiana’s refusal, according to investigators, Sergio Pino’s reign of terror intensified.
Mark Seal is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of many nonfiction books, including The Man in the Rockefeller Suit and Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli
