Lauderhill man pleads guilty to smuggling guns to Haiti
A Lauderhill resident and former Haitian National Police officer pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in smuggling more than 100 guns to Haiti since 2020.
Jean Robert Casimir, 53, entered an agreement with the government on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., in which he pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy, smuggling and violations of the U.S. Export Control Reform Act, federal court records show.
Casimir, who was arrested in Lauderhill in 2024 and indicted in Washington in 2025, purchased 140 guns since 2020 from businesses with federal licenses to sell firearms and from an individual in Florida, then exported them all to Haiti without the necessary license from the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release Tuesday.
Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI had been investigating potential gun trafficking in Haiti since at least 2022, and as part of the investigation, authorities reviewed photos of guns in Haiti that included the makes, models and serial numbers of multiple rifles, according to a criminal complaint. Casimir was identified during the investigation after two AR-15 rifles investigators saw in the photos were found to have been purchased by him in October 2023 from a licensed firearms dealer near West Palm Beach.
A few months before his arrest 2024, Casimir was stopped for inspection by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport after returning from Haiti.
In a voluntary interview with agents, Casimir said he was formerly a Haitian National Police officer who worked as the head of security for the chief. He said he worked “providing security consulting for clients who travel to Haiti and want an armed security detail,” and owned a security company in his home country, according to the complaint.
Agents then asked Casimir about the two AR-15s he purchased in October 2023, and he said that those two guns had “been lost” after he took them to a friend’s house who had agreed to hold them for him, and while Casimir was on a trip in Port-au-Prince, his friend died in a motorcycle crash.
Casimir in the interview admitted that he had smuggled guns to Haiti on a few occasions by packing them in boxes and delivering the boxes to cargo boat crew members who operated between Miami and Haiti, the complaint said. When boats arrived in Haiti at Port de Miragoâne, an associate of Casimir’s retrieved the guns and took them to Casimir’s security company’s office in Port-au-Prince.
He denied that the firearms were sold to gang members but said some of them ended up in the hands of street gangs, according to the complaint. In one instance, Casimir told investigators an employee of his was attacked while transporting the guns and gang members stole several of them.
Within a few months of the stop at the airport, agents received a search warrant for two cellphones Casimir had with him that day. Both had a “significant” amount of photos, videos, audio recordings and texts discussing the purchase of guns in the U.S. and sales of them in Haiti, according to the complaint. Some of the text messages were between Casimir and a person identified only as “U.S. Person 1,” who was an employee of a “major U.S.-based firearms manufacturer.”
Other messages between Casimir and two people identified only as living in Haiti included Casimir sending multiple photos of guns, including pistols and AR-15 rifles, on several occasions and discussing pricing, the complaint said.
A video Casimir recorded of himself and texted to someone identified in the complaint only as “U.S. Person 2” showed him supervising a group of people in the driveway of a home in Haiti cutting open the air tanks of two large air compressors, which were filled with “duct tape-wrapped packages in the shape of firearms and firearm magazines,” the complaint said.
Casimir and co-conspirators would pack the disassembled guns and rifles into the industrial air compressors with foam insulation, then weld the compressors back together in order to smuggle them, the DOJ said in the news release.
A sentencing hearing is set for December, federal court records show.
He faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison on the conspiracy charge, a maximum of 20 years for the violations of the U.S. Export Control Reform Act and a maximum of 10 years on the smuggling charge, according to the plea agreement.