During the trial for illegal possession of guns against the music producer, it was confirmed that federal authorities are investigating him for money laundering.
Upon leaving the United States Court for the District of Puerto Rico yesterday after being found guilty on two counts of illegal possession of weapons, music producer Rafael Antonio “Raphy” Pina Nieves assured that he was only “the first ’round’ of 12 “.
But the reality is that it is already the second ’round’ that Pina Nieves faces with the federal authorities and, according to federal prosecutor José Ruiz Santiago and according to part of the evidence presented, the confrontation may produce a third ’round’ .
In 2012, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico succeeded in having a grand jury charge Pina Nieves for a $4.1 million mortgage fraud committed during a financing transaction with Doral bank for the purchase of a residence in Palmas del Mar, that ended with a guilty plea through which Pina Nieves managed to avoid jail with a two-year probation sentence and a $150,000 fine.
The second confrontation was the case of illegal possession of weapons and illegal possession of a machine gun, an accusation that would not have occurred if he were not a federal convict in the previous fraud case. For the guns case, Pina Nieves initially underwent a negotiation process with the federal prosecutor’s office in which, according to an expression that his lawyer, Francisco Rebollo Casalduc, made in a sealed motion, but which was submitted to the juries as evidence, he was “resigned” to having to serve jail time for these charges.
Pina Nieves’ third face-to-face with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico is pending, in fact, has existed since before the confiscation of two guns, 526 10-caliber bullets, $135,794 and €10,000 (Euros) in cash in a kind of “panic room” that he had hidden behind a reinforced metal door with controlled electronic access and a dedicated alarm in his house in the Caguas Real community on April 1st 2020.
To carry out a search, authorities had to present to a federal judge or magistrate enough evidence for him to issue the necessary warrant to give legality to that invasion of the state in the privacy of a person’s home without his consent. For that order, the agents had calls that they had intercepted to Pina Nieves in which he talks about the vault and confirms that he has guns and money there.
“El Pescao muere por la boca” prosecutor Ruiz Santiago stressed in Spanish to the jurors yesterday, urging them to listen to the recordings carefully and find Pina Nieves guilty, which they did after two and a half hours of deliberations that included lunch.
Prosecutor María Montañez Concepción took the case against Pina Nieves together with Ruiz Santiago.
Despite being one of the main pieces of evidence on which the prosecution’s theory rested, when it was the defense’s closing turn, Rebollo Casalduc only attended to it, almost at the conclusion of his final exhortation to the jury, saying that they should “discard” it because that call in which his client spoke of the guns in the vault was from February 2020, while the accusation was for possessing the weapons in April, when they made the raid.
The defense’s theory was that Pina Nieves had that house abandoned and that his subordinates had control of entry, so it could be others who placed the guns there, a Glock Model 19, 9mm altered to function as a machine gun, and a Smith & Wesson, Model SD40.
“Maybe he should have been more careful in supervising his property, I grant you that, but he is not a criminal,” was his lawyer’s final claim during a speech in which the prosecution objected to his expressions in at least 15 times.
In order to intercept the calls to Pina Nieves and others in his orbit such as Joed Romero Soler, who handles Pina’s financial and tax matters, the agents also needed a court order, for which, in turn, they had to have presented certain facts to the judge. And, according to Ruiz Santiago he told the jurors, that intervention with the communications occurred because Pina Nieves was also under investigation for money laundering.
In fact, the FBI agent who appeared as a witness to present the recordings, Joel Rosario, was working for the FBI’s Money Laundering Unit in San Juan when he oversaw the interception of some 1,000 calls to Pina Nieves and another 2,500 to Romero Soler.
Seen another way, the illegal possession of weapons case was a bonus that agents took out of the money laundering investigation.
No further details about that investigation were discussed during the trial that ended yesterday, but neither were other investigative steps taken in the money laundering investigation, such as the raid on the Rogelio’s gas station in Caguas, which is owned by Pina Nieves, carried out. on April 5, 2020, four days after the raid at his residency.
“They were filming me because they thought I was a gangster … the government knows that I am not a drug dealer, that my money is legal,” the producer said in an Instagram message last night after the verdict.
Although the charges were subscribed to the illegal possession of weapons and ammunition, the prosecution emphasized during its final arguments to the jury that Pina Nieves had in the vault a checkbook from a Banco Popular savings account where she had $2 million. In one of the calls, Pina refers to that money as being “libre de polvo y paja.”
“The good thing about this is that none of you were born yesterday … the “Ay bendito!” Not here,” the prosecutor told the jurors when asking them to use elements such as the checkbook to conclude that Pina Nieves really had direct control of the vault on April 1, 2020 when agents raided his house and that he had possession of illegal weapons.
The most renowned artist managed by Pina Nieves is “Daddy Yankee”, whose real name is Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez, and who was involved in the dissemination of data on international money laundering known as The Panama Papers. As reported by the Center for Investigative Journalism in 2016, around a presentation of the singer in Peru, a network of transactions were developed so that the rights over it ended up in an offshore account. Pina Nieves does not appear involved in that transaction by Ayala Rodríguez, who yesterday was at the trial all day and, after the verdict was known, said “that’s what friends are for, en las buenas y en las malas.”
The next appointment of Pina Nieves before Judge Francisco Besosa is on April 1, 2022 for his sentencing. Although the charges carry a maximum of 10 years in prison, Rebollo Casalduc said yesterday that, due to personal circumstances and the case, they expected the real sentence to be between three to four years in prison. But the judge can take into account his prior conviction and the fact that he has gone to trial, instead of negotiating, to impose consecutive sentences, instead of concurrent ones.
April 1, 2022 will be the second anniversary of the raid on the Caguas Real residence that caused Pina Nieves to issue an “ea, puñeta,” when he found out that federal agents were raiding his home, according to one of the recordings presented in evidence.
