Prominent South Florida homebuilder Sergio Pino was found dead from suicide at his Coral Gables home on Tuesday morning.
Pino was being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation amid a contentious divorce with his wife, who accused the developer of poisoning her.
Pino, founder and president of Century Homebuilders Group and a major Republican donor, was also a former president of the Latin Builders Association and ex-vice chairman of U.S. Century Bank’s board of directors. His firm, Century Homebuilders, built more than 16,000 homes.
Pino’s lawyer, Sam Rabin, confirmed Pino took his own life. “The level of law enforcement activity at his residence was unprecedented and unnecessary, especially since we had offered to surrender him should that have become necessary,” Rabin said in an email.
“Today’s events mark a very tragic ending to an investigation that we were confident we could successfully defend. There were many rumors and allegations but what was lacking was evidence,” he said.
The events unfolded over the course of Tuesday morning. Loud bangs were reportedly heard near Pino’s waterfront home in the ultra high-end Cocoplum neighborhood. The FBI arrived at his home. A source told The Real Deal Pino was threatening suicide and law enforcement was trying to convince him not to harm himself. Jeffrey Veltri, FBI special agent in charge of the Miami FBI office said in an email that Pino was alone in his bedroom as an FBI SWAT team was entering the home to reach him. The team found Pino “deceased from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Veltri said.
The FBI also conducted a separate raid at a home in Cutler Bay where agents arrested an unnamed subject tied to the Pino investigation, said Veltri, who referred to it as a murder for hire. Property records show Fausto Villar and his wife, Natalia Barrientos, own the home at 9720 Bel Aire Drive in Miami, where the arrest took place.
In late June, the FBI raided Pino’s waterfront estate at 142 Isla Dorada Boulevard, and his Century Homebuilders Group headquarters at 1805 Ponce de Leon.
The FBI had been investigating whether Pino hired one of his part-time employees to target Pino’s wife, Tatiana, shortly after she filed for divorce in 2022. Tatiana had accused her estranged husband of poisoning her with fentanyl and bath salts, according to her deposition, included in the divorce filings.
Pino had denied that he had poisoned his wife, and he also denied that he hired Bayron Bennett, a part-time worker at the Pinos’ home, to target her.
In a deposition recorded in December, Tatiana said Sergio was “the only possible suspect” who would have poisoned her. She began having unexplained health problems in 2019 that persisted until she moved out of their home in 2022.
The problems included that she stopped breathing, was found with foam coming out of her mouth, and had bouts of diarrhea, according to her deposition. She went to local hospitals that included Mercy Hospital, South Miami Hospital and Doctors Hospital, as well as traveled to the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins Hospital.
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It was at Johns Hopkins where an epidemiologist found fentanyl in her system, and additional testing also revealed bath salts in her medication, Tatiana said in her deposition.
Tatiana Pino’s attorney, Raymond Rafool, declined to comment, he said on Tuesday afternoon.
The couple’s divorce trial was expected to begin this week, but it was postponed to next year, court records show.