A Virgin Islands jury Wednesday found Darin Richardson guilty of all five charges federal prosecutors brought against the former V.I. Housing Finance Authority executive over the last year. After a full day of deliberations, the jury foreperson told the court that the panel determined Richardson was guilty of making material false statements to a federal agent, criminal conflict of interest, bank fraud, money laundering and making false statements on a loan application.
A sentencing date has not yet been set, and the government did not ask that Richardson be detained ahead of his sentencing.
The verdicts came after a nearly two week-trial, during which prosecutors sought to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Richardson received a $107,000 kickback for improperly awarding a warehouse management services contract to steward lumber for disaster recovery projects and that, later, he lied on a home construction loan application and used portions of the money he received to buy property.
While at VIHFA, Richardson — then the semiautonomous agency’s chief operating officer — served on the bid evaluation committee that awarded a nearly $3 million warehousing contract to Island Services Group. The contract was amended multiple times over the next year, increasing to more than $4.3 million. ISG subcontracted the actual work to D&S Trucking. That company’s owners, Davidson and Sasha Charlemagne, were also indicted in June.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Cherrisse Woods said during the trial’s opening arguments on Feb. 20 that at some point, Richardson approached ISG managing partner Morris Anselmi about a business arrangement. In February 2022, Anselmi gave Richardson a $107,000 loan. Days later, Richardson notified VIHFA leadership of the business relationship and recused himself from all matters related to ISG.
“But what the evidence in this case will show,” Woods said, is that he didn’t.
During the trial, jurors were shown multiple checks to ISG totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, which Richardson signed after he had formally recused himself from matters related to the company.
Richardson’s attorney, Darren John-Baptiste, stridently refuted the government’s claims over the course of the 10-day trial.
John-Baptiste attempted to downplay Richardson’s influence over the VIHFA bid evaluation committee and noted that two of the committee’s five members had given ISG a higher score than did Richardson. John-Baptiste also highlighted the relatively small number of executives at VIHFA who were authorized to sign checks to contractors and stressed that the Authority’s then-executive director, Daryl Griffith, was out of the territory at the time the checks to ISG were signed.
Moments before the jury returned to the court to read the verdicts aloud Wednesday afternoon, John-Baptiste asked U.S. District Judge Wilma Lewis to declare a mistrial in response to comments prosecutors made to the jury during their closing arguments earlier this week. John-Baptiste specifically took issue with the government’s claim that Richardson had signed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of checks to ISG and Anselmi.
“The government fully well knew that that was not a factual statement,” he said, because Anselmi and ISG only reaped 13 percent of the money paid out for the lumber storage contract. Most of the money was forwarded to the Charlemagnes’ company, D&S Trucking.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Huston rebutted the claim, noting that the checks in question “have been presented every step of this proceeding.” John-Baptiste indicated that the jurors had been misled because attorneys were unable to discuss the Charlemagnes, whose case was severed from Richardson’s in September.
“Any attempt to introduce new evidence at this point is clearly improper,” Huston said.
Lewis denied the motion, which she called “grossly untimely.” Lewis said the court would likely have dealt with John-Baptiste’s objection to the comment if he had raised it at the time, rather than after a full day of deliberation by the jury.
Prosecutors added the latter three charges against Richardson — making false statements on a loan application, bank fraud and money laundering — in a superseding indictment filed in December.
According to the indictment, Richardson requested a $200,000 construction loan from Banco Popular in August 2020 to build a single-family home in Estate Bordeaux on St. Thomas. A loan agreement was executed in December of that year. That agreement included a construction estimate seemingly prepared by Four Star Construction but actually prepared by Richardson and presented on Four Star’s letterhead.
“This gave the appearance that the estimate of the construction costs was created by Four Star, a construction company,” according to the charging document. “Consequently, this estimate was relied upon by BPPR in approving the loan and loan amount.”
Woods told jurors during the government’s opening argument that Richardson received the loan in three installments. He used some of the money for its stated purpose, but according to Woods, he also bought a car and used $50,500 from the loan’s third installment — together with the $107,000 he received from Morris Anselmi — to buy an Estate Fortuna property through a U.S. Marshals Service auction.
Following Wednesday’s conviction, John-Baptiste signaled his client’s intent to appeal.
“On to the next stage,” he said.
