How Ex-SEAL on Child Rescue Mission Became Island Kingpin

When a former Navy SEAL with ties to a raft of Trumpworld figures landed in Haiti nearly a decade ago, his putative mission was to lead raid and rescue operations that would recover a missing American child. But by his own account, he did little work in that direction—and The Daily Beast has discovered he instead fell into the Caribbean state’s thorny politics, and into an unbelievable business deal: control of a paradisiacal island that Port-au-Prince seized from its inhabitants.

Since Dave Lopez left the elite special ops force, his résumé has featured a stint with Erik Prince’s mercenary firm Blackwater, the launch of an anti-vaxx supplement company, and multiple ventures with former Trump Customs and Immigration Services chief Ken Cuccinelli. But the gig that sent him to Haiti, that entangled him with Port-au-Prince’s powerbrokers, and positioned him to win the rights to build what his team vows will be the struggling country’s answer to Disney World, was his role at Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.).

O.U.R. and its founder, Tim Ballard, became nationally famous last summer with the release of its fictionalized cinematic origin story Sound of Freedom—and then infamous in the fall, as Ballard faced claims of sexual predation and of self-enrichment at the expense of his organization’s donors. Ballard has cast these allegations as a “smear campaign” designed to besmirch his name and extort cash.

But in years past, Ballard and O.U.R. had enjoyed a level of celebrity on the political right, where their mission of disrupting alleged child-trafficking networks resonated with a fringe inflamed with conspiracy theories about elite pedophiles dominating the world.

Experts on exploitation warned that the group’s flashy tactics, which included filmed sweeps of supposed underage sex dens, served the self-styled saviors more than the victims. But Ballard developed tight ties with Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and with then-Sen. Orrin Hatch, secured an appointment from then-President Donald Trump to a new council on human trafficking in 2019, and—according to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt—enjoyed the personal imprimatur of Trump National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.

Sound of Freedom dramatized a 2013 raid in Colombia, in which Dave Lopez reportedly participated. But in Ballard’s own telling, O.U.R.’s real birthplace was several hundred miles north, in Haiti.

The head of O.U.R.’s operations in Haiti was Lopez. The ex-SEAL also served as Ballard’s lieutenant in another of his signature projects, the Glenn Beck-founded Nazarene Fund, formed to rescue Christians from persecution in the Middle East. And later, it was Lopez who gave up information to investigators in a probe that led to Ballard’s public disgrace.

But by that time, the contacts Lopez had made through O.U.R. had already secured him power over the island of Ile-à-Vache. He did not respond to repeated outreach from The Daily Beast for this story.

“Gardy is the kid whose story created Operation Underground Railroad,” Ballard asserted in the 2018 documentary Operation Toussaint.

The remark referred to Gardy Mardy, a Haitian-American boy from Ballard’s home state of Utah, abducted in Port-au-Prince in late 2009, whose father, like Ballard, is active in the Church of Latter Day Saints. The film describes a 2014 raid on a location where Ballard believed traffickers were holding Gardy, and depicts subsequent trainings and operations ostensibly aimed at rescuing him and other child sex slaves in Haiti.

Besides Ballard, Operation Toussaint heavily features Lopez, Beck, Attorney General Reyes, and Sen. Hatch—as well as several of O.U.R.’s political allies from Haiti. What it does not feature is the event that made Gardy Mardy so hard to find—the earthquake that devastated the country just weeks after his disappearance.

The political aftershocks of that disaster reverberated throughout the country—even to Ile-à-Vache, six miles detached from the southwest city of Les Cayes. Barely a year later, a contested presidential election ushered U.S.-backed candidate Michel Martelly, a pop star and son of a Shell Oil executive, into the presidential palace.

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With hundreds of thousands of Haitians dead and more than 1 million displaced and injured, Martelly’s priority was rebuilding the nation’s obliterated economy. He and his Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe broadcast the slogan “Haiti Is Open for Business.” And the business best positioned to draw in foreign dollars, they decided, was tourism.

In Ile-à-Vache’s salt-white beaches and teal water, the new government saw a destination that could rival the resorts that had so enriched the neighboring Dominican Republic. The only possible impediment was the island’s 14,000 residents, most of whom worked in fishing or small-scale agriculture.

“Haiti is to a large degree a dependency, whether one likes it or not, of the United States,” observed Dr. Robert Fatton, a Haitian-born professor of foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. “They were bent on transforming the island into a tourist resort. The people living on the island were not consulted at all.”

Fatton noted that Martelly triangulated between the U.S. and its rivals in the region, most notably Venezuela, which dispensed tens of millions from its PetroCaribe program to subsidize Haiti’s tourism ministry. The development of Ile-à-Vache soon became the Martelly government’s signature initiative. The seed for the new, island-spanning project was to be Abaka Bay, a hotel on Ile-à-Vache’s northwest tier, co-owned by an American citizen and his Haitian in-laws.

From the outset, Fatton said, there were rumors of corruption.

“There was protest, and there was also suspicion that Martelly, Lamothe, and company had a financial interest in the project,” the professor remembered, noting that such arrangements have recurred frequently in Haitian history.

The allegations have since become explicit: in an open letter to Martelly published in 2014, Abaka Bay’s American co-owner Robert Dietrich accused the then-president of trying to “horn in” on the project.

Dietrich sent The Daily Beast communications and proposals which he asserted came from Martelly’s intermediaries, which he said he began receiving almost immediately upon the president’s assumption of power. These materials also composed part of the evidence for a lawsuit Dietrich filed in his home county in Michigan, which a judge threw out on the grounds that it dealt with activities outside the state.

“This man becoming president wants to buy a resort within the same week he became president,” Dietrich told The Daily Beast. “He wanted 51 percent, but he didn’t want to pay the value of 51 percent.”

The Haitian law firm involved in the correspondence Dietrich shared, Cabinet Lissade, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The office employs multiple attorneys who have worked for President Martelly and Prime Minister Lamothe, and for the Haitian government.

Dietrich also shared what he described as counter-offers he sent back to Martelly’s interlocutors as negotiations to build out Abaka Bay continued. In his open letter, and in conversations with The Daily Beast and other publications, and in the court case lodged in Michigan, he accused his ex in-laws of subsequently pushing him out of the business entirely.

But the project forged ahead. To realize the vision of a grand resort, in 2013 Martelly decreed the entire 20 square miles of Ile-à-Vache a public utility, effectively dispossessing the native population, who had informally passed down homes and property for generations.

A Montreal-based urban planner named Olthene Tanisma, a native of Haiti, told The Daily Beast he was recruited through family connections to draw up designs for the resort. He has since sued the Haitian government in a Canadian court, claiming it failed to compensate him for his work. In an interview, he recalled the island’s beauty and hospitality, as well as its rudimentary physical and civic infrastructure.

“This is one of the best pieces of beach I have ever seen in Haiti,” Tanisma recollected. “They have good food, and no organization.”

It was the same way that activist Nixon Boumba found it when he first visited in 2012—and when he returned a year later to rally opposition to the project.

“Ile-à-Vache was very rural, very rustic, very exotic,” he recalled. “People move on this island on foot, use a cow sometimes, but they move from one part to another part by walking.”

It was the start of construction that finally fired local ire, as the first work on a planned airfield and a cross-island road erased homes, gardens, and fruit tree groves. The local farmers organized into the Konbit Peyizan Ile-à-Vache, or Ile-à-Vache Peasants Collective, and sought to block the development with demonstrations. Boumba and other Haitian sources recalled clashes with police, as well as opposition leaders jailed or compelled to flee.

By the time President Martelly left office in 2016, the project had stalled, thanks both to the local friction and to corrosive corruption on a national scale: the billions in foreign aid intended to rejuvenate Haiti after the earthquake had simply vanished without results—including the PetroCaribe money earmarked for tourism ventures.

Canada sanctioned Martelly in 2022 for facilitating “the illegal activities of armed criminal gangs, including through money laundering and other acts of corruption.” Last year, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken barred former Prime Minister Lamothe from entering the country, accusing the politician of having “misappropriated at least $60 million from the Haitian government’s PetroCaribe infrastructure investment and social welfare fund for private gain.” A Haitian judge issued arrest…