OAN Staff Abril Elfi
6:25 PM – Tuesday, August 12, 2025
The United States has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Haitian gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier.
On Tuesday, the United States announced a reward following criminal charges against Cherizier and an unnamed North Carolina man for conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions.
“There’s a good reason that there’s a $5 million reward for information leading to Cherizier’s arrest,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said at a press conference. “He’s a gang leader responsible for heinous human rights abuses, including violence against American citizens in Haiti.”
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The July 17th indictment, unsealed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, states that Cherizier and Bazile Richardson, also known as “Fredo Pam,” conspired to avoid sanctions and raise funds for Cherizier’s gang activities in Haiti. They allegedly sought donations from members of the Haitian diaspora in the United States to assist pay gang members’ salaries and buy weaponry.
Richardson is a naturalized U.S. citizen who grew up in Haiti and now lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
In 2020, Cherizier formed a gang alliance, bringing together nine criminal factions in Port-au-Prince known as “G9 Family and Allies,” which eventually allied with its primary opponents to form a group known as “Viv Ansanm” (Living Together), which now dominates the majority of the capital.
Human rights groups have accused the gang’s members of committing massacres, rapes, ransom kidnappings, extortion, and arson.
Cherizier is the spokesman for this coalition, which labeled itself as a “political party” earlier this year. It has since been characterized by the Trump administration as a terrorist organization.
Additionally, Cherizier has been under U.S. Treasury Department sanctions since 2020 and UN sanctions since 2022. He could face extradition to the United States, though Haiti’s tenuous security situation might make that difficult, officials say.
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