A St. Croix couple accused in a $4 million scheme to defraud taxpayers through a contract to store wood for the territory’s hurricane recovery have asked the court to have their case heard separately from that of their co-defendant.
Davidson Charlemagne, 50, and his wife, Sasha Charlemagne, 44, each filed motions in V.I. District Court on Thursday, seeking to sever their case from that of Darin Richardson, 56, the former chief operating officer of the V.I. Housing Finance Authority.
The trio was arrested last month after a federal grand jury returned an indictment charging Davidson Charlemagne with government program fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy, his wife with money laundering conspiracy, and Richardson of St. Thomas with criminal conflict of interest and making materially false statements.
According to court documents, the charges stem from a two-year FBI investigation into a VIHFA contract for the storage and management of wood that was shipped to the territory to be used for the reconstruction of commercial and residential buildings following hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.
Davidson Charlemagne, head of maintenance for the V.I. Education Department, secured the contract for his private company in a bid process overseen by Richardson, according to court documents. Initially awarded in January 2021 for $2.9 million over a three-year period, the contract was increased to $4.4 million in October that year — a sum the government alleges was grossly inflated.
According to court documents, VIHFA paid Charlemagne’s trucking company a total of $3.6 million in federal funds, of which $3,177,000 was credited to bank accounts owned and controlled by him and his wife. Just over a year after the contract was awarded, Davidson allegedly received a payment of $107,000 from a person identified as “Individual One” in the indictment.
Meanwhile, the woodpiles on St. Croix and St. Thomas remained almost entirely unused and stacked on pallets outdoors and exposed to the elements for more than three years. Moreover, the St. Croix woodpile was stored rent-free at Henderson Elementary School — meaning the government was paying millions to store its own property on its own land — the Justice Department alleges.
In Thursday’s filings, the Charlemagnes allege their case should be separate from Richardson’s because none of their charges overlap, they are not alleged to have aided and abetted one another, and there is no conspiracy charged or alleged.
“Darin Richardson’s charges are not materially related with the charges against Davidson (or Sasha) Charlemagne. Richardson’s name does not even appear in the counts of the Indictment against the Charlemagnes, and the Charlemagnes’ names do not appear in the charges against Richardson,” according to Davidson Charlemagne’s motion to sever, which is essentially identical to his wife’s.
“In essence, the United States charges that Davidson Charlemagne committed some crimes by himself, and one with his wife, Sasha, and it separately charges that Richardson committed some offenses on his own. The indictment does not allege that Richardson and the Charlemagnes committed the same act (or crimes) and it does not allege that they participated in the same series of transactions constituting an offense,” the motion states.
Instead, the government seeks to use an unindicted third party (Individual One) as a link to join Richardson and Charlemagne, it says. However, the mere “presence of one overlapping member does not make two separate [crimes] part of the same series of acts or transactions.”
Further, the indictment does not allege that Charlemagne knew about or participated in the offenses lodged against Richardson, it says.
“There is no allegation that Individual One paid $107,000 on behalf of Davidson (or Sasha) Charlemagne, or that the Charlemagnes knew about or authorized the payment. The United States charged Charlemagne and Richardson together merely because it alleges a connection between Individual One and Charlemagne and Individual One and Richardson,” according to the motion.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Emile A. Henderson III had not ruled on the request as of Saturday, but earlier in the week granted a motion to extend the deadline to file motions in the case to Nov. 27 after Sasha Charlemagne said she had received a “document dump” of 48,000 pages from the government as part of the discovery process. Her attorney, Pamela Lynn Colon, estimated the review alone will take 240 hours, or six weeks, and that is at a pace of 200 pages an hour that she deemed “an extremely fast and perhaps unrealistic rate.”
The case had been scheduled to go to trial on Aug. 5, but that has been continued to a date following Dec. 1 that will be set by further order of the court, Henderson ruled.
