A Government House spokesperson defended the territory’s procurement process during a weekly press briefing Monday, days after two more high-ranking government officials were convicted on charges stemming from bribes and kickbacks related to a shady contract awarded to a career felon.
“It was a great day for justice but a sad day for the Virgin Islands. Ultimately, everyone has to be held accountable for their actions and justice must be served,” Government House Communications Director Richard Motta Jr. said before lamenting that “these types of things cause a stain in some people’s mind.”
“They characterize all Virgin Islanders to these standards, but generally, I mean, justice was served,” he said. “The individuals who were accused and convicted of doing the things that they were accused and convicted of were held accountable.”
Jurors in the latest trial were tasked only with determining whether former V.I. Police Commissioner Ray Martinez and former V.I. Management and Budget Director Jenifer O’Neal committed a series of crimes, including honest services wire fraud, bribery concerning federally-funded programs, money laundering conspiracy, and — in Martinez’s case — obstruction of justice. On Thursday, they returned a verdict of guilty on all counts after approximately five hours of deliberation. Martinez and O’Neal’s convictions came nearly five months after former Sports, Parks and Recreation Commissioner Calvert White and business-owner Benjamin Hendricks were found guilty of similar offenses.
Neither case definitively answered how million-dollar, federally-funded contracts awarded to a convicted felon passed muster with the territory’s procurement process or whose job it was to vet the assertions of rogue cabinet members.
Though the bulk of the federal government’s case against Martinez and O’Neal came from evidence presented alongside testimony by contractor and cooperating witness David Whitaker, the first person called to testify was current Property and Procurement Commissioner Lisa Alejandro. At the center of the case was a nearly $1.5 million cybersecurity contract between the V.I. Police Department and Whitaker’s company, Mon Ethos Pro Support, which bounced between departments for months.
It was finally authorized in October 2023, one month after the Federal Bureau of Investigation approached Whitaker with evidence of multiple crimes. Signatories included Whitaker, Martinez, Alejandro and Gov. Albert Bryan Jr.
On Dec. 4, Alejandro testified that she would not have signed the contract if she had known one of the other signatories had been receiving payments from the grantee “because it’s against all federal and local laws.”
“It’s a crime,” she said.
One of Martinez’s attorneys, Miguel Oppenheimer, later asked Alejandro to describe signs that a contract may have been awarded fraudulently. Alejandro said that was outside of her purview. After further cross-examination, she stated that the onus was on the contractor to secure the necessary permissions for working in the U.S. Virgin Islands through the V.I. Licensing and Consumer Affairs Department. At one point, Oppenheimer asked if the department’s legal counsel had anyone to assist her in reviewing contracts.
“Not at this time,” Alejandro replied.
Under questioning from O’Neal’s attorney, Dale Lionel Smith, Alejandro acknowledged that she only became aware of Whitaker’s felonious past — the subject of multiple articles, including a 2013 feature piece in Wired Magazine — after the contract was signed.
Responding to U.S. Justice Department attorney Alex Dempsey, Alejandro said Property and Procurement “at times” relies on the claims made by the user agency during procurements and that they expect the user agency — in this case VIPD — to perform due diligence.
Jurors heard recorded conversations and reviewed text exchanges between Whitaker, Martinez, and O’Neal in which they discussed a scheme to inflate Mon Ethos invoices in exchange for kickbacks to the former VIPD commissioner and OMB director after officials had rubber-stamped the contract, which was funded through American Rescue Plan Act dollars. At one point, they heard testimony from a high-ranking VIPD official, Deputy Commissioner for Professional Standards Jason Marsh, who signed off on one of those fraudulent invoices while filling the role of acting commissioner for a week in 2023. Dempsey asked Marsh whether he received the invoice for accuracy.
“I did not,” Marsh acknowledged, explaining that he assumed the invoice was accurate once it came across his desk via VIPD Chief Financial Officer Sandra Webster. Dempsey later asked Marsh whether he understood that bribery is a crime and whether he would ever sign an invoice that resulted from criminal activity.
“No,” Marsh said. “It’s a crime.”
Later still in the weeklong trial, the person nominally in charge of federal grants for the V.I. Management and Budget Office, Jamie Gaston, was called to testify. As she explained OMB’s role in entering federally-funded invoices and having the V.I. Finance Department cut checks, Dempsey clarified that her office isn’t tasked with checking the invoices’ validity.
“No,” she agreed.
Smith sought to poke holes in prosecutors’ claims that O’Neal was something of an ultimate authority in whether or not the fraudulent Mon Ethos invoices were paid and noted that invoices bounced from Management and Budget to Property and Procurement and back again before being sent to Finance.
“Each agency has approval of invoices in the payment system queue,” Gaston testified.
Smith also questioned the role of Ernst and Young, auditors with long-standing ties to the Virgin Islands government. Gaston testified that the contractor had no role in processing invoices and only reviewed transactions after the fact. Smith pushed back and noted that they were hired to perform oversight of federal funds and grants, many of which have clawback provisions. Why, he asked, wouldn’t Gaston tell the auditors?
“If I saw fraud, I would let my superior know,” Gaston said. At the time, her superior was Jenifer O’Neal.
Asked about guardrails Monday, Motta said that “generally, all of our contracts follow a procurement process.”
“And yes … there’s a chain of custody along the way, and when we talk about guardrails, I mean, if one person along that chain of custody decides to do something nefarious, it doesn’t essentially mean that the process is not working,” he said. “We just have to make sure that we hold individuals who choose to do things like that accountable.”
The high-profile corruption charges against Martinez and O’Neal, White and Hendricks, former V.I. Housing Finance Authority Executive Darin Richardson, and contractors Davidson and Sasha Charlemagne were all brought by the federal government.
Motta referenced the Bryan-Roach administration’s implementation of the Virgin Islands government transparency website and online procurement portal, which went live in 2019 and 2022, respectively.
“All of these things are put in place to give the public open view of all of these things, and that increased scrutiny is also, perhaps, one of the tightest guardrails in the process,” he said. “So I would point you to those things. I mean, no system is without flaw — especially if it has humans in it. We’re not infallible.”
At the end of the day, Motta said, people have to trust the mechanisms and people put in place to work on behalf of Virgin Islanders. The Source asked whether Virgin Islanders should trust their government in the wake of three cabinet members’ convictions in the last year.
“Those are three individuals in hundreds of individuals who serve the people of the territory in government service every day,” Motta said. “And so I would say yes, absolutely.”
