WASHINGTON — A former FBI agent bragged that while working for the agency in the 1990s “he routinely arrested Bahamian criminal defendants in South Florida and unlawfully sent them back to their homeland on commercial airline flights without any formal review of their cases in U.S. courts,” the Miami Herald reported.
The Herald reported that retired FBI Agent Gerard “Jerry” Forrester, the FBI’s Miami liaison officer in the Caribbean in the 1990s, made the statements in secretly recorded conversations, which were part of a defamation lawsuit.
The conversations appeared in an affidavit that has surfaced in a defamation lawsuit in the Bahamas filed by Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard against New York hedge fund billionaire Louis Bacon and others, the paper reported. Bacon and Nygard both own property in the Bahamas.
The paper reported that Forrester, now a private investigator, worked for Bacon and was a consultant for an unflattering profile on Nygard that aired on the Canadian Broadcast Company.
The paper reported that the affidavit in the defamation lawsuit said Forrester told of a suspect, who was initially arrested in Miami for a Bahama murder in the 1990s. A short time later, without due process, the suspect was shipped out on a plane to Bahamas where he was killed in custody. Under U.S. law, the suspect would have had the right to fight extradition.
“I kidnapped him back to Nassau,” Forrester, owner of JF-Investigations in the Bahamas, said in the recorded conversations. “They had him for about 10 hours and the guy wound up dead.” He later added about deporting others: “I did it all the time. … All the time for 20 or 30 years.”
The recordings were made by former Scotland Yard detective Alick Morrison , who had been hired by fashion mogul Nygard to find out if Forrester and others were behind the negative profile on him on the CBC, the paper reported.
Forrester chuckled when asked about the recordings, according to the Herald.
“Yes, I did say it. Was it true? No. Why did I embellish? Because I brag.”
The FBI in Miami declined comment, the Herald reported.
