By all appearances, Marguerite Martial Jean was a good Christian woman. She was a prominent member of Eden Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Little Haiti and a devoted mother of two young girls. The 37-year-old even taught Bible study, for Christ's sake.
But behind the winning smile and pious act, Jean was fueled by greed, not God. According to county prosecutors, Jean persuaded 300 of her fellow Haitian-Americans to invest at least $3.4 million in her phony rice import/export business. For years, she heavily recruited in churches in Broward and Miami-Dade. She even swindled her own spiritual leader.
"She was a church officer!" says retired Eden minister Michel Lamartine Porcena, who invested more than $200,000 of his own money with Jean. "As her pastor, I never thought that this person, a church member, wasn't telling the truth."
Porcena says Jean first contacted his wife with a "business offer" in 2007. Jean claimed to have found a cheap shipment of rice she could resell to foreign buyers for a nifty 22 percent profit — if Porcena put up some cash. Trusting his fellow Adventist, he gave her $7,000. "She promised us $1,600 [in interest payments]," Porcena says. "And within a few days, we got it."
Porcena, along with two dozen members of his church, was intrigued by the promise of easy money. He coughed up another $1,000 for Jean's business, believing she had a warehouse full of Indian rice somewhere.
"She was always on the phone with supposed clients," Porcena recalls. "She would tell them: 'I can't send you so much [rice] right now,' to prove that the business was real." At first, the pastor was fooled. He even took out a $75,000 loan on his house to invest in Jean and her husband Gary's businesses: MMJ Warehouse and VLM Enterprise, LLC. Then the payments dried up and the couple began making excuses. By mid-2009, Porcena knew he was being bilked. Ultimately he lost a third of his $203,270 investment.
Marguerite Jean was arrested April 13 and charged with grand theft and two counts of fraud. Gary Jean, however, has not yet been charged. The scandal has divided the Little Haiti community and the churches Jean scammed.
They "put their faith in man and not in God!" one self-described church member wrote online. "This will just be a lesson for them... They could have given to rebuild the church, but [instead] they gave thousands of dollars for rice."
