Two days after Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was shot to death in his second-floor bedroom in the hills above Port-au-Prince, Tampa businessman Frederick Bergmann called his longtime friend in the Haitian capital and asked what he wanted him to do.

Should he call the news media? The Justice Department? The FBI? Bergmann asked Christian Emmanuel Sanon, his friend of 17 years.

Sanon, the South Florida pastor now on trial in Miami on conspiracy charges stemming from the July 7, 2021, assassination, wanted none of it, Bergmann told a federal jury on Wednesday. Sanon even rejected Bergmann’s suggestion that they pray for Moïse and the Colombian former soldiers killed in the aftermath of the middle-of-the-night raid on the president’s residence.

“I don’t pray for the rat,” Bergmann recalled his friend saying about Moïse.

Instead, Sanon lamented about how things had gone wrong in his efforts to replace Moïse by leading people to believe he had the support of the U.S. government and contacts within Haiti’s religious community to rally support against the increasingly unpopular president, who was facing a barrage of protests over the end of his presidential mandate, dismissal of Parliament and delay of elections.

“He said, ‘I sent her James, and I get no position. Now I need a lawyer. I might go to prison for the rest of my life,’” Bergmann testified about Sanon’s reaction.

When he asked whom Sanon was referring to, his friend named Windelle Coq Thélot, a former justice on Haiti’s Superior Court who had been illegally dismissed by Moïse.

“He said he sold his soul to the devil,” Bergmann testified. “Now he’s in God’s hand.”

The testimony from Bergmann, 67, came five weeks into Sanon’s trial, where he’s facing a number of charges, the most serious of which is conspiring to kidnap or kill a person outside the United States. The testimony marked the first time that Sanon had been directly implicated in the assassination plot.

Until Wednesday, evidence introduced at trial and testimony from cooperating witnesses had largely placed Sanon in the middle of discussions about “capturing” Moïse, putting him aboard an airplane and sending him into exile so that Sanon could replace him as president.

By the time a squad of Colombian soldiers stormed the president’s residential neighborhood, Sanon had been sidelined. His co-conspirators, realizing he had no money and could not mobilize Haiti’s poor masses, had instead turned to Coq Thélot as Moïse’s replacement.

Some of the plotters had acknowledged as much as early as June 10. But Bergman testified that he was unaware of the change, and he still believed that Sanon was in line to become Haiti’s next leader. When he learned of Moïse’s death, he assumed it was an arrest that had gone wrong, he testified.

“They hid that from me,” he testified under cross-examination by Sanon’s defense lawyer, Humberto Dominguez.

Sanon was a like “a brother,” in whose political ambitions he had invested tens of thousands of dollars. He rarely asked questions, telling the jury that throughout the plot to overthrow Moïse’s he was simply “in the backseat of this car that Dr. Sanon was driving.”

Bergmann’s testimony and text exchanges between them leading up to July 7 show that Sanon may not have been totally left in the dark about the evolving plans to overthrow Moïse, who was referred to as “the rat” in text exchanges.

“The rat will go with his group,” Sanon texted Bergmann on June 30.

On July 3, Sanon texted about needing $3,000 for food for the Colombians, who the following day would be forced to leave their hotel over an unpaid $46,000 bill.

Then on July 5, two days before the assassination, Bergmann received a call from Sanon, who was in Haiti and had been left alone after the team of Colombians left with James Solages, the Haitian-American handyman who had been in charge of the commandos.

Sanon was unable to reach Solages, and asked Bergman to try calling him. When Bergmann finally spoke to Solages, whom he said was also like a brother to Sanon, he said Solages told him Sanon “sent me to do something and I needed everybody.”

Then, he said, “it’s going to happen at the clinic, not the hospital.”

Prosecutor Sean McLaughlin asked Bergmann what Solages meant by the clinic and the hospital.

“President Moïse’s house,” Bergmann said, referring to the clinic.

The hospital, he said, was the presidential palace.

Bergmann said he then relayed the conversation back to Sanon, who confirmed what Solages said but then complained about being left alone.

“He said, ‘Yes, that’s true, but he didn’t have to take everybody. I am all by myself,” Bergmann testified.

Under cross-examination, Bergmann acknowledged that Solages never explicitly told him what the plan was. Still, his testimony offered jurors a rare glimpse into what was going on with Sanon in the days before and immediately after the assassination, including his reported knowledge of the plan’s evolution from a kidnapping to a killing.

An entrepreneur who had founded several businesses before being pulled into the South Florida plot to overthrow Moïse, Bergmann pleaded guilty to backing a “military expedition against a friendly nation” and violating export laws by smuggling 20 ballistic vests in a shipment to the Colombian security team in Haiti. He falsified the shipping labels by saying the contents were “medical x-ray vests and school supplies.”

The lower-charges were part of a plea deal in which he is serving a nine-year prison sentence, as opposed to life, which Sanon is facing if convicted.

Bergmann acknowledged his role during his two days of testimony, while also testifying about his longstanding friendship with Sanon, which dates back to 2004. He admitted to lying about his background in literature, telling jurors though Sanon claimed to be a doctor and pastor, he never saw him practice medicine — and had never seen him preach.

He also acknowledged giving Sanon thousands of dollars over the years, including $150,000 that he was told was for the presidential campaign of Mirland Manigat, the former first lady who lost the disputed 2011 election to Michel Martelly.

“I don’t know what they used the money for,” Bergmann testified, acknowledging throughout his testimony that he rarely asked questions.

Sanon, Bergmann said, wanted to become planning minister in a Manigat administration. When Martelly was named president, Sanon didn’t get a cabinet position.

“He was very upset,” Bergmann said.

Bergmann testified that after Martelly fired his first prime minister, Garry Conille, Sanon “supposedly was going to be taking that person’s place” under a power-sharing agreement between Martelly’s Haitian Tèt Kale Party and Manigat’s Rally of Progressive National Democrats.

The account appears to be among several claims that Bergmann accepted without verification.

Another was that Sanon and the Doral-area security firm that hired and recruited the Colombians to guard him in Haiti had State Department backing to overthrow Moïse.

“The whole thing was a lie,” Bergman said. “The FBI, the Department of State, the Department of Justice. It was all a lie.”

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