MIAMI — Hugo Perera, a Cuban-born man imprisoned in the 1990s for cocaine smuggling with the notorious Cali Cartel, reinvented himself as a Miami real estate developer, a Coral Gables restaurateur and as a government informant.

As the feds’ star witness at the trial of former Miami-Dade Congressman David Rivera and political consultant Esther Nuhfer — charged in a conspiracy with failing to register as foreign agents for Venezuelan government — Perera has remained unscathed even though he was their partner and made millions off Rivera’s $50 million contract with the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s national oil company.

Testifying in Spanish through an interpreter, Perera admitted Tuesday that he, Rivera, Nuhfer and wealthy Venezuelan Raúl Gorrín teamed up on Rivera’s consulting contract with PDV USA, which he said the government of President Nicolas Maduro approved in 2017.

Together, the four partners strived to keep their agreement a secret, corresponding in a private MIA group chat on WhatsApp, because of concern over a potential scandal if their stunningly profitable deal with the socialist Venezuelan government became known in the anti-communist exile community of Miami.

“My role was to introduce them to Raul Gorrín,” Perera testified before the 12-person Miami federal jury, saying the four partners met on Fisher Island in late 2016 or early 2017. “We talked about Raul being able to acquire a contract from Venezuela because he was a close friend of (then-foreign minister) Delcy Rodriguez and President Maduro.”

But unlike Rivera and Nuhfer, the 65-year-old Perera, who resumed his testimony Wednesday, was given a pass by prosecutors because he agreed to flip on them as the case’s cooperating witness. He has not been charged with them and been allowed to keep the millions of dollars that Rivera paid him for introducing the former Republican politician to Rodriguez and Maduro that led to his $50 million consulting contract.

The contract, which the four partners agreed to divide up evenly among themselves, was ostensibly meant to promote the refinery business of the Venezuelan oil subsidiary, PDV USA, operating as Houston-based Citgo.

But prosecutors say the deal provided cover for the foursome as they tried to “normalize” relations between the United States and Venezuela during a period of political turmoil, economic collapse and human rights violations under the Maduro regime. At the time, Maduro and other senior officials were being threatened with sanctions that would cripple them and their country.

The contract, signed in March 2017, was technically between Rivera’s company, Interamerican Consulting, and PDV USA, but he cut side deals with Nuhfer, Perera and Gorrín. The U.S. oil subsidiary ended up paying Rivera’s firm a total of $20 million in 2017 before firing him for doing little work on promoting Citgo’s refinery interests in the U.S. as well as trying to bring Exxon back to Venezuela, which had seized the oil behemoth’s oil fields.

After landing the contract, Rivera paid about $5 million to Perera and about $4 million each to Nuhfer and Gorrín for their roles in helping put the players and deal together with the top Venezuelan officials.

Perera, however, did more than make introductions. He attended meetings with the other three partners in 2017 and 2018 in New York, Washington and Caracas, where they and others met with then-Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Texas Congressman Pete Sessions, Rodriguez and Maduro. Rubio and Nuhfer were the only ones who did not travel to Caracas to meet with Maduro. Perera said he personally met twice with Maduro during those two years.

Asked by prosecutor Roger Cruz what Maduro wanted out of any deal with the United States, Perera testified that his main interest was rebuilding the country’s oil industry.

“Maduro said he wanted to reinvent himself like China and improve relations with the United States ... that the (U.S.) oil companies would come to Venezuela since Venezuela was a very rich country and had a lot of reserves,” Perera testified. “But without U.S. technology, they couldn’t do anything.”

But Rivera and Nuhfer, along with their defense lawyers, have argued that their agenda was to persuade Maduro to hold democratic elections so he could be replaced by a political opposition leader in Venezuela. And if the president did not agree, they would advocate sanctions against Maduro, other senior officials and the country’s oil company, PDVSA.

The defense has also argued that Rivera’s consulting contract was technically with an American corporation — not the Venezuelan government — and therefore Rivera and Nuhfer did not have to register as foreign agents for Venezuela with the U.S. attorney general. Over the past two weeks, however, several government witnesses have testified that PDV USA, operating as Citgo, was owned by the Venezuelan government under Maduro’s control nearly a decade ago.

From cocaine smuggling to Miami developer

On the witness stand, Perera said he left Cuba for Spain as a 10-year-old boy, then later moved to New York as a teen and eventually to Miami. In his 20s, he said he operated a packing business in Guatemala, where he became involved with the Cali Cartel, the world’s largest drug-trafficking organization in the 1980s and ‘90s.

After moving back to Miami, Perera pleaded guilty in the mid-1990s to cocaine trafficking and tax-fraud charges in the massive drug-smuggling case against the Colombian cartel and was sentenced to eight years in prison.

After his prison term, Perera made a spectacular rebound as a real estate developer in Miami, building high-rise apartments and condos. He also invested in a Miami-Dade farm that produced mamey, a tropical fruit, and opened a restaurant called Caramelo in Coral Gables in the mid-2000s.

Nuhfer, a political consultant known for fundraising, met Perera at his restaurant and they became friendly. A decade later, in 2016, Nuhfer reached out to Perera about trying to develop foreign business for the Tallahassee-based lobbyist Brian Ballard, a major fundraiser for Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016.

Perera said he told Nuhfer about Gorrín, who owned a Caracas TV station that wanted to expand into the U.S. market. He said he came to know Gorrín, who lived in a waterfront home in the upscale Cocoplum area of Coral Gables, through a mutual friend at a Miami-area cigar store. Perera said he persuaded Gorrín to buy an apartment on Fisher Island and earned a commission on the sale.

In turn, Nuhfer told Perera about Rivera, the conservative Miami Republican who had served one term in Congress between 2011 and 2013. Perera said Nuhfer arranged for him to meet Rivera in late 2016 or early 2017. At the same time, Perera told his friend Gorrín about Rivera. He said that Gorrín expressed an interest in meeting him to discuss a business proposition with the Venezuelan government.

“Gorrín said he wanted to meet him because he could get him a contract with Venezuela,” Hugo testified. “And that is why (Gorrín) wanted to meet him.”

Meetings in Coral Gables, Fisher Island

The four of them, Perera, Rivera, Nuhfer and Gorrín, met initially over lunch in Coral Gables and later on Fisher Island, he said.

Perera said that during their meetings on Fisher Island, Gorrín told Rivera and Nuhfer that he “had a very good relationship” with Maduro and his foreign minister, Rodriguez.

Perera testified that Gorrín’s connections to them paved the way for Rivera’s consulting contract with the U.S. subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDV USA.

“Raul (Gorrín) said he would be able to get a contract for $50 million,” Perera testified. “At that time, I didn’t believe it.”

In the months before and after Rivera’s consulting company, Interamerican, signed the contract with PDV USA in March 2017, the four partners communicated in a private WhatsApp group chat. They discussed setting up key meetings with U.S. and Venezuelan politicians and officials in New York, Washington and Caracas, and talked about the millions in expected earnings from the contract.

They also stressed how it was absolutely critical not to let anyone know about their agreement because of the political sensitivity of dealing with the Maduro government, the text messages show.

“You can’t talk about this to anybody,” Perera told the group in a chat on March 30, 2017, as they discussed a critical meeting planned that April at Gorrín’s Manhattan apartment with Sessions, the Texas congressman, Rodriguez, the foreign minister, Rivera and others. “Remember that everybody has a friend and if there is a leak everything collapses and even The Light goes out.”

“The Light,” he testified, was code for the money to be earned from the $50 million contract with the Venezuelan government.

Gorrín ultimately informed Rivera and Nuhfer that Maduro “refused to agree to hold free and fair elections in Venezuela in exchange for reconciliation with the United States,” according to their indictment. In early January, U.S. military forces seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from a compound in Caracas and brought them to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges in New York.

Gorrín is wanted by U.S. authorities on two federal indictments in Miami charging him with foreign corruption and money laundering. And three sources recently told the Miami Herald that Gorrín is being held in a notorious Venezuelan prison known as La Tumba — The Tomb.

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