Prosecutors added nine new federal charges against the St. Croix couple accused of working with a former V.I. Housing Finance Authority executive to bilk $4 million from taxpayers through a contract to store wood for hurricane recovery. On Thursday, a judge ordered them to court Friday afternoon for arraignment and advice of rights by U.S. Magistrate Judge Emile A. Henderson III.
In addition to money laundering conspiracy, husband and wife Davidson and Sasha Charlemagne were charged Tuesday with making false claims upon the United States. Prosecutors allege Sasha Charlemagne submitted timesheets to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from July 2021 through October 2023, claiming she was working eight hours a day at woodpiles in the territory. In fact, according to court records, Charlemagne was not even in the Virgin Islands at the time.
Davidson Charlemagne had previously been charged with wire fraud in the alleged scheme and fraud related to receiving federal funds.
Prosecutors allege Sasha Charlemagne used some of the fraudulently acquired money to spend lavishly on credit cards. She allegedly made payments to her American Express card totally nearly $38,500 in July 2022 and again in August 2022.
In September, V.I. District Court Judge Wilma A. Lewis ruled the Charlemagnes’ case could be separated from their alleged co-conspirator, former VIHFA Chief Operating Officer Darin Richardson. Richardson has been charged with criminal conflict of interest and making false statements by allegedly lying to HUD investigators about recusing himself from contracts related to the woodpiles.
The trio was arrested in June after a federal grand jury returned an indictment. The charges stem from a two-year FBI investigation into a VIHFA contract for the storage and management of wood that was shipped to the territory for the reconstruction of commercial and residential buildings following hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program.
According to court documents, Davidson Charlemagne, head of maintenance for the V.I. Education Department, approached the owner of ISG — referred to as Individual One in the indictment — to submit a bid for the contract that named Charlemagne’s company, D&S Trucking, as the subcontractor.
In a bid process overseen by Richardson, ISG and D&S Trucking were awarded the contract in January 2021 for $2.9 million over a three-year period, an amount that was increased to $4.4 million in October that year — a sum the government alleges was grossly inflated.
Richardson had significant control over the procurement process and allegedly manipulated the evaluation of bids to favor ISG’s proposal, according to the complaint. Moreover, it was unlawful for him to formally award the contract after convening a bid evaluation committee in June 2020 to rate the proposals, the government alleges. Federal regulations contemplate a bifurcation of these two duties, and Richardson violated the regulations by performing both roles, it said.
According to court documents, VIHFA paid Charlemagne’s trucking company a total of $3.6 million in federal funds, of which $3,177,000 was credited to bank accounts owned and controlled by him and his wife.
Just over a year after the contract was awarded, Davidson Charlemagne allegedly received a payment of $107,000 from Individual One.
Meanwhile, the woodpiles on St. Croix and St. Thomas remained almost entirely unused and stacked on pallets outdoors and exposed to the elements for more than three years. Additionally, the St. Croix woodpile was stored rent-free at Henderson Elementary School — meaning the government was paying millions to store its own property on its own land — the Justice Department alleges.
