The first of nine men charged in what federal prosecutors say was prominent South Florida developer Sergio Pino’s plot to have his wife murdered was sentenced Monday to nearly 20 years in prison.
Avery Bivins and five of the others have pleaded guilty to various charges related to attempts to stalk, intimidate, and ultimately kill Tatiana Pino.
Bivins was the first to be sentenced; three others are awaiting trial.
According to Bivins, Sergio Pino told one of his co-conspirators Tatiana had rejected a $20 million divorce offer to walk away from their 32-year marriage, so he wanted her dead.
Over those years, the Pinos and their companies amassed a fortune worth more than $165 million, according to probate court records.
Sergio Pino killed himself in July 2024 as an FBI SWAT team was moving in to arrest him on murder-for-hire conspiracy charges inside his $10 million waterfront home.
Bivins pled guilty to that conspiracy charge, stalking and a firearms violation, and has agreed to cooperate if the three co-defendants who have not yet pled guilty go to trial.
“He put the acts in motion, while bringing on others,” assistant U.S. Attorney Abbie Waxman told the court Monday. “He put the ball in motion,” by recruiting three men, including one who brandished a handgun as he chased Tatiana’s car outside her home in June 2024. He then held it to the head of the Pinos’ daughter when she came outside the home to investigate the commotion.
Vernon Green, who has pled guilty to his role as the gunman, never got off a shot.
Bivins 37, has known little of life outside prisons since he turned 18. That’s where he met Fausto Villar, the roofer working on Pino’s house who has admitted recruiting Bivins to assemble what the FBI called a “murder crew,” tasked with killing Tatiana by gunfire or poisoning with fentanyl.
After serving 15 years for attempted murder and armed robbery with a firearm — crimes committed when he was just 18 — Bivins was released in December 2020. But after less than four years of freedom, he was headed back to custody in July 2024.
That’s when the FBI says they cracked the Pino murder-for-hire plot, thanks in no small part to Bivins.
After he was approached by the FBI, he agreed to record a video call with Villar, his former prison pal who he said paid him $75,000 to assemble a group of convicted felons to murder Tatiana. Villar is heard on the call promising more money from the unnamed Pino once, he hoped, law enforcement interest in them would die down.
Pino would pay $300,000 for a successful hit that went unsolved by law enforcement, Villar told Bivins, according to charging documents.
The call led to Villar’s arrest the next day, just as FBI agents were also trying to arrest Sergio Pino, thwarted only by Pino’s suicide. Before his death, Pino denied any involvement through his attorneys.
Bivins’ attorney, Humberto Dominguez, asked US District Court Judge Darrin Gayles to impose a sentence below the guideline minimum of 235 months, noting Bivins’ prior offenses occurred when “he was young. His brain hadn’t finished developing.”
In this case, Dominguez argued, Bivins “didn’t have anything to do with the gun… He was kind of the middleman.”
The upper end of sentencing guidelines called for an even longer sentence of nearly 23 years, but Gayles, citing Bivins’ “timely acceptance of responsibility,” imposed the 235-month term.
Depending on how Bivins may help prosecutors in any trial of the three codefendants and considering his substantial assistance in getting Villar on tape, federal rules allow the government to come back to the court for a reduction in sentence sometime in the future.
For his part, Bivins told the courtroom that included his father, uncle, cousin, fiancé, and other relatives, “I just apologize to the victims and my family.”
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