santo domingo, dominican republic | A New York native who falsely claimed he is the newly elected president of the Jewish Communities of Dominican Republic is being sought in connection with a female trafficking ring in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Jorge Puello, 32, is wanted in El Salvador for allegedly luring women and girls into prostitution with bogus offers of modeling jobs.
He is also accused of falsely stating he is a lawyer and attempting to represent the 13 American members of a missionary group who have been detained in Haiti for allegedly trying to take children out of the country without proper documents after the earthquake. Puello is in apparent violation of Dominican law for failing to register with the local bar association or obtain a license, said Jose Parra, vice president of the Dominican Lawyers Association.
However, in a phone interview, Puello said he was innocent and that he and his wife had taken in young women from the Caribbean and Central America who had been abandoned by smugglers.
“I’m planning to go to El Salvador to tackle this problem,” Puello said. “I am not afraid to face the music.”
But each new detail emerging about Puello’s past seems to add to the embarrassment of the American missionaries that Puello volunteered to help.
Born in Yonkers, N.Y., Puello spent his early childhood years in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico after his parents divorced, according to his mother, Ana Rita Puello, a 49-year-old activist.
Later, Ana Puello married Franco Cerminara, a businessman from Italy, and they moved to South Florida.
As a 15-year-old in Miami, his mother and stepfather said, Puello began dating a stripper 10 years older than him. He soon left home for Philadelphia, where Cerminara said he was convicted of bank fraud, and later moved to Puerto Rico.
At some point, he apparently served in the U.S. military. A family photo shows him in fatigues next to two Army trucks.
About four years ago, he emerged in Santo Domingo saying he wanted to establish a Sephardic Jewish community.
Cerminara and Ana Puello said everyone in their family is Catholic and that Jorge Puello converted on his own.
“He is Jewish by conviction,” Puello’s mother said. “He practices the religion and believes it in his heart.”
The Dominican Republic is home to about 50 Jewish families, a tight-knit community that includes both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, and some had doubts about the new arrival, said Isaac Lalo, secretary of the country’s main synagogue.
Puello began identifying himself as the “newly elected president of the Jewish Communities of Dominican Republic,” even though he was never elected to any such role and had no congregation.
“This guy has nothing to do with our community,” Lalo said. “Sephardic Jews don’t just set up a community out of the blue.”
Puello’s Salvadoran wife, Ana Josefa Galvarina, has been jailed in El Salvador since a raid on the alleged trafficking ring. Puello said that he ran a business converting cars to run on propane gas.
The Dominican National Police said it had conducted several raids and interviews in an attempt to locate Puello and detain him on the Salvadoran warrant.
Dave Oney, a U.S. Marshals Service spokesman in Washington, said authorities are trying to determine if Puello is a man with a similar name and physical description wanted for a 2002 parole violation.
Puello said that he and his wife took in young women abandoned by smugglers, but that the migrants tired of the house rules and he dropped them off at a bus station with money for a ticket home.
He claimed they tried to get back at him by telling police they had been trafficked.
Associated Press writers Dionisio Soldevila in Santo Domingo and Mike Melia in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report.