Source: United States Department of Justice News
Miami, Florida – Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, 36, a Mexican citizen who had resided in Singapore, was sentenced yesterday in the Southern District of Florida to four years and one day in prison for acting within the United States on behalf of a foreign government without notifying the Attorney General.
Fuentes is a Mexican citizen who has spent significant time in Russia. According to court documents, since 2019, Fuentes acted under the direction and control of someone he believed to be a Russian government official. Instructed by this Russian official, Fuentes arranged for an intermediary to lease a unit in a residential building in Miami-Dade County where a U.S. person, who had previously provided information about the Russian government to the United States Government, resided.
Furthermore, at the direction of the same Russian official, Fuentes traveled to Miami in February 2020 to obtain the license plate number and parking location of the U.S. person’s car to provide this information to the Russian official upon his next trip to Russia.
Fuentes’s travel companion, at his request, took a photo of the U.S. person’s car. WhatsApp message from Fuentes’s travel companion to Fuentes contained a close-up photograph of the specified U.S. person’s car. The manner in which Fuentes communicated with the Russian government official and his undertakings in this case are consistent with the tactics of the Russian intelligence services for spotting, assessing, recruiting, and handling intelligence assets and sources.
Fuentes had not notified the United States Attorney General, as required by law, that he was acting in the United States as an agent of the Russian government.
Fuentes pled guilty to the charge in February. U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks imposed the sentence, which included an order that the defendant be removed from the United States to Mexico promptly upon his release from confinement.
Juan Antonio Gonzalez, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida; Matthew G. Olsen, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; George L. Piro, Special Agent in Charge, FBI, Miami Field Office; and Vernon T. Foret, Director of Field Operations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Miami Field Office, made the announcement.
FBI and CBP investigated the case.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Thakur of the Southern District of Florida and Trial Attorney Matt McKenzie of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section prosecuted the case.
Related court documents and information may be found on the website of the District Court for the Southern District of Florida at www.flsd.uscourts.gov or at http://pacer.flsd.uscourts.gov, under case number 20-cr-20129.
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