How Ex-SEAL on Child Rescue Mission Became Island Kingpin

When a former Navy SEAL with ties to a raft of Trumpworld figures landed in Haiti nearly a decade ago, his putative mission was to lead raid and rescue operations that would recover a missing American child. But by his own account, he did little work in that direction—and The Daily Beast has discovered he instead fell into the Caribbean state’s thorny politics, and into an unbelievable business deal: control of a paradisiacal island that Port-au-Prince seized from its inhabitants.

Since Dave Lopez left the elite special ops force, his résumé has featured a stint with Erik Prince’s mercenary firm Blackwater, the launch of an anti-vaxx supplement company, and multiple ventures with former Trump Customs and Immigration Services chief Ken Cuccinelli. But the gig that sent him to Haiti, that entangled him with Port-au-Prince’s powerbrokers, and positioned him to win the rights to build what his team vows will be the struggling country’s answer to Disney World, was his role at Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.).

O.U.R. and its founder, Tim Ballard, became nationally famous last summer with the release of its fictionalized cinematic origin story Sound of Freedom—and then infamous in the fall, as Ballard faced claims of sexual predation and of self-enrichment at the expense of his organization’s donors. Ballard has cast these allegations as a “smear campaign” designed to besmirch his name and extort cash.

But in years past, Ballard and O.U.R. had enjoyed a level of celebrity on the political right, where their mission of disrupting alleged child-trafficking networks resonated with a fringe inflamed with conspiracy theories about elite pedophiles dominating the world.

Experts on exploitation warned that the group’s flashy tactics, which included filmed sweeps of supposed underage sex dens, served the self-styled saviors more than the victims. But Ballard developed tight ties with Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and with then-Sen. Orrin Hatch, secured an appointment from then-President Donald Trump to a new council on human trafficking in 2019, and—according to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt—enjoyed the personal imprimatur of Trump National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.

Sound of Freedom dramatized a 2013 raid in Colombia, in which Dave Lopez reportedly participated. But in Ballard’s own telling, O.U.R.’s real birthplace was several hundred miles north, in Haiti.

The head of O.U.R.’s operations in Haiti was Lopez. The ex-SEAL also served as Ballard’s lieutenant in another of his signature projects, the Glenn Beck-founded Nazarene Fund, formed to rescue Christians from persecution in the Middle East. And later, it was Lopez who gave up information to investigators in a probe that led to Ballard’s public disgrace.

But by that time, the contacts Lopez had made through O.U.R. had already secured him power over the island of Ile-à-Vache. He did not respond to repeated outreach from The Daily Beast for this story.

“Gardy is the kid whose story created Operation Underground Railroad,” Ballard asserted in the 2018 documentary Operation Toussaint.

The remark referred to Gardy Mardy, a Haitian-American boy from Ballard’s home state of Utah, abducted in Port-au-Prince in late 2009, whose father, like Ballard, is active in the Church of Latter Day Saints. The film describes a 2014 raid on a location where Ballard believed traffickers were holding Gardy, and depicts subsequent trainings and operations ostensibly aimed at rescuing him and other child sex slaves in Haiti.

Besides Ballard, Operation Toussaint heavily features Lopez, Beck, Attorney General Reyes, and Sen. Hatch—as well as several of O.U.R.’s political allies from Haiti. What it does not feature is the event that made Gardy Mardy so hard to find—the earthquake that devastated the country just weeks after his disappearance.

The political aftershocks of that disaster reverberated throughout the country—even to Ile-à-Vache, six miles detached from the southwest city of Les Cayes. Barely a year later, a contested presidential election ushered U.S.-backed candidate Michel Martelly, a pop star and son of a Shell Oil executive, into the presidential palace.

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Hector Retamal/Getty Images

With hundreds of thousands of Haitians dead and more than 1 million displaced and injured, Martelly’s priority was rebuilding the nation’s obliterated economy. He and his Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe broadcast the slogan “Haiti Is Open for Business.” And the business best positioned to draw in foreign dollars, they decided, was tourism.

In Ile-à-Vache’s salt-white beaches and teal water, the new government saw a destination that could rival the resorts that had so enriched the…