Enzo Vincenzi’s Jacó Complaint Still Names the Lawyers and the Liens While Celso Gamboa’s Cocaine Trial Is Set for February 8, 2027
Two clocks are running on Costa Rica, and they are not the same case. On September 14, 2026, U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker reset the cocaine trial of former security minister and former Supreme Court magistrate Celso Manuel Gamboa Sánchez for February 8, 2027, at 9:30 a.m. in the Eastern District of Texas. Jury selection is that morning. A pretrial conference sits on February 3. The deadline to announce a plea deal, or to ask for yet another delay, is noon on January 4, 2027. That order granted a 120-day continuance defense lawyer Rafael de la Garza filed on September 1. Prosecutors did not oppose. Gamboa has not entered a plea. He is presumed innocent unless a jury says otherwise. None of those dates withdraws the other clock: a criminal complaint dated September 6, 2024, from American investor Enzo Vincenzi, about hotels, a house, a lien, and the lawyers he says built a machine for taking them.
Vincenzi sent that packet to President Rodrigo Chaves Robles, bar association president Francisco Eiter Cruz Marchena, OIJ Director Randall Zúñiga, and then–U.S. Ambassador Cynthia A. Telles. The AEGIS Alliance is publishing it as his sworn account and the exhibits he attached, not as a finished verdict. Chaves left office on May 8, 2026. Laura Fernández Delgado succeeded him. Telles left the embassy on January 19, 2025. Melinda “Mindy” Hildebrand presented credentials on January 8, 2026. In May 2025 Costa Rica amended its constitution so nationals could be extradited on drug-trafficking and terrorism charges. On March 20, 2026, Gamboa and Edwin Danney López Vega, known as Pecho de Rata, were flown to Texas. Those handovers are separate from Vincenzi’s property claims. They are the reason this desk will not describe Costa Rican justice as a postcard while a former magistrate waits on a Tyler jury and a hotel investor is still pointing at envelopes.
The envelopes are not atmosphere. They are how a complainant proves he was not shouting into a void. Mail addressed to Vincenzi at the Ocean Beach Jacó Hotel is part of the exhibit stack because the fight, in his telling, was never only a courtroom argument. It was paper landing at the property he says other people were trying to stain, freeze, or occupy. Jacó sells itself to Americans as a Pacific beach town where a condo or a small hotel does not come with the security lecture attached to other Central American markets. The complaint says that sales pitch is where the trap is set.
Vincenzi’s list of accused lawyers and officials is long on purpose. He names Cristian Eduardo Zamora Sequeira, Yorleni Díaz, Andrea Díaz, Jacó Mayor Tobias Murillo, and Fiscal Attorney Carlos Villegas Méndez as part of a network that, he says, uses fabricated charges and paper traps to pry property away from foreign owners. False domestic-violence filings are, in his account, the preferred lever: a charge that stains a residency file, scares a bank, and makes an American look like a man who should be pushed out of the country. He says Chaves’s own office issued directives that local actors ignored. The presidency letters posted with the embassy complaint are part of that trail. Naming people is not the same as convicting them. Silence is the outcome the complaint was written to prevent.
The money allegation is specific enough to test. Vincenzi says $35,000 left a U.S. Wells Fargo account through a rogue handling by ZAR Abogados, with Zamora Sequeira accused of signing and endorsing checks he had no right to touch. That is a bank-trail claim, which is why the file reads like a financial-crime memo instead of a travel blog. He also describes a fabricated lien of $12,587 against his Puntarenas home, dressed up as unpaid property tax that a deceased prior owner had already covered. A lien that size does not explain a hotel war by itself. It is large enough to freeze a sale, poison a title, and force a man to hire from the same local bar he says is hunting him. The scanned letters from ZAR Abogados and the court papers in this stack are the exhibits he wants a reader to hold next to that number.
Then the file turns from liens to threats, and Vincenzi says the threats were part of the same campaign, not a separate feud. He names government lawyer Norma Cayaso and private figure Myra Cecilia Villalobos Chacón. Villalobos, he says, stayed on his property after a legal eviction and walked media onto the grounds to smear the hotel. Junior and Yorleni Díaz are accused of theft. José Calderon is accused of a kill-or-pay threat. Judge David Ricardo Madrigal is accused of blocking process. Americans Carly and James Huba, he says, issued threats in front of hotel staff and ran online slander against the business. The AEGIS Alliance cannot independently swear to every clause. It can keep the names attached to the exhibits instead of smoothing them into “a dispute with local partners.”
Cayaso is also accused of working with Yamileth De Los Angeles Araya Lara, known as “Mila,” on additional false charges, and of coordinating with Fiscalía de Garabito attorney Eduardo Mora Casconte and translator Glynne Dapane Rochester. Precision Immigration appears in the same bundle. A voicemail from Craig Anthony Atherton alleged a conflict of interest with public attorney Yorleni Diaz. That audio stays on this page because it is part of the complaint.
“This evil, demonic, organized racket has operated unchecked for years, preying on unsuspecting U.S., Canadian, Mexican, and U.K. investors. Unlike others who have been victimized, I refuse to back down.”
That sentence is Vincenzi’s. The job of this desk is to keep the exhibits attached to it. Foreign-investor cases in Costa Rica often die the same quiet death. A local attorney takes a retainer. A municipal claim appears. A domestic-violence filing appears. A title cloud appears. The visitor pays or leaves. Publishing the names and the envelopes is his wager that the script breaks when it is readable. The reward list exists for that reason, not as a bounty-hunter stunt. Named officials can still sue if the facts are wrong.
The geography is the map of that script. Jacó is the beach town. Puntarenas is where he says the tax lien landed on the house. San José is where the embassy, the bar association, and the OIJ take their mail. A complaint copied to the president, the police intelligence service, the lawyers’ college, and the U.S. ambassador is a man trying to pin the fight to every door that can still be slammed. Gamboa’s Texas file shows one of those doors can open. De la Garza told Barker the defense had started its own investigation inside Costa Rica and still had most of the discovery left, including, in the public descriptions of the case, undercover recordings, cooperator testimony, and financial records that include $16 million in deposits in Mexico. Barker wrote that the extra months were necessary so counsel could prepare. A former magistrate gets that sentence in a federal order. A private American investor gets, on this record, a PDF and a stack of scans.
The same investor later described a violent 2019 arrest in North Fort Myers, Florida, involving Lee County deputies, revisited in the Florida arrest file. He argues the Costa Rica campaign is a continuation, not a fresh accident. Readers can accept that theory, reject it, or hold it open. What they cannot do is pretend the September 2024 complaint was a blank page, or pretend a cocaine extradition cleaned the property docket. No U.S. indictment of embassy staff on the claims in this article has been posted. No Costa Rican court has, on the public record this desk can see, delivered a clean sweep of the named attorneys. Gamboa’s plane to Texas proves Washington can move a former minister when the charge is cocaine. Property-theft and false-charge allegations against a private investor travel slower. That gap is the present tense of this story.
The Costa Rica Conspiracy: Unraveling the Web of Corruption and Deceit
Left in Peril: the embassy complaint
Complaint download: 9-07-2024-enzo-vincenzi-criminal-complaint.zip
The AEGIS Alliance will keep this nexus file under 犯罪ニュース, 国際ニュースと、 アクティビズム posts that follow Vincenzi’s later filings. Outside documents worth reading next to the scans are the Justice Department extradition release, El Observador’s report on the February 8, 2027 trial dateと、 Tico Times account of the continuance request. The envelopes, the lien papers, and the voicemail are still the heart of the original complaint. They have not been withdrawn.
