Alleged Coup Plotters Planned Goofy Haiti Invasion by Sailboat

Did These Idiots Find Inspiration From the Book ‘White King of Gonâve’?

Peter Swanson Nov 24

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Now that two Texas knuckleheads have been indicted for plotting to invade Haiti with an mercenary army of homeless people—on a sailboat—we as a nation have to ask ourselves: When did we start putting people in prison for sharing a pathetic fantasy?

According to their indictment as international terrorists, Gavin Rivers Weisenburg, 21, and Tanner Christopher Thomas, 20, began planning their coup d etat in 2024. They plotted to take a Haitian island by force, murder all its men and then force the women and children to become their sex slaves.

Gonâve, the island in question, comprises 287 square miles and has a population of around 100,000 people. (Not to mention some thousands of machetes.)

Let’s consider an equally plausible scenario:

Inspired by the Three Stooges’ 1957 space voyage to planet Venus, Beavis and Butt-Head plot to hijack a NASA space shuttle and colonize the dark side of the Moon until they are thwarted by famed FBI agent Foghorn Leghorn.

Thomas and Weisenburg don’t know how to sail, and, according to the indictment, could not afford lessons, let alone the price of a boat. And, how big a boat would they have needed to accomodate their putative invasion force? Or was their unwashed army—to be recruited from the District of Columbia’s “unhoused” population—going to fly coach to Port-au-Prince and hop on the Gonâve ferry?

“If anyone’s initial reaction to the government’s sensational press release was, ‘That sounds crazy, wild, impossible, or beyond belief,’ I would encourage them to hold that thought,” said Attorney David Finn, representing Weisenburg.

The indictments were announced Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the charges being “conspiracy to murder, maim or kidnap in a foreign country” and a related “production of child pornography” count. If convicted, Thomas and Weisenburg face up to life in prison.

In court documents, prosecutors argued that the case was extraordinary because of its complexity:

The discovery in this case involves more than 55 GB of data, hundreds of pages of reports and records, thousands of text message communications, and hours of video footage from the execution of search warrants…Because the defendants are charged with an offense alleging acts of international terrorism, all significant pleadings and proposed resolutions must receive the approval of the Department of Justice’s National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.

At this point, I am making a plea to a subset of the readership. I know some Loose Cannon subscribers are former prosecutors. My question to you is whether you can indict someone for plotting the impossible, the fantastical. Please share your thoughts in the comments or by direct message.

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The words “in furtherance of the conspiracy” are how prosecutors introduce the overt acts that prove the plotters in question really meant it.

For example, Thomas joined the U.S. military in January “for the purpose of obtaining military training that would be use in carrying out their armed coup attack.” He chose the U.S. Air Force because of its famed Tire Machèt martial arts school. (Wait, you say the Air Force doesn’t train recruits in machete combat, or sailing, for that matter.)

But there was more:

Thomas, while in Air Force basic training, successfully changed his initial station assignment from Ramstein Air Base in Germany to Andrews Air Base in Maryland for the dual purposes of 1) remaining in the United States to facilitate the group s armed coup attack, and 2) being located near the District of Columbia to facilitate the recruitment of members of the area’s homeless population to serve as members of their unlawful expeditionary force.

Further evidence: In August 2024, Weisenburg enrolled in the North Texas Fire Academy because that’s where he thought he would learn “command-and-control protocols that would be useful during their armed coup attack.” He flunked out.

Then, in February, Weisenburg flew to Thailand because that’s where one goes to learn how to sail. However, when he got there he found that the cost of training exceeded his budget.

The indictment does not record either man ever having gone to Gonâve or Haiti proper to conduct a proper reconnaisance, even though travel to that country is doable despite general chaos.

Reality Check

Frank Virgintino has built or bought more than 20 marinas, mostly in the Northeastern U.S. (One of these was the Minneford Marina in City Island, New York, on the site of the former Minneford Yacht Yard, builder of several America’s Cup contenders.)

Virgintino began cruising the island of Hispaniola in the 1980s before hardly anyone else was doing so and has written several Caribbean cruising guides, including The Cruising Guide to Haiti, which covers the Gonâve port city of Anse-à-Galets.

Why would anyone choose to invade Gonâve? Virgintino said their motivation might be a result of Haiti’s general collapse combined with Gonâve’s history of isolation from and neglect by the central government:

Gonâve is like an adjunct to Haiti. People there don’t say they’re from Haiti. They say they’re from Gonâve in French or Creole. Right through the 1960s, the people of Gonâve lived with no electricity, no running water and no money. It’s an island that’s caught in a time warp. Maybe, it’s like 1985 right now.

If this story is true, they probably thought it would be easy to topple, since there is no central government in Haiti right now that is functioning, but I don’t believe the story. It sounds like a cover story for something else. I don’t believe that two guys could think they could go in on a sailboat and kill 45,000 men who have knives, guns and machetes.

In another example of “furtherance of conspiracy,” Thomas and Weisenburg “engaged in Haitian Creole language training for the purpose of facilitating their armed coup plot.” (Another cruising guide author based in the Dominican Republic, Bruce Van Sant once wrote, “Creole sounds to a non-speaker as if it only has syllables like la, ba, oo and oh. Haitians also have a penchant for dramatizing everything with real OH’s.”)

If you’ve gotten this far into the story, prepare to be rewarded—something from my research on Gonâve deserves to be a Tom Hanks mini-series. This is a forgotten memoir authored by one of the most fascinating non-commissioned officers ever to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps—Faustin Edmond Wirkus.

Wirkus’ unit was part a force of Marines that occupied Haiti for 19 years, beginning in July 1915. During his deployment Wirkus was engaged in fighting anti-government insurrectionists, at which he excelled, in part because he learned to speak the Haitian Creole language.

The Only Marine To Become a King

Before headlines about Thomas and Weisenburg, the only time Gonâve had ever made news in the U.S. may have been accounts of Wirkus’ adventures there. Which made me wonder whether part of the 55 GB of data in the goverment evidence against Thomas and Weisenburg is a copy of Wirkus’ 1931 book “White King of Gonâve,” which you can download here. The writing is superb and surprisingly modern to the ear.

	The White King Of La Gonave 8.84MB ∙ PDF file
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In the 1920s, Gonâve’s population of 12,000 people was ruled by women, according to its longstanding tradition. Regional queens reported to the top queen, who, besides an air of absolute authority, was in Wirkus’ time distinguished by her ownership of a pair of shoes. Beneath a veneer of Catholism, the religion of the people was straight-up Voodoo, with which Wirkus had become fascinated.

In his late 20s, Sergeant Wirkus had been deputized as a lieutenant in the Haitian gendarmes and assigned to police Gonâve. There, he met the Voodoo queen herself, Ti Memenne, and they developed a relationship based on mutual respect and affection.

The central government did not recognize her authority, and the feeling was mutual. The problem was that Gonâve’s subsistence economy was based entirely on fishing and farming, and 100 percent of Gonâve’s land was government owned, which meant that all farmers were tenants.

The Port-au-Prince tax collectors assigned to the island became rich through corruption. Notoriously, once an individual farm became profitable, officials would evict the family, assign the property to someone else for a price and keep the money. In fact, they had basically been pocketing all the taxes they collected.

Wirkus saw this injustice and got the tax collectors fired—and himself appointed as the head collector. Under Wirkus’ fair administration, some tax revenue went to the central government but monies were also available for Gonâve itself, including for the construction of an airstrip still in use today.

As word spread, Wirkus’ popularity among Gonâve’s people soared. Queen Ti Memenne and her inner circle were also fascinated by the first name given to Wirkus by his Polish-American parents—Faustin—which also happened to be a prominent name in Haitian history. Faustin Soulouque had been emperor of Haiti for a decade until he was overthrown in 1859.

According to Gonâve legend, Faustin would someday return as ruler. Ti Memenne saw Wirkus as a reincarnation of the late emperor, but she had to make certain.

One late night, after a Voodoo celebration with Wirkus in attendance, Ti Memenne and her designated successor-queen led Wirkus by the hand to a seaside cave in which there lived a blind wiseman, who never had to wake up because he never went to sleep.

Ti Memenne hailed the old guy, who came out of his hole in the rock, gave Wirkus a sniff and essentially declared, “Yeah, that’s him alright.”

The next time Wirkus was invited to attend a ritual, he knew he was going to receive some sort of honor, but he was surprised by the size of the crowd. The event was full-on Voodoo—animal sacrifices, trance-like states, wild dancing and non-stop drumming. Here a Marine Corps historian takes up the story:

On the evening of 18 July 1926, Master Sergeant Faustin Wirkus was crowned king of La Gonâve in a Voodoo ceremony. As the drums beat the “Call of the King,” a rhythm designed specifically for Wirkus, he was carried from the Houmfort, or Voodoo temple. In the firelight, the blood of a sacrificed rooster marked his forehead and wrists. He wore the crown of Faustin I. Behind him walked Ti Memenne. The crowd shouted “Le Roi! Vive le Roi Faustin!”

In case you were wondering, Ti Memenne had a husband but the fact of marriage did not make him king. For the next three years, Wirkus—now Faustin II—ruled Gonâve with Ti Memenne, more like mother and son, even though she declared herself subordinate to him.

This whole spectacle created resentment among the Port-au-Prince kleptocracy, and by now Marine command must have worried that Wirkus might be getting too big for his baggy cavalry britches. In 1929, he was reassigned to duties on the Haitian mainland, thus ending a unique chapter in the history of the Corps.

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