Developer Sergio Pino says someone shot at the front door of his home, made phone threats

One month after his wife filed for divorce in 2022, developer Sergio Pino pulled into the driveway of his multimillion-dollar waterfront home in the exclusive Cocoplum neighborhood of Coral Gables.

As Pino opened the front door with a security code that night, a bullet shattered the hurricane-impact window next to it.

“I was coming into my house. I heard [a] shot. I heard the door hit,” Pino said in a November 2023 deposition taken in the divorce case brought by his estranged wife, Tatiana. “I called 911 and they were there in five minutes, three minutes.”

From his description, it seemed like a drive-by shooting, but Pino said he didn’t see anyone in a car or on foot — only that he heard a noise from an abandoned house next door. Coral Gables police officers checked it out and found no one, according to a police report.

Pino also said that, starting days earlier, he had begun to receive anonymous calls from someone making threats about how he should quickly resolve his divorce dispute.

In the divorce case deposition, Pino portrayed himself as a victim of threats. But the 67-year-old executive, who heads one of Miami-Dade’s biggest real estate development companies, Century Homebuilders Group, is himself under investigation by the FBI for allegedly making threats against his wife after she filed for divorce in April 2022. Federal agents raided Pino’s home and office in Coral Gables last week as they expanded their investigation.

READ MORE: FBI investigating developer Sergio Pino’s possible link to threats against wife’s life

FBI agents are looking into whether Sergio Pino hired one of his part-time employees, Bayron Bennett, to recruit three others to threaten Tatiana Pino’s life, people familiar with the FBI probe told the Miami Herald. Bennett and three other Miami-Dade men — Michael Dulfo, Edner Etienne and Jerren Howard — have been charged with stalking Pino’s wife.

Sergio Pino’s defense attorney, Sam Rabin, said they’re aware of the prosecutions of the four men and the FBI’s ongoing investigation. “We are cooperating fully with the authorities,” Rabin said, declining to comment further.

In a letter to his family and friends on Monday, Sergio Pino called the recent allegations reported in the press “entirely false” while acknowledging the federal investigation. “I welcome this investigation because I have nothing to hide,” he wrote in the email.

The shooting incident at Pino’s home happened one month after his wife Tatiana filed for divorce and more than two years before the FBI raided his home and office last week.

According to a Coral Gables police report, this is what happened on the night of May 22, 2022, at Pino’s home at 142 Isla Dorada Blvd.

That Sunday evening, Pino was hanging out with a female friend in his backyard, which faces a canal next to the Cocoplum Yacht Club, from about 6 to 10 p.m., according to the police report. Around 9:30, he said he began hearing “noises” coming from the direction of the vacant property next door but assumed it was his neighbor two doors down having guests over.

Pino drove his friend home around 10 p.m. and returned about an hour later. As he walked up the front steps and through the front door, he told police, he heard a “loud bang like a gunshot,” believing that “something was shot at his front door.” He glanced outside but didn’t see a person or vehicle.

Pino then locked the front door, ran upstairs to his bedroom and retrieved a firearm from his bedside dresser, according to the police report. When he came back down, he told police, he saw a white luxury SUV drive by, slowly heading south. Soon after, the same vehicle drove past his house again, this time heading north, according to the report.

When police arrived, they located what appeared to be a bullet on the front steps, as well as damage to the large glass window next to the door where the round apparently struck.

Pino told police he was going through a divorce and that, days earlier, he had begun receiving threatening phone calls from two numbers. One of the callers purportedly told him that “you better settle with your wife” and “we can’t afford being involved in a lawsuit.” Pino told police he “didn’t think anything of it at the time,” according to the report.

Police conducted a search of the building’s exterior, as well as the home next door where Pino said he had heard noises earlier, but didn’t find anything unusual.

Around the time of the incident, police stopped a white BMW SUV near Pino’s house on Cocoplum Road. Police searched the vehicle, which included a male driver and male passenger, but didn’t find anything suspicious.

Early the next morning, on May 23, 2022, Pino reported to police that he had lost a small-caliber black Beretta pistol that he normally keeps in his bedside dresser. Pino told police he hadn’t seen the Beretta pistol in about two weeks, though he said it was possible he left it at his office on Ponce de Leon Boulevard or “in a crate where he keeps additional weapons and ammo.”

It’s unclear from his second police report whether Pino was describing the handgun that he had retrieved the previous night after someone had shot at the glass front door of his home or if he was referring to another firearm in the residence.

In the November 2023 divorce deposition, Pino said police recovered the bullet that shattered the window next to his front door, but he did not recall if they told him the caliber of the weapon. He said there were no security cameras at his home back then.

He also elaborated on the threatening calls he said he had received, saying that the caller was someone with a Colombian accent.

Pino said the person told him, “ ‘You gotta get this divorce done. You gotta settle.’ Stupid things. ... Since I’m not afraid of anything ... it didn’t concern me at all.”

Tatiana Pino’s divorce attorney, Raymond Rafool, said he believes her estranged husband brought up the shooting incident and phone threats to divert attention from himself and put pressure on his wife to settle their difficult divorce dispute. In Tatiana’s own deposition, she accused the wealthy home builder of trying to poison her — another allegation that he denied.

Rafool suggested that Sergio Pino, through his deposition, was sending a message to Tatiana: “End this divorce and take less.”

As for the police probe into the shooting, it’s still unsolved.