by Mark Seal at Air Mail: It is a case that shocked the seemingly unshockable state of Florida, a state about which novelist Carl Hiaasen once said, “Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I’ve ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.”
“This case is about a husband, Mr. Pino, who decided after years of marriage that he was going to kill his wife,” U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe would later say in a press conference. “First, he tried to poison her over a period of time. When that failed, he put out a contract on her head on two separate occasions, hiring separate groups of hit men to do the job.”
When Tatiana Pino arrived at a deposition in her extremely contentious divorce from Sergio Pino in December 2023, she was flanked by two armed Florida Department of Law Enforcement officers. “She has been attacked in her home,” explained her attorney, “so there is a safety concern.”
She told her story in fits and starts, beginning with the love she shared with Sergio, her husband of 32 years, whose company is said to have become the largest Hispanic-owned homebuilder in the country during their marriage. Eventually, she divulged the things he did that made her fear for her life.
In Coral Gables, Sergio Pino’s sand-colored Century Homebuilders Group headquarters commands a prime stretch of Ponce de Leon Boulevard. And in Miami, five miles to the east, Sergio personified—at least up until a couple of years ago—power and achievement, building more than 20,000 homes, running the lucrative duty-free concessions at Miami International Airport, and donating large sums to both political parties in the state, including the campaigns of his friend former governor Jeb Bush.
The immigrant who rose to such prominence arrived in Miami from Havana at age 12 in 1969 with his younger brother, Carlos, and his parents, Eugenio and Helia, after his father’s small Havana grocery store was confiscated by the Cuban government. Fleeing the Communist regime, the family moved into an efficiency apartment, where Sergio immediately began working, “cleaning hotel welcome mats,” according to a 1997 Miami Herald profile of him entitled “An Idea That Grew into Millions.” His father, Eugenio, initially worked as a plumber’s assistant, making $1.35 per hour.
In 1977, eight years after his arrival, Sergio borrowed $6,000 from his father and put a down payment on a little shop called Cruise Plumbing Supply, which he eventually built into a behemoth whose name reflected his outsize ambition: Century Homebuilders.
At 29, amid a divorce from his first wife, with whom he had two children, Sergio walked into a food market two blocks from his office and saw an apparition behind the cash register: Tatiana Linares. Also the child of Cuban immigrants, she was a devoutly religious, raven-haired, Future Homemakers of America member working part-time at her parents’ store while still a student at Miami Senior High School. She was 17.
And though in 1992 Sergio listed his assets at more than $15 million and Tatiana listed hers as “none,” the financial disparity did not, at least in the early passion of their South Florida love story, seem to matter.
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