From left: Raymond Gomez, Jeffry Arista and Jonathan Arista are facing charges of kidnapping, attempted kidnapping and conspiracy to kidnap. They allegedly kidnapped the wrong person and tortured the victim until he connected them with the intended target. (Broward County Jail)
An employee at the Booby Trap strip club in Florida was kidnapped by three men at gunpoint, but it turned out the suspects had wanted to abduct the victim’s co-worker, prosecutors said.
To get the victim to lead them to their intended target, his kidnappers put an electric drill to his body, a gun to his head and waterboarded him, a federal criminal complaint says.
Jeffry Arista, 32, his brother Jonathan Arista, 29, and Raymond Gomez, 42, face charges of kidnapping, attempted kidnapping and conspiracy to kidnap.
Police were called around 2 a.m. to the strip club in Pompano Beach for a bomb threat. But when cops confronted the man, there was no bomb. Instead, he allegedly had a mind-bogglingly scary story to tell.
He told officers he was a victim of a violent kidnapping and was tortured and threatened. According to the complaint, the man said he walked out of his Fort Lauderdale home around 7:30 a.m. When he was about to get into his car, a man wearing police attire and a facemask holding a handgun approached the victim.
The kidnapper forced the victim to a white Dodge Charger with tinted windows. A second kidnapper got out and told the victim to move faster.
The kidnappers forced the man into the backseat and threw a black head covering over his head so he couldn’t see where they were going. They threw his phone out the window and drove to a home, where they forced him inside.
After the head covering was removed, the victim saw a third kidnapper with face tattoos, later identified as Jeffry Arista, who asked him to identify himself. This is when the kidnappers realized they had the wrong guy.
The co-worker had borrowed the victim’s car the day before, which caused the suspects to abduct the wrong person. They demanded to know “where the money was.” The co-worker owed them money, and they wanted the victim to give up his location, according to the complaint.
“The kidnappers threatened the victim by putting an electric drill to his skin and pointing firearms towards his head,” the complaint said. “At one point, the kidnappers forced the victim into a bathroom inside the residence where they covered his face with four or five black masks and poured buckets of water on him, effectively waterboarding him. During this time, the victim thought he was going to drown.”
Gomez and the Arista brothers allegedly began brainstorming how to get the intended kidnapping target to them. They forced the victim to call his co-worker and try to make plans with him, authorities said. They then took him back to his apartment around 7:30 p.m., some 12 hours after the original kidnapping. The victim received a text message from the co-worker saying he was at the Booby Trap strip club. They drove there in a Porsche and, after putting a tracker on the co-worker’s car, demanded the victim go inside to lure him out.
Once inside, the victim alerted the co-worker of what was going on, and they called law enforcement with the bomb threat so they would come quickly. The victim was talking to an officer when he saw Jeffry Arista recording him with his cellphone, authorities alleged. He told the officer, and Jeffry Arista was arrested.
Cops later saw the Porsche, which had crashed, and Jonathan Arista was taken into custody. Gomez eluded cops but was tracked down at the home where the kidnappers took the victim, authorities said. Police arrested Gomez when he left the home. Gomez and two other men were cleaning up the home and the Dodge Charger used in the kidnapping, authorities said.
Gomez admitted to detectives he participated in the kidnapping but claimed he and the Arista brothers committed the crime at the behest of an unknown man.
Jonathan Arista told investigators that someone had approached his brother about three days earlier. When officers wanted additional information, he said he “feared for his life” and stopped the interview.
All three men are in the Broward County Jail.
One of their defense attorneys joked about the bizarre situation at their bond hearing.
“I gotta tell you, judge, in the history of kidnappings, this would be the first time someone gets kidnapped then taken to a strip club. I’ve never heard of that before,” he said in a video posted on local NBC affiliate WTVJ.
“I was about to say, I think there’s a long list of husbands who have claimed exactly that in the past,” the judge joked. “We’ve all been taken against our will.”
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