They had almost no supplies or money. His great-grandfather was a decorated World War I medic, his grandfather a World War II infantry sergeant-major. Alcalá already had shady connections to Colombia from his days inside the Chávez regime. Goudreau was to fly to Caracas when the job was done.Of course, they never got that far. Berry “didn’t know the time frame, and he couldn’t give me, or didn’t want to give me, any more information,” says Berry’s wife, Melanie. Goudreau begins to speak with the terseness of a battle-hardened warrior as he confirms that an amphibious operation into Venezuela is underway. Forced to pay back what he owed, he went into debt, friends say. One night, on a Puerto Rican hilltop with a few other guys, Goudreau pulled out a pair of $13,000 PVS-15 night-vision goggles like the ones used in Army Special Forces, according to someone who was present at the time and who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.“Where did you get those?” one of the other men asked.“Afghanistan,” Goudreau replied, implying that he’d stolen them. He didn’t seem to be getting far until September, when he finagled a meeting with members of Guaidó’s inner circle at the $3 million Miami penthouse apartment of J.J. Rendón, a Venezuelan refugee and political strategist. His wife, an insomniac, ran in from the other room and woke him up. Still groggy, the retired business professor stepped to the balcony of their eighth-floor apartment and peered into the 4 a.m. darkness of Macuto, a coastal Caribbean town 25 miles from Caracas. After Puerto Rico was affected by Hurricane Maria in September 2017, Goudreau served as a security contractor and saw the financial benefits of being in the industry. Goudreau, who was stationed in Stuttgart, told the Army that June was living in Brooklyn, N.Y., where the housing allowance was more than double that of Phoenix, according to an official investigation. He began taking jobs on offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, says Braxton Smith, a lifelong friend, but grew tired of the non-exhilarating parts of the job, including the months at sea away from his girlfriend. MacDonald’s wife, Bobbie, says Goudreau was a lousy houseguest. “What I think happened is that Jordan probably caught him at the right moment.”On Jan. 13, Silvercorp obtained a last-minute loan from an undisclosed source, according to a lien filing. Rendón says he didn’t believe the contract truly bound him or his boss, because Goudreau knew they didn’t have the money. “We are not dummies,” he says. He could be moody and unpredictable, friends say. At 6 p.m., according to Venezuelan authorities, more than a dozen rebels set out in two boats from a property on the barren Guajira Peninsula, which the country shares with Colombia. A former Green Beret, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of harming his career, recalls Goudreau almost colliding with him while skydiving because he wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings. He had a long view of the shoreline, where he could see two boats, one of them flashing blue police lights, and a helicopter circling overhead. In January 2019, following disputed elections, the U.S. joined about 60 other countries in The history of U.S. intervention in Latin America is long, bloody, and antidemocratic. Billionaire By then, relations between the U.S. and Venezuela, never friendly under Chávez or Maduro, had soured further. And it involves having a firearm. “He was just arrogant,” she says.Overconfidence didn’t hurt Goudreau’s plans. Drug seizure, he figured. Rendón, who’s suing According to Rendón, Goudreau said he’d recruited secretive investors to help finance a coup in Venezuela in exchange for a chunk of the country’s billions in seized assets, and that he already had 1,000 fighters on the ground preparing for an invasion.