Is Team Trump 'running' Venezuela? A case of two imprisoned banker brothers casts doubts
By Tim Padgett
April 14, 2026 at 6:00 AM EDT
After the U.S. military captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in Caracas on Jan. 3 and flew him to New York to face drug-trafficking charges, President Donald Trump insisted he was now running Venezuela.
“We’re going to run the country," Trump said, "until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition."
What Trump really meant was that interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez — a holdover from Maduro’s socialist regime — would be handling the country, and its critical oil, for Trump.
But Rodríguez’s caretaker government may not be as much in charge in Venezuela as Trump asserts, as suggested by cases like the two-year-long incarceration of the De Grazia brothers, who were ordered released last month — but are still languishing in one of the country's most abusive prisons.
"My father went into prison, more than 700 days ago, and he was weighing close to 190 pounds — and now he weighs less than 120 pounds," Carmelo De Grazia Parra told WLRN.
"I don't think I exaggerate when I say that my father is dying."
De Grazia Parra is the son of Carmelo De Grazia, a 52-year-old Venezuelan banker. In April of 2024, the elder De Grazia and his brother Daniel, also a banker, were arrested by the Maduro regime and locked up in the hellish Rodeo I prison outside Caracas.
Since then, they’ve been denied due process, such as access to private legal counsel or a trial date. And they say they’ve suffered psychological torture and inhumane food and water conditions in Rodeo I — which the U.N.has cited for brutal human rights violations, including torture.
"He's locked in his cell 23 hours a day," De Grazia Parra said of his father, who is a gastric bypass patient whose system cannot tolerate most of the food he's given in Rodeo I.
"Every time my mom has been able to see him, he’s just kind of vanishing.”
A view of the notorious Rodeo I prison in Venezuela's Miranda state, outside Caracas. which international human rights groups have accused of inhumane conditions and torture. (1148x924, AR: 1.2424242424242424)
Maduro's regime accused Carmelo and Daniel De Grazia — and the two banks they controlled, Bancamiga and Dominica-based Compass Bank — of being part of a $21 billion money-laundering scandal at Venezuela’s state-run oil monopoly, Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA.
It included a cryptocurrency scheme used to evade U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan oil sales — and led to the downfall of one of the Maduro regime's most powerful and feared bosses, Tarek El-Aissami.
The De Grazias — who were even charged with treason — deny having had any dealings with the PDVSA-crypto fraud or, for that matter, with PDVSA. (Their brother Levin, owner of the Bocas restaurant chain popular in Miami and Doral, was also sent to Rodeo I but was released in late 2024.)
So far prosecutors have presented no formal evidence to support the charges against the De Grazias.
“The main reason that my dad is in prison is because individuals very close to the Maduro regime wanted Bancamiga and wanted Compass Bank," De Grazia Parra claimed.
"Bancamiga was considered the most technologically advanced bank in Venezuela,” whose more modern point-of-payment services, for example, were a model for the country's largely outdated financial sector and helped fuel Bancamiga's fast growth.
In all, the De Grazias' "banking and technology infrastructure," as they put it in their complaint against their arrest, was valued at more than half a billion dollars.
READ MORE: 'Don't let them play you, President Trump': Venezuelans ponder the dictatorship that remains.
De Grazia Parra, a recent University of Chicago graduate who lives in Miami, says two powerful, regime-connected figures — José Simón Elarba and Carlos Erik Malpica Flores — seized the banks after his father’s and uncles’ arrests.
Malpica Flores is the nephew of Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, whom the U.S. also arrested on drug-trafficking charges on Jan 3. Malpica Flores — the former Treasurer of Venezuela and a former senior PDVSA director — is on the U.S. Treasury Department's Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list of corrupt persons barred from doing business with Americans.
“It was a completely state-sponsored takeover," De Grazia Parra said of Elarba and Malpica Flores taking control of the banks.
"It was easier for them to have my father and my uncles put in jail and take their assets than to build banks themselves.”
Carlos Erik Malpica Flores (left) and Jose Simon Elarba in St. Barth in 2014. (1152x908, AR: 1.2687224669603525)
Malpica Flores and Elarba run companies like FOSPUCA, Venezuela’s waste management quasi-monopoly. WLRN reached out for comment from them but got no response.
Elarba has recently insisted he saved, not stole Bancamiga. But either way, using summary imprisonment in order to confiscate someone’s businesses or property was common under Maduro’s notoriously lawless regime.
Still, what’s happening now in the De Grazia case — even after the U.S. ousted Maduro this year — is raising new concerns.
“It indicates to me that there is still no rule of law in Venezuela — that we don’t know who’s in control," said Coral Gables attorney Raul Valdes-Fauli, who is representing the De Grazia brothers in the U.S. since they have U.S. citizen children.
"It indicates there is still no rule of law in Venezuela — that we don’t know who’s in control, that there's factional hatred that makes the country ungovernable."
Valdes-Fauli, the former mayor of Coral Gables, is referring to the fact that on March 16, the attorney general for Venezuela’s interim government — Larry Devoe, who recently replaced the Maduro-era A.G., Tarek William Saab, who oversaw the De Grazias imprisonment — convinced a judge, José Antonio García Morán, to have the De Grazia brothers released from the Rodeo I prison to house arrest.
But the Rodeo I warden — military Col. Alexander Martinez — is refusing to acknowledge García Morán's court order.
The March 16, 2026 Venezuelan court orders for the release of Daniel De Grazia (left) and Carmelo De Grazia from Rodeo I. (2394x1632, AR: 1.4669117647058822)
On March 23, Carmelo De Grazia's wife, Marianna Parra, issued a formal public complaint against Martinez to the Special Prosecutor's office in Caracas.
Martinez is now "now committing illegal detention of my family," Parra said outside the prosecutor's office. "This is now a case of abduction."
Martinez has not responded to her or the Venezuelan media about his defiance.
As for what's behind it, Valdes-Fauli said, “There’s resentment, there’s hatred going on — and that makes the country ungovernable.”
Top henchmen
Valdes-Fauli is talking about the heated rivalry between Venezuela's interim President Delcy Rodríguez’s more U.S.-friendly faction and the one led by more hardline Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.
It was Cabello’s top henchman — Col. Alexander Granko, of the feared General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) — who personally led the De Grazia brothers’ arrest in 2024.
Granko has been sanctioned by the U.S. since 2019 for human rights violations including the torture of Venezuelan political prisoners.
Meanwhile, Col. Martinez, the prison director who now refuses to release the De Grazias, is allied with Granko.
Advocates, like Valdes-Fauli, say a big reason they may well want to see the brothers kept in Rodeo I is that freeing them would be a tacit admission of wrongdoing in the 2024 arrests and bank seizures — and that the brothers can talk publicly about their ordeal from house arrest, which they can't do from inside the prison.
"If the Trump administration’s going to take control of Venezuela, to get the oil, they should try to clean the country up, too," Valdes-Fauli said.
"This is thievery.”
Venezuelan military intelligence director Col. Alexander Granko (left) and Rodeo I prison director Col. Alexander Martinez. (2540x1620, AR: 1.5679012345679013)
Because the De Grazias have U.S. citizen children, Valdes-Fauli is working to get the Trump administration to pressure the Cabello faction to release the brothers from Rodeo I. And he hopes the re-opening of the U.S. embassy in Venezuela last month — and the return of a U.S. envoy there, Laura Dogu — will accelerate that effort.
But Venezuela analysts say it’ll be a complicated task.
“This show of force tells you who owns the imprisonment of the De Grazia brothers,” said Francisco Poleo an exiled Venezuelan investigative journalist in Miami.
Poleo says getting the Cabello faction to release the De Grazias — not to mention the hundreds of political prisoners still behind bars in Venezuela — isn’t a matter of the Trump administration ordering it, but negotiating it.
READ MORE: Police rage and ransoms: Venezuelans face a perverse 'mafia state'
That’s especially true because Cabello too is under indictment in the U.S. for drug trafficking — and doesn’t want to go the way of Maduro.
“Diosdado Cabello can make the transition [to democratic and economic reform] in Venezuela way, way more difficult," Poleo said. "So I’m pretty sure they can eventually come to an agreement with [him].”
Doing that, Poleo says, matters not just for human rights cases like the De Grazias, but ensuring robust investment in sectors like Venezuelan oil — a Trump priority.
The Trump administration, he says, "can’t get as many oil companies as they'd like to go to Venezuela and invest because they don’t feel safe investing in a place where there is no law and order and due process.” (Venezuela's moribund oil production has in fact rebounded in recent months, however.)
And as for that epic oil and cryptocurrency scandal the Maduro regime accused the De Grazia brothers and their banks of being part of?
Poleo and other Venezuela watchers point out that whether the De Grazias are guilty or not, they may have made themselves vulnerable to the quicksand they’re in by getting entangled with people close to Maduro's criminal dictatorship — like their alleged investor partner Samark López, who’s now wanted in the U.S. for narco-corruption.
“To have a bank in Venezuela — especially a relatively new bank like Bancamiga and not a legacy bank — you have to have connections in the regime," Poleo said.
"That’s the only way you can operate at such a scale.”
Then-Venezuelan Vice President and now Acting President Delcy Rodríguez (right) with Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello (left) and then-Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino in Caracas on May 13, 2025. (1004x796, AR: 1.2613065326633166)
The De Grazias deny any ties to the likes of López. Levin De Grazia claimed to WLRN in 2019, in fact, that he ad his family opposed the Maduro regime.
The brothers are admittedly the sort of rapid success story many praise but others scrutinize.
The sons of a working-class Italian immigrant, they grew up in the town of Upata in Venezuela's southern Bolívar state. (Since the De Grazias are dual Italian and Venezuelan citizens, Italian government officials such as Senator Pier Ferdinando Casini are also speaking out on their behalf.)
They made their way to university in Caracas — and then to running banks like Bancamiga, now one of the country's ten largest.
Along the way, the brothers insist, they never ran afoul of banking regulations.
Their supporters say the bottom line is that the brothers, after two years in a nightmare lockup, have still had no chance to prove their innocence.
One advocate is the brothers' cousin, former Venezuelan opposition Congressman Américo De Grazia.
"The big irony is that here in the U.S., Maduro is receiving the due process of law he denied to my cousins," Américo De Grazia told WLRN during a recent visit to Miami.
As a frequent regime critic, Américo De Grazia himself has spent time in Venezuelan prison on what he calls the sort of bogus charges he insists were leveled against his cousins.
The fact that the De Grazia brothers are not being released per the court order, Américo De Grazia said, is "a sure sign the left-over Venezuelan regime is facing an internal crisis for control.
“And my cousins’ case is a test for resolving that crisis.”
And for Trump, it’s perhaps a test of whether his team is actually running Venezuela.
(1509x275, AR: 5.487272727272727)
“We’re going to run the country," Trump said, "until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition."
What Trump really meant was that interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez — a holdover from Maduro’s socialist regime — would be handling the country, and its critical oil, for Trump.
But Rodríguez’s caretaker government may not be as much in charge in Venezuela as Trump asserts, as suggested by cases like the two-year-long incarceration of the De Grazia brothers, who were ordered released last month — but are still languishing in one of the country's most abusive prisons.
"My father went into prison, more than 700 days ago, and he was weighing close to 190 pounds — and now he weighs less than 120 pounds," Carmelo De Grazia Parra told WLRN.
"I don't think I exaggerate when I say that my father is dying."
De Grazia Parra is the son of Carmelo De Grazia, a 52-year-old Venezuelan banker. In April of 2024, the elder De Grazia and his brother Daniel, also a banker, were arrested by the Maduro regime and locked up in the hellish Rodeo I prison outside Caracas.
Since then, they’ve been denied due process, such as access to private legal counsel or a trial date. And they say they’ve suffered psychological torture and inhumane food and water conditions in Rodeo I — which the U.N.has cited for brutal human rights violations, including torture.
"He's locked in his cell 23 hours a day," De Grazia Parra said of his father, who is a gastric bypass patient whose system cannot tolerate most of the food he's given in Rodeo I.
"Every time my mom has been able to see him, he’s just kind of vanishing.”
A view of the notorious Rodeo I prison in Venezuela's Miranda state, outside Caracas. which international human rights groups have accused of inhumane conditions and torture. (1148x924, AR: 1.2424242424242424)
Maduro's regime accused Carmelo and Daniel De Grazia — and the two banks they controlled, Bancamiga and Dominica-based Compass Bank — of being part of a $21 billion money-laundering scandal at Venezuela’s state-run oil monopoly, Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA.
It included a cryptocurrency scheme used to evade U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan oil sales — and led to the downfall of one of the Maduro regime's most powerful and feared bosses, Tarek El-Aissami.
The De Grazias — who were even charged with treason — deny having had any dealings with the PDVSA-crypto fraud or, for that matter, with PDVSA. (Their brother Levin, owner of the Bocas restaurant chain popular in Miami and Doral, was also sent to Rodeo I but was released in late 2024.)
So far prosecutors have presented no formal evidence to support the charges against the De Grazias.
“The main reason that my dad is in prison is because individuals very close to the Maduro regime wanted Bancamiga and wanted Compass Bank," De Grazia Parra claimed.
"Bancamiga was considered the most technologically advanced bank in Venezuela,” whose more modern point-of-payment services, for example, were a model for the country's largely outdated financial sector and helped fuel Bancamiga's fast growth.
In all, the De Grazias' "banking and technology infrastructure," as they put it in their complaint against their arrest, was valued at more than half a billion dollars.
READ MORE: 'Don't let them play you, President Trump': Venezuelans ponder the dictatorship that remains.
De Grazia Parra, a recent University of Chicago graduate who lives in Miami, says two powerful, regime-connected figures — José Simón Elarba and Carlos Erik Malpica Flores — seized the banks after his father’s and uncles’ arrests.
Malpica Flores is the nephew of Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, whom the U.S. also arrested on drug-trafficking charges on Jan 3. Malpica Flores — the former Treasurer of Venezuela and a former senior PDVSA director — is on the U.S. Treasury Department's Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list of corrupt persons barred from doing business with Americans.
“It was a completely state-sponsored takeover," De Grazia Parra said of Elarba and Malpica Flores taking control of the banks.
"It was easier for them to have my father and my uncles put in jail and take their assets than to build banks themselves.”
Carlos Erik Malpica Flores (left) and Jose Simon Elarba in St. Barth in 2014. (1152x908, AR: 1.2687224669603525)
Malpica Flores and Elarba run companies like FOSPUCA, Venezuela’s waste management quasi-monopoly. WLRN reached out for comment from them but got no response.
Elarba has recently insisted he saved, not stole Bancamiga. But either way, using summary imprisonment in order to confiscate someone’s businesses or property was common under Maduro’s notoriously lawless regime.
Still, what’s happening now in the De Grazia case — even after the U.S. ousted Maduro this year — is raising new concerns.
“It indicates to me that there is still no rule of law in Venezuela — that we don’t know who’s in control," said Coral Gables attorney Raul Valdes-Fauli, who is representing the De Grazia brothers in the U.S. since they have U.S. citizen children.
"It indicates there is still no rule of law in Venezuela — that we don’t know who’s in control, that there's factional hatred that makes the country ungovernable."
Valdes-Fauli, the former mayor of Coral Gables, is referring to the fact that on March 16, the attorney general for Venezuela’s interim government — Larry Devoe, who recently replaced the Maduro-era A.G., Tarek William Saab, who oversaw the De Grazias imprisonment — convinced a judge, José Antonio García Morán, to have the De Grazia brothers released from the Rodeo I prison to house arrest.
But the Rodeo I warden — military Col. Alexander Martinez — is refusing to acknowledge García Morán's court order.
The March 16, 2026 Venezuelan court orders for the release of Daniel De Grazia (left) and Carmelo De Grazia from Rodeo I. (2394x1632, AR: 1.4669117647058822)
On March 23, Carmelo De Grazia's wife, Marianna Parra, issued a formal public complaint against Martinez to the Special Prosecutor's office in Caracas.
Martinez is now "now committing illegal detention of my family," Parra said outside the prosecutor's office. "This is now a case of abduction."
Martinez has not responded to her or the Venezuelan media about his defiance.
As for what's behind it, Valdes-Fauli said, “There’s resentment, there’s hatred going on — and that makes the country ungovernable.”
Top henchmen
Valdes-Fauli is talking about the heated rivalry between Venezuela's interim President Delcy Rodríguez’s more U.S.-friendly faction and the one led by more hardline Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.
It was Cabello’s top henchman — Col. Alexander Granko, of the feared General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) — who personally led the De Grazia brothers’ arrest in 2024.
Granko has been sanctioned by the U.S. since 2019 for human rights violations including the torture of Venezuelan political prisoners.
Meanwhile, Col. Martinez, the prison director who now refuses to release the De Grazias, is allied with Granko.
Advocates, like Valdes-Fauli, say a big reason they may well want to see the brothers kept in Rodeo I is that freeing them would be a tacit admission of wrongdoing in the 2024 arrests and bank seizures — and that the brothers can talk publicly about their ordeal from house arrest, which they can't do from inside the prison.
"If the Trump administration’s going to take control of Venezuela, to get the oil, they should try to clean the country up, too," Valdes-Fauli said.
"This is thievery.”
Venezuelan military intelligence director Col. Alexander Granko (left) and Rodeo I prison director Col. Alexander Martinez. (2540x1620, AR: 1.5679012345679013)
Because the De Grazias have U.S. citizen children, Valdes-Fauli is working to get the Trump administration to pressure the Cabello faction to release the brothers from Rodeo I. And he hopes the re-opening of the U.S. embassy in Venezuela last month — and the return of a U.S. envoy there, Laura Dogu — will accelerate that effort.
But Venezuela analysts say it’ll be a complicated task.
“This show of force tells you who owns the imprisonment of the De Grazia brothers,” said Francisco Poleo an exiled Venezuelan investigative journalist in Miami.
Poleo says getting the Cabello faction to release the De Grazias — not to mention the hundreds of political prisoners still behind bars in Venezuela — isn’t a matter of the Trump administration ordering it, but negotiating it.
READ MORE: Police rage and ransoms: Venezuelans face a perverse 'mafia state'
That’s especially true because Cabello too is under indictment in the U.S. for drug trafficking — and doesn’t want to go the way of Maduro.
“Diosdado Cabello can make the transition [to democratic and economic reform] in Venezuela way, way more difficult," Poleo said. "So I’m pretty sure they can eventually come to an agreement with [him].”
Doing that, Poleo says, matters not just for human rights cases like the De Grazias, but ensuring robust investment in sectors like Venezuelan oil — a Trump priority.
The Trump administration, he says, "can’t get as many oil companies as they'd like to go to Venezuela and invest because they don’t feel safe investing in a place where there is no law and order and due process.” (Venezuela's moribund oil production has in fact rebounded in recent months, however.)
And as for that epic oil and cryptocurrency scandal the Maduro regime accused the De Grazia brothers and their banks of being part of?
Poleo and other Venezuela watchers point out that whether the De Grazias are guilty or not, they may have made themselves vulnerable to the quicksand they’re in by getting entangled with people close to Maduro's criminal dictatorship — like their alleged investor partner Samark López, who’s now wanted in the U.S. for narco-corruption.
“To have a bank in Venezuela — especially a relatively new bank like Bancamiga and not a legacy bank — you have to have connections in the regime," Poleo said.
"That’s the only way you can operate at such a scale.”
Then-Venezuelan Vice President and now Acting President Delcy Rodríguez (right) with Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello (left) and then-Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino in Caracas on May 13, 2025. (1004x796, AR: 1.2613065326633166)
The De Grazias deny any ties to the likes of López. Levin De Grazia claimed to WLRN in 2019, in fact, that he ad his family opposed the Maduro regime.
The brothers are admittedly the sort of rapid success story many praise but others scrutinize.
The sons of a working-class Italian immigrant, they grew up in the town of Upata in Venezuela's southern Bolívar state. (Since the De Grazias are dual Italian and Venezuelan citizens, Italian government officials such as Senator Pier Ferdinando Casini are also speaking out on their behalf.)
They made their way to university in Caracas — and then to running banks like Bancamiga, now one of the country's ten largest.
Along the way, the brothers insist, they never ran afoul of banking regulations.
Their supporters say the bottom line is that the brothers, after two years in a nightmare lockup, have still had no chance to prove their innocence.
One advocate is the brothers' cousin, former Venezuelan opposition Congressman Américo De Grazia.
"The big irony is that here in the U.S., Maduro is receiving the due process of law he denied to my cousins," Américo De Grazia told WLRN during a recent visit to Miami.
As a frequent regime critic, Américo De Grazia himself has spent time in Venezuelan prison on what he calls the sort of bogus charges he insists were leveled against his cousins.
The fact that the De Grazia brothers are not being released per the court order, Américo De Grazia said, is "a sure sign the left-over Venezuelan regime is facing an internal crisis for control.
“And my cousins’ case is a test for resolving that crisis.”
And for Trump, it’s perhaps a test of whether his team is actually running Venezuela.
(1509x275, AR: 5.487272727272727)