Markenzy Lapointe ascended to one of the most powerful positions in the state from some of the harshest circumstances in the Western Hemisphere.
The son of a Haitian street vendor with no formal education who risked all to come to the United States, she can now call her son the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
He uses words like “surreal” and “suspended reality,” but most often "blessed" when reflecting on his journey from a 16-year-old Haitian kid who did not know English sharing a two-bedroom Liberty City apartment with a single mom and four siblings to the top of federal law enforcement in South Florida.
Walk into the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami and, seeing the gallery almost entirely of white men in the photos, you sense something different about those who held this office before 55-year-old Lapointe.
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“It takes all kinds to do this job,” he said when asked about his background compared to many of his predecessors’. “Certainly, I respect everyone who actually had been the United States attorney. The fact of the matter though is, as the first Black person to be the U.S. attorney in the Southern District, you do feel it as you walk in.”
“Becoming United State attorney here it almost feels like you have to suspend reality a little bit because it is so remote in so many ways,” he said. “To that I say, I’m blessed.”
And as the first Haitian-American U.S. attorney, he walked into a case that hits home to his birthplace, prosecuting some of those who allegedly participated in the July 2021 assassination of Haiti's president, Jovenel Moise.
Separating where he came from and where he now sits as a prosecutor of his birth country’s president, he said is “very easy because as a prosecutor the very essence of what you do is actually not emotionalize your decision-making process. The essence of what you do is analyze and assess things in a fair and impartial way… It would have been a prosecution had it been someplace in South America or anywhere else… I don’t think you have to be Haitian to appreciate the outrageous nature of what occurred.”
If he sounds careful and disciplined, it’s something he may have picked up even before becoming a lawyer, having served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the office from 2002 to 2006, and then an associate and partner in two prominent law firms, before President Joe Biden nominated and the Senate confirmed him in December.
He skipped his Edison High School graduation to rush off to Parris Island for Marine Corps bootcamp. He was later called up to serve in the Gulf War in Iraq.
“I think joining the Marine Corps was such a big deal to me, so I felt a great deal of gratitude to this country,” he said. “To me I felt a tremendous debt to America. With all its problems, all its warts, it’s still the best game in town on the world stage.”
He attended Miami Dade College and earned both finance and law degrees at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he clerked with Florida Supreme Court Justice Harry Lee Anstead during the contested 2000 election litigation.
Despite his achievement, he remains modest about the struggles he overcame.
“You have to have been blessed,” he said. “You’ve had to have some amount of luck, to being at the right place at the right time and God’s blessing.”
A role model in practice and in title, having been inducted last month into the 5000 Role Models of Excellence, he credits his own: his mother.
“For somebody who did not have an education, she clearly understood being part of this required her to work, required her to take care of her children on her own, making about $16,000 a year,” he recalled. “So to this day, I think she’s not just my hero, my superhero.”
By volunteering his legal services he's been a hero to others, whether a veteran needing a dishonorable discharge upgraded, or a teen struggling to get legal status in his adopted country, where he was naturalized in 1995.
But, most prominently, he helped reunite a child who was buried in the rubble of the 2010 Haiti earthquake with her family.
Baby Jenny, she was named, by volunteer doctors and nurses who saved her life first in Port-au-Prince and then in Miami where she was flown for trauma care.
“At the time no one claimed the child so the child,” he recalled. “Turns out though while they show the child on TV, the parents of the child in Haiti raise their hand, (saying) ‘this is my child.’ So we had a major problem.
One he and other attorneys solved pro bono.
“Ultimately the child was reunited with the parents. The parents came to the United States,” where he said they and now 13-year-old Jenny still live. “That was a very, very satisfying moment.”
From that cramped Liberty City apartment has emerged South Florida’s new top federal prosecutor, someone who just might inspire others facing long odds to pursue their own paths to success.
“One of the things you realize being the first of anything, first Haitian-American, first Black U.S. attorney, is there's a tremendous responsibility that comes with that. Part of that is recognizing it means a whole lot more than you thought it would because there’s an entire community who may have felt outside of the process, outside of the mix,” he said.
“And now they see you and they feel, ‘Oh. Finally now there's somebody who's from my neck of the woods who is there.’”
