I’m thinking this nephew guy has turned out to be a problematic figure … The story here is about a deal to sell arms to the police in Haiti and the company in question, Fencebridge, was founded by “Daniel Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager, and Bryan Seaver, one of Parton’s nephews who was also her head of security.”
From the Miami Herald (gift link) …
A private security firm founded by two people close to late country music legend Dolly Parton is at the center of an unusually complex arms deal in Haiti that several sources with knowledge of the matter say was worked out with little due diligence.
The security firm, Fencebridge Strategic Risk, entered into a multimillion-dollar agreement about a year ago to supply the Haiti National Police with semi-automatic rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, as the agency struggles to combat violent gangs that have claimed the lives of more than 25,000 Haitians since 2021.
The story somehow manages to be sleazier and iffier than even these first first two grafs would suggest.
Haiti is under a State Department arms embargo, and this applies to the police, not just the military. Enter former Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), who resigned from Congress in July 2025 to start a business that he said he couldn’t reveal details about other than that it was going to fight the good fight against the Chinese Communist Party. “While I cannot give the details here, I will be doing something specifically designed to help America compete against the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], but this time in business,” he said in a video posted on Twitter.
Well, when Seaver found out (not clear that Nozell was still involved) about this arms embargo thing, Green was somehow around and said he could help. Green was already trying to put together deals in Haiti for cement and fuel. “I said I could help you with” getting the waivers for the gun-running opportunity, Green told the Herald. “I have lobbyists buddies in D.C. and you could use my name as supportive of this effort.”
The arms deal was finalized three months after Green’s resignation, which provides some context to his unexpected and sudden resignation and his apparent need to get into the private sector like … really quickly.
Green later billed $1,000,080 for his help, of which he’s been paid only $600,000. Adding additional weirdness to all this is that the whole deal is run through a woman named Ellie Soto, a U.S. citizen born in Costa Rica who lives in Sugarland, Texas. She appears to function as the pass-through for the whole deal, though the Herald wasn’t able to figure out exactly why or even why Soto would be involved in any of this in the first place. Apparently Green was supposed to get his cut from Soto. But, according to Green, she’s no longer responding to his emails.
Another fun moment in the story is a text message from Seaver, Dolly’s nephew who announced her death in late August, in which he brags, “I’m literally an international arms dealer and mercenary.” As you can see, the whole deal was thrown together pretty quickly and pretty sloppily. So Seaver seemed both stoked and a bit surprised that he’d joined the international gun-running world.
It’s unclear what if anything Parton knew about any of this. Nozell originally told the Herald: “Dolly never had anything to do with the company.” But lawyers from Parton’s estate later told them not to use that quote, a request that the Herald declined to honor since it was an on the record statement. Nozell at least claims that he helped set up the company back in 2015 but no longer has any involvement with it since Seaver took it over. The company was dissolved in Tennessee in 2020 for failure to file annual reports and, it appears, later reincorporated in the Cayman Islands. So it’s possible that Nozell really isn’t involved in this arms dealing stuff, though we only have his word on that.
Seaver has been in the news because Nozell, who is in charge of Parton’s estate, accused him of threatening violence and to ruin Parton’s legacy. He fired Seaver and took out a restraining order against him for “terrorizing conduct” that “made their continued retention untenable.”
Seaver has recently petitioned the court not to make the restraining order permanent since the alleged threats in question were, he claimed, in a “private conversation between two friends who were both frustrated, grieving and discussing strategy.”
