Former high-ranking ICE agent arrested in Green Valley

A former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was arrested at his home in Green Valley on Friday and arraigned in federal court on charges of trafficking cocaine and selling information about law enforcement operations to a drug cartel.

Richard Padilla Cramer was a federal agent for nearly 30 years and worked in Mexico and Nogales, Ariz., where he headed the ICE office.

The charges stem from a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency investigation dating back to 2006. No one answered the phone at Cramer's home Friday and it was unclear whether he had a lawyer.

He is accused of negotiating cocaine shipments from Panama to Spain while he was working for ICE out of the Guadalajara office, according to a criminal complaint filed against him by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, where federal prosecutors say the majority of the acts occurred. Authorities say Cramer will be extradited to Florida.

The complaint also says Cramer and the smuggling organization invested about $400,000 in a 660-pound shipment of cocaine. The cocaine was shipped from Panama and went through the U.S. en route to Spain, where it was seized in June 2007. He also is accused of selling confidential information from law enforcement databases to an unidentified drug cartel.

An informant told DEA agents that Cramer had "very powerful friends" among DEA agents in Mexico and a strong relationship with one particular member of the smuggling organization, according to the complaint.

The complaint also says that during an August 2007 meeting, a member of the smuggling organization convinced Cramer to retire from ICE and begin working directly for the organization in drug smuggling and money laundering.

Cramer left Nogales in 2004, ICE spokesman Vincent Picard said. He worked in Mexico until he retired. Until last week, Cramer was employed by the Santa Cruz County Detention Center. He took the job in May and went through the Correctional Officers Training Academy in Tucson, said Ramon Romo, executive assistant to the sheriff.

“He was given a citation for his professionalism upon his graduation from CODA,” said Romo, adding, “This is very uncharacteristic.”

Romo, who worked with Cramer when Cramer was a dispatcher and later a deputy with the sheriff’s department from 1976-79, said he did not know the particulars of the case.

He said the file obtained by his department on Cramer’s background during the interview process for the detention department “has nothing but good stuff, nothing detrimental.”

“I have mixed feelings. I feel bad for him and for his family. This has to be very hard. I hope he gets out of this one,” he said.

Romo said Cramer went to work in September 1979 for the Nogales Police Department and in 1981 joined U.S. Customs.

Sheriff Antonio Estrada said Cramer was “well-known and respected. He was a local resident that went on to do well in his career. While he has not been convicted and we are not sure how this will end, there is certainly a feeling of betrayal.

“This just goes to show we all have to be mindful and watchful for the long tentacles of the drug trade, which tend to try to creep into every agency, local, state and federal.”

Manuel C. Coppola and the Associated Press contributed to this article.