Former prohibition honcho Richard Padilla Cramer is accused of selling out to prohibition's outlaws, helping them to discover informants and set up bootlegging deals, according to the Los Angeles Times. Family and colleagues don't believe it.
The joke around Nogales, Arizona is that most people work for the government or the mafias, says the LA Times. Or for both of them, a situation that prohibition's large flows of underground cash has made common [4]. But a case brought against a former top Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official, which investigators have predicted will widen to implicate more US agents, has upped the ante.
Richard Padilla Cramer, a Mexican immigrant, US citizen since childhood, grandfather and decorated Vietnam veteran, had used his perfect Spanish skills and a talent for undercover work for three decades in border law enforcement, according to the LA Times. He rose through the ranks, racking up drug prohibition busts and locking up corrupt officials, retiring after a stint as US attache in Mexico for ICE. In September, Cramer was arrested by fellow prohibition agents, and in a trial beginning Monday in Miami will face charges that he sold his talents to drug lords while in Mexico, according to the Times.
If friends and family of Cramer including several officials are right, it may be a case of over-zealous prosecutors relying on the word of informants naming names in order to get their own sentences reduced or for money -- a tactic that's common in drug prohibition cases, though usually involving less prominent defendants. Such informants in turn have been known to invent charges against the innocent. In perhaps the most spectacular known example, Andrew Chambers netted over $2 million for "informing" on more than 400 people -- DEA operatives continued using him for years [5] despite his having been caught repeatedly perjuring himself.
"Of the people I worked with in my career, he's one of a group of four or five who I would trust with my life," retired ICE supervisor Terry Kirkpatrick told the Times. "Unless somebody says, 'Here's a videotape,' I am not going to believe it."
"This is impossible to grasp," said Rene Andreu, a former assistant ICE chief in Tucson told the Times. "Richard is old-fashioned in his integrity, his honor, the perceptions people have of him. I can't imagine him taking the risk of having his family look at him differently."
Others say that prohibition corrupted Cramer well before he took the attache post. A high-ranking federal official, who requested anonymity, told the Times they believe it went as far back as Cramer's years as a chief agent in Nogales, though prosecutors haven't alleged that.
Kirkpatrick's reminiscences paint a different picture. When Cramer was a rookie border inspector, a childhood friend was enlisted to offer him a bribe, but he reported it. Eight or nine people were arrested after Cramer reported being approached about letting loads of drugs through, Kirkpatrick told the Times. "[Cramer] and I got death threats because of work we did" locking up corrupt officials, said Kirkpatrick.
If the charges are true, they demonstrate the abundance of opportunity for personal profit that prohibition presents to those charged with enforcing it. According to the Times, the federal complaint alleges that Cramer was able to use his sources cultivated through undercover work to invest $40,000 of his own in a cocaine shipment from Panama that got intercepted in Spain. One informant says he received a DEA document by email from Cramer, naming his email address as proof -- "corpsmanpop," a reference to Cramer's son who enlisted in the Navy and tended to wounded soldiers in Iraq. Traffickers apparently obtained at least 10 criminal history documents that Cramer alleged downloaded from US databases, according to the Times. How much is one useful email that took an hour to compile, worth to a drug lord who could use it to save his drug shipments and maybe his and his henchmen's freedom?
If, on the other hand, the charges are wrong, they may demonstrate the extent to which prohibition law prosecutions rely on guesswork to decide whether a defendant will spend decades in prison or go free. Kirkpatrick offered an alternative explanation for the downloads, suggesting he could have slipped the information to friends in Mexican law enforcement as a favor, without knowing they were corrupt. "You are not supposed to give documents to the Mexicans like that," he told the Times. "If he did it, shame on him. But it's not the same as the charges in the complaint."
Is Richard Cramer a highly-placed official who yielded to prohibition's temptations? Or is he an innocent victim of federally-suborned perjury by informants working with rival agencies?
Either way, prohibition has failed to stem the flow of cocaine from its South American producers to its largely North American and European consumers. But it has cast a pall of suspicion over its enforcers on both sides of the border, and on anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.