A former Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has been arrested for being involved in drug trafficking. According to the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, former ICE agent Richard Padilla Cramer, and the smuggling organization that he worked for, had invested $400,000 in a 660-pound cocaine shipment that was smuggled through the US on the way from Panama to Spain. The cocaine shipment was seized in Spain in 2007, and Cramer was arrested in his home in Green Valley on September 4th this year. The retired ICE agent will be extradited to Florida, where most of the drug-related activities are supposed to have taken place, and where the U.S. attorney’s Office has filed a criminal complaint against him for conspiring to smuggle cocaine.

Cramer had worked as an ICE agent for nearly 30 years when he retired in 2007, allegedly to go to work for the criminal organization behind the drug shipment that was seized in Spain just over two years ago. According to the US Attorney’s office complaint, Cramer provided the organization with information from classified law-enforcement databases, information that included the identities of DEA informants possibly working for the cocaine-smuggling organization.

One informant to the Drug Enforcement Agency sais Cramer had “powerful friends” among DEA agents in Mexico. Cramer is also supposed to have had a close connection to at least one member of the smuggling organization. Cramer was working as federal agent in Mexico from 2004 and until he retired from ICE in 2007. Before working in Mexico, Cramer headed the U.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement office in Nogales, Ariz.

The former federal agent is accused of negotiating drug shipments from Panama to Spain, through the US, while he was still working for ICE. The complaint from the US Attorney’s office also says he and the smuggling organization invested $400,000 in the shipment of cocaine that was seized in Spain. On top of that, Cramer is accused of selling classified information to a drug cartel.

Up until recently, Cramer worked for the Santa Cruz County Detention Center.