GUILTY PLEA BY EX-ICE AGENT SHOCKS MANY

Family, Friends Doubt Ties To Drug Traffickers

Richard Cramer was first a foot soldier and then a leader in the war
on drugs. He once ran the Nogales office of U.S. Customs and
Immigration Enforcement and was twice assigned as an attache to Mexico.

Incorruptible, dedicated, tireless - a cop's cop. That's how Cramer's
family and friends describe the Sahuarita resident.

But this week, Cramer's reputation was shattered when he admitted that
he worked with Mexican drug dealers. In a Miami federal courthouse,
Cramer, 56, pleaded guilty to obstructing justice by helping two drug
traffickers avoid arrest, a felony that carries a maximum 20-year
prison term.

His plea makes Cramer one of the highest-ranking ICE officials to
admit to or be convicted of corruption in the six years since the
agency was created. And it raises questions about the ability of
Mexican drug cartels to reach the upper echelons of U.S. law
enforcement.

Cramer's supporters insisted that the charges were the product of
overzealous investigators and prosecutors. They said he would never
knowingly break the law.

"This goes counter to everything I know about Richard," Rene Andreu, a
former assistant ICE chief who hired Cramer as a customs investigator
in the early 1980s, said weeks before the plea. "If somehow, some way,
he is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, my paradigm on life
itself will be changed."

Cramer's family said any plea deal is grossly unfair but is better
than spending the rest of your life behind bars for something you didn't do.

As part of the plea agreement, Cramer admitted that he "corruptly
attempted to obstruct, influence and impede" an official
investigation.

The charge stands in contrast to the host of accusations levied
against Cramer after his arrest in September. A federal complaint
charged Cramer with using his position to supply drug dealers with
intelligence on informants and investing his own money in a
300-kilogram (660-pound) shipment of cocaine.

In exchange for the plea, the government dropped three
cocaine-smuggling charges and will recommend that Cramer serve two
years in prison when he is sentenced on Feb. 18.

Venerated lawman

In nearly 30 years of chasing drug smugglers, winnowing out corruption
and enforcing justice along the border, Cramer had seen it all. He had
turned down bribes, busted dirty agents and stood his ground when
traffickers threatened his life, according to colleagues who worked
with him on the front lines.

"He was costing drug-trafficking groups south of the border a lot of
money," said Andreu, adding that Cramer stacked up more arrests than
almost any other agent. "In Nogales, you were in constant contact with
drug-trafficking organizations. You got information about competitors.
. You worked one against the other."

Andreu said Cramer was a great undercover agent with a flawless
understanding of his native Mexico, including the language and the
people.

Cramer rose from a customs officer to an investigator and then worked
internal investigations before being tapped for the highly selective
post of Mexican attache in the late 1990s. When he returned to the
U.S. in 2001, he was put in charge of Nogales.

Cramer's counsel was so highly valued that, when he accepted a new
stint as an attache in Guadalajara, he was able to name his
replacement: ICE supervisor Matt Allen.

Allen, who is now special agent in charge of the Arizona ICE Office of
Investigations, would not comment on Cramer.

"While even one betrayal of the public's trust by a (Department of
Homeland Security ) officer or agent is too many, the vast majority of
our employees are dedicated public servants who uphold the highest
standards of integrity and professional responsibility," Allen said.

Cramer retired to his Sahuarita home in a gated golf community in
2007, but he found it impossible to trade the gun and badge for golf
and country-club gossip.

So this year, he took a $30,000-a-year job as a corrections officer
with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office, where he had started his
law-enforcement career three decades earlier.

The father and grandfather joined the academy, started a
physical-fitness regimen, took and passed a lie-detector test and
sailed through a psychological exam and background
investigation.

"He was one of those success stories," county Sheriff Tony Estrada
said, emphasizing that not a single red flag arose. "I kept saying,
'Richard, I'm impressed. Why do you want to do this?' "

Now, Estrada said, the question everyone is asking is: "What made him
jump to the other side?"

Accused of trafficking

Cramer's conviction comes amid a rise in criminal-corruption cases
involving U.S. law-enforcement officials along the border, many
involving Customs and Border Protection officials, who are tempted
with bribes of money or sex to look the other way as smugglers move
drugs and illegal immigrants into the country.

No ICE agent in Arizona has been arrested on bribery or drug-smuggling
charges since the creation of ICE in 2003.

Cramer was arrested Sept. 1 after his regular shift at the Santa Cruz
jail. He was called to Tucson for an interview with his former
colleagues in ICE and subsequently placed in custody on
drug-trafficking charges. The charges stem from a 2006 investigation
by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration into a Mexico cartel
operating in Florida.

According to the DEA, while Cramer was stationed in Mexico, he
supplied a drug-trafficking organization with information on the
workings of U.S. law enforcement, including how it conducts records
checks, investigations and the turning of informants. Agents said that
Cramer was linked to the cartel through e-mail addresses and a direct
push-to-talk phone line that connected traffickers to his home.

The DEA built its case largely through confidential informants, who
reported that Cramer quit his job with the government to work for the
cartel. Agents said Cramer also invested in a shipment of cocaine from
Mexico to Spain, which was later seized by agents. In an attempt to
identify who tipped off authorities to the shipment, members of the
cartel discussed using Cramer to oust the traitors, saying he had
"very powerful friends," including DEA agents.

In court, Cramer pleaded guilty to arranging to run the names of a
Mexican money launderer and his associate through U.S. law-enforcement
databases to determine whether they were being investigated.

Federal prosecutors said the money launderer was hiding in Miami and
wanted to return to Mexico but needed assurance he was not being
sought by authorities. Members of an unidentified drug-trafficking
organization reached out to Cramer, prosecutors say, and he provided
them printouts of criminal records searches that allowed the money
launderer to return safely to Mexico.

When smugglers were later busted, agents found they were carrying
copies of the background checks.

Cramer's lawyer in Miami told the Associated Press that his client did
not profit from this activity, which he described as mistakenly
handling computer records.

Duty-bound

Cramer might have been born in Mexico, but he had lived in the U.S.
since childhood. Family and friends say he is American to the core,
which makes his arrest and plea even harder to comprehend.

"He is beyond reproach, has been for every minute of my life that I
have known him," said Hector Ayala, a Tucson high-school teacher who
has been friends with Cramer since fifth grade. "I am
devastated."

Cramer was reared dirt poor in Nogales. His mother worked as a
restaurant cook and his stepfather was a decorated World War I and
World War II veteran.

Although Cramer's stepfather died when he was about 10 years old, he
left his stepson a legacy of service and love of country.

"He idolized his father," Ayala said, remembering how Cramer used to
talk about the military as if it were a higher calling.

When he was 17, Cramer answered that call, dropping out of school to
join the Marines and go to Vietnam, where he earned a Bronze Star for
bravery when he defended his platoon from a vicious assault.

Friends and family say Cramer brought that sense of duty home,
instilling it in his three children, who followed in their father's
steps; his son became a Navy corpsman, his daughters law-enforcement
officers.

"That's what makes no sense," Ayala said. "He would not betray his
wife or his son and daughters, who are in law enforcement, or his
nephews who are in law enforcement."

Cramer's oldest daughter, Michelle Cramer, who worked in the Army
Criminal Investigative Division, said she does not believe her father
switched sides. She points out that she has dealt with many criminals
and does not believe that her support is based on naive
assumptions.

She described the case against her father as circumstantial, based
primarily on words from confidential informants.

In letters to his daughter, penciled on yellow memo sheets from his
solitary cell in Miami, Cramer has repeatedly insisted he is innocent
and intended to fight the charges in a jury trial.

"I write to my father every other day. And he has written back every
day," she said. "A couple of times he has gotten emotional. . . . He
said, 'You know I never had anything to do with this.' "

At other times, Cramer has reminded her of his faith and his feeling
that God is testing him.

"But his faith has never wavered," Michelle said.

But she wants to be pragmatic. Should her father risk spending the
rest of his life in prison in an attempt to clear his name? She
doesn't think so. Even before a plea bargain was offered, she said her
father should consider one if it were offered. "It is really (awful),
admitting to something you didn't do," she said. "He doesn't deserve
any of this."