Miami, March 9. A nurse in the US federal prison system has pleaded guilty to obtaining payments of thousands of dollars from inmates at the Miami, Florida, detention center in exchange for delivering drugs and other prohibited items, reports the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of the State on Thursday.
Ruben Montanez-Mirabal, 33, pleaded guilty in federal district court to “conspiracy to bribe and supply contraband in federal prison” from November 2021 to August 2022.
The Hispanic, who was a registered nurse who worked for the Bureau of Prisons at the Miami Federal Detention Center (FDC-Miami), “took thousands of dollars in bribes” from inmates at that prison in exchange for the supply of drugs hidden in sheets of paper paper.
Additionally, he received prisoner benefits such as free use of high-end vehicles (a Lamborghini and a Rolls-Royce), according to the facts admitted in court in exchange for his guilty plea.
Montanez-Mirabal would bring these contraband items to FDC-Miami, then either smuggle them directly to inmates or hide them in places where inmates he was paying could find.
These inmates would then “sell the drug-soaked pages to other inmates for $1,500 a page.”
As the former nurse admitted in court, “he made several such deliveries to inmates, including one in which it was discovered that he was hiding thirty-seven drug-soaked pages under a bookcase in a closet. concierge accessible to inmates that I paid for it”.
Investigators were able to recover these pages from the cabinet and lab tests revealed that the pages were mixed with a controlled synthetic substance, cannabinoids, and bore the accused’s fingerprints.
Montanez-Mirabal will receive the sentence next May and faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. ECE
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