A former nurse with the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami pled guilty to supplying inmates with prohibited items, including drugs.
Ruben Montanez-Mirabal, 33, entered the plea on Thursday to charges including conspiring to commit bribery, conspiring to provide contraband in a federal prison, and providing contraband in a federal prison, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida said.
District Judge Jose E. Martinez will sentence Montanez-Mirabal on May 16. He faces up to 15 years in prison.
According to court documents, Montanez-Mirabal solicited and obtained illegal payments from inmates in exchange for bringing in and delivering to them prohibited objects, including controlled substances that had been soaked into sheets of paper. Montanez-Mirabal accepted thousands of dollars in bribes from these inmates and their associates.
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Montanez-Mirabal also solicited and received other things of value from inmates, including the free use of a Lamborghini and a Rolls-Royce.
Montanez-Mirabal would bring these prohibited items into FDC-Miami and then either deliver them directly to the inmates or hide them in places where the inmate paying him would be able to recover the contraband, according to documents. He later admitted to making a number of these deliveries for inmates, including one delivery where he was observed "hiding 37 drug-soaked pages underneath a shelving unit in a mop closet accessible to the inmate paying him."
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Investigators were able to recover these pages from the closet and laboratory testing revealed that the pages were laced with a synthetic cannabinoid-controlled substance and had the defendant’s fingerprints on them.
Montanez-Mirabal also admitted he was aware that inmates were reselling the pages for $1,500 each, and that he delivered between 100 and 140 such pages to inmates inside FDC-Miami in exchange for the bribes he received.
