MIAMI– One of the nation’s most prolific drug prosecutors violated ethics rules last year when he drunkenly handed his business card to Florida police investigating a hit-and-run crash, a Justice Department regulator found.
The finding comes nearly a year after the Associated Press released body camera footage from a July 4 traffic accident in which Joseph Ruddy was accused of striking another vehicle, leaving the scene of the accident and unlawfully attempting to use his position as an assistant U.S. attorney in Tampa to mitigate the consequences.
In the footage, a disoriented Ruddy can be seen barely standing upright, slurring his words and leaning on the back of his pickup truck for balance. But he was sufficiently controlled to hand over his Justice Department credentials to officials from two judicial districts dispatched to investigate the accident.
“What are you trying to sell me?” asked a Tampa police officer. “When you pull up my body-worn camera footage and see this, you know this is going to get really bad.”
A one-page summary released Wednesday by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General does not name Ruddy but does document allegations that an assistant U.S. attorney “abused his position” when he provided his unsolicited employment references. And last year, the Justice Department confirmed it was referring Ruddy’s case to the Office of the Inspector General.
Investigators also found that the assistant U.S. attorney had “conducted in a manner detrimental to the government” by driving while intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident after striking another vehicle, according to their report. The report was forwarded to the Justice Department’s Professional Misconduct Review Unit for appropriate action.
After the AP asked about Ruddy’s employment status last year, he was removed from several cases, but the Justice Department confirmed Wednesday that he remains an assistant U.S. attorney. Neither Ruddy nor his attorney responded to requests for comment Wednesday.
“While we cannot comment on specific personnel matters, the Department of Justice requires the highest standards of personal and professional conduct from all employees, including Assistant U.S. Attorneys,” the department said in a statement. “We take all allegations of misconduct by Department employees seriously and, when warranted, take appropriate action.”
Ruddy is known in law enforcement circles as one of the architects of Operation Panama Express (PANEX), a task force created in 2000 to combat cocaine smuggling at sea that combines resources from the U.S. Coast Guard, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Historically, intelligence generated by PANEX has accounted for more than 90% of the U.S. Coast Guard’s drug investigations at sea. Between 2018 and 2022, the Coast Guard seized or destroyed 888 tons of cocaine worth an estimated $26 billion and arrested 2,776 suspected smugglers, a senior Coast Guard official said in testimony to Congress last year. The majority of those cases were handled by Ruddy and his colleagues in Tampa, where PANEX is headquartered.
Ruddy, 70, a former Ironman triathlete, has a reputation among lawyers for hard work and toughness in the courtroom. His biggest cases included some of the early extraditions of top smugglers from the feared Cali Cartel from Colombia.
But the majority of the cases his office handles involve poor fishermen from Central and South America, who make up the lowest layer of the drug trade. Often the drugs are not even destined for U.S. shores, and the constitutional guarantees of due process that normally apply to criminal proceedings within the United States are only vaguely observed.
Despite his own confessions and witness testimony, prosecutors never charged Ruddy with hit-and-run and dropped charges of driving under the influence with property damage – a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison.
Instead, Ruddy, whose blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit at 0.17%, was allowed to plead guilty late last year to a charge of reckless driving, a second-degree misdemeanor, and received a 12-month suspended prison sentence.
“We had no witnesses who could testify that Mr. Ruddy was behind the wheel during the incident, which is a key factor in proving drunken driving cases,” said Erin Maloney, spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa. “This outcome ensures that the defendant will continue to be held accountable.”
On the night of his arrest, Ruddy was accused of striking an SUV whose driver was waiting to turn at a red light, damaging a side mirror and tearing off another piece of the vehicle that became lodged in the fender of Ruddy’s pickup truck.
“He didn’t even brake,” a witness told police. “He just kept going, swerving all over the road. I thought to myself, ‘No, he’s going to hurt someone.'”
When officers arrived at Ruddy’s home in the Tampa suburb of Temple Terrace, they found him hunched over his pickup truck with his keys in his hand and the vehicle for support, a police report said. Officers found he had urinated himself, was unable to walk without assistance and had failed a breathalyzer test.
“I heard we could have a better night,” said Taylor Grant, a patrol officer with the Tampa Police Department, before looking at the business card.
“Why didn’t you stop?” asked the officer.
“I didn’t realize it was that serious,” Ruddy said vaguely.
“You hit a vehicle and then ran,” the officer said. “You ran because you were drunk. You probably didn’t realize you hit the vehicle.”
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Mustian reported from New York. Contact AP’s global investigative team at [email protected].
