One of the nation’s most prolific federal narcotics prosecutors flouted ethics rules last year when he drunkenly handed his business card to Florida police investigating a hit-and-run crash, a Justice Department watchdog found. The finding comes nearly a year after The Associated Press published body-camera footage following a Fourth of July crash in which Joseph Ruddy was accused of striking another vehicle, leaving the scene and improperly seeking to leverage his position as an assistant U.S. attorney in Tampa to blunt the fallout, the Associated Press reports. In the footage, a disoriented Ruddy could barely stand up straight, slurred his words and leaned on the tailgate of his pickup to keep his balance. But he handed over his Justice Department credentials to officers from two jurisdictions dispatched to investigate the crash. “What are you trying to hand me?” a Tampa police officer asked. “You realize when they pull my body-worn camera footage and they see this, this is going to go really bad.”
After the AP inquired about Ruddy’s work status last year, he was removed from several cases but the Justice Department confirmed on Wednesday that he remains an assistant U.S. attorney. Ruddy is known in law enforcement circles as one of the architects of Operation Panama Express, or PANEX — a task force launched in 2000 to target cocaine smuggling at sea, combining resources from the U.S. Coast Guard, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Between 2018 and 2022, the Coast Guard removed or destroyed 888 metric tons of cocaine worth an estimated $26 billion and detained 2,776 suspected smugglers, a senior Coast Guard official said in congressional testimony last year. The bulk of those cases were handled by Ruddy and his colleagues in Tampa, where PANEX is headquartered.
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