By Steve Neavling
The DEA quietly removed a former top official in Mexico for allegedly having ties to Miami-based defense attorneys representing accused drug traffickers.
Nicholas Palmeri is accused of socializing and vacationing with Miami drug lawyers after serving 14 months as the DEA’s regional director, the Associated Press reports, citing confidential records.
Palmeri, who worked for the agency for more than two decades, was transferred to Washington headquarters in May 2021 before his forced retirement in March 2022.
“The post of regional director in Mexico is the most important one in DEA’s foreign operations, and when something like this happens, it’s disruptive,” Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations, said.
According to internal investigative records, Miami defense attorney David Macey hosted Palmeri and his wife at his home in the Florida Keys. The trip was not work-related and violated rules governing interactions with attorneys, the records state.
Palmeri, 53, admitted to investigators that he had stayed at Macey’s home and that his Mexican-born wife worked as a translator for another prominent attorney, Ruben Oliva.
He acknowledged that he also took an unauthorized trip to Miami in February 2021, when he said he was debriefing a confidential source. But the party took place at a private home, and Palmeri arrived with his wife and a bottle of wife, according to the internal report.
“The meeting had the appearance of a social interaction with a confidential source,” the investigators wrote, “and there was no contemporaneous official DEA documentation concerning the substance of the debrief, both of which violate DEA policy.”
Those violations led to Palmeri being transferred to Washington headquarters.
