The former Miami chief of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was sentenced to nearly six years in prison and 20 years of supervised release on Friday after pleading guilty to Internet child-pornography charges.

In court on Friday, Anthony Mangione did not say why he started viewing child pornography, the Sun-Sentinel reported from West Palm Beach.

"I’m pretty much a broken guy," Mangione told U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra. "I feel like I’m in a hole eight feet deep with six feet of dirt on top."

According to court documents, Mangione, 52, who led the fight to hunt down child-porn suspects, was caught sending pictures of children engaging in sex after AOL detected the images and contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

He also created several AOL email accounts and screen names such as BookStoreMomNC and OldrMom11 to send the pornographic images, and he emailed pictures to a former school bus driver in Delaware between March and September 2010.

Four days after the images were detected by Mangione’s Internet provider, he left for a seminar in Portugal and learned of sites that people who engage in child pornography used to wipe their computers clean. He later installed wiping software on his personal computer and erased his own evidence.

Investigators found a dozen computers and 16 cellphones when they searched Mangione’s Parkland home in April 2011. Soon after, Mangione retired from ICE after being sent on administrative leave.

David Howard, Mangione’s attorney, defended the 27-year law enforcement officer in a court filing saying that people who engage in child pornography suffer from a mental disorder, which is often sparked by previous tragic events in their childhood. He also said that Mangione had “successfully overcame his” problems in an attempt to get the U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra to sentence Mangione to the mandatory minimum of five years in prison.

Mangione’s case was prosecuted by Deputy Chief Alexandra R. Gelber and Trial Attorney Michael W. Grant. The investigation was done by the Broward County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI, with help from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Inspector General.

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