Former Coral Gables cop pleads guilty to minor felony in DEA corruption case
Edwin Pagan III, a former Coral Gables police officer, will be spared a risky trial in a corruption case that tarnished the Drug Enforcement Administration after he pleaded guilty on Friday to a minor felony of failing to report the crime to federal authorities.
Pagan, 53, now faces about a year in prison, but his future could have been bleaker if he had been convicted at an upcoming trial of the more serious charges — conspiracy, bribery, fraud and perjury.
Pagan began his law enforcement career with the Coral Gables Police Department in 1997 and worked as an officer and detective. While with Gables police, he also spent a decade as a deputized agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Last year, he was charged with playing a supporting role in a conspiracy to bribe a DEA supervisor in Miami with tens of thousands of dollars for access to confidential information about drug-trafficking suspects. The secret intelligence was then passed on to a retired DEA agent so he could share it with a Coral Gables defense attorney who worked with the retired agent to recruit and represent new clients, the indictment says.
Pagan was placed on suspension without pay by Coral Gables Police Chief Ed Hudak, who plans to terminate him now that he has been convicted in federal court and will be sentenced in January. During his suspension over the past year, the Coral Gables police union paid Pagan $1,500 a month.
The looming question for Pagan is whether he will still qualify for his police pension. A union representative could not be immediately reached for comment.
In the DEA case, Pagan faced not only corruption charges but also perjury counts stemming from making alleged “false statements” during his testimony for the two former DEA agents at a New York City federal trial that ended with their convictions in 2023.
A Manhattan federal jury reached unanimous guilty verdicts on corruption charges for Manuel Recio, who retired from the DEA in 2018 after working as an assistant special agent in charge of the Miami office, and John Costanzo Jr., who had worked as a supervisor in the Miami office as well as in DEA headquarters in the Washington, D.C., area.
Recio, 57, was sentenced to three years in prison and Costanzo Jr., 51, to four years in the $100,000 bribery scheme that played out in South Florida and New York between October 2018 and January 2020.
Guilty plea
With his guilty plea, prosecutors have agreed to drop all the charges in the indictment against Pagan, his defense attorney, Chris DeCoste, told the Miami Herald on Monday. As part of his plea agreement in Manhattan federal court, Pagan admitted that he knew a felony was committed when Costanzo and Recio were indicted in May 2022, failed to report his knowledge of their criminal case to prosecutors, and then helped them conceal their crime when he testified for the former DEA agents at trial.
“This outcome is unique because it’s saying he didn’t have knowledge of the crime at the time it was committed and it’s also saying that he made no admission that he testified untruthfully at their trial,” DeCoste said.
Pagan was close to Costanzo because they had attended a police academy together in the mid-1990s.
The indictment
In the indictment, Pagan was portrayed as a bag man and a buffer between Costanzo and Recio. Pagan was the third defendant to be prosecuted in the evolving case.
Then, in February of this year, Coral Gables criminal defense attorney David Macey was indicted along with Pagan on charges of bribing Costanzo to obtain confidential information about drug-trafficking suspects to recruit them as potential clients for his law firm.
In a surprising turn of events in August, federal prosecutors agreed to drop charges against Macey, 54, without explaining why at a court hearing in Manhattan. Prosecutors said the criminal charges against Macey will be dismissed in a year as long as he does not break any laws, according to a deferred prosecution agreement announced in court. The agreement was not filed in the court record.
Macey was charged with a conspiracy to bribe Costanzo. Macey was accused of using Recio and Pagan as intermediaries in the alleged corruption scheme to provide confidential information and defendants to the Coral Gables lawyer, according to the indictment. After his retirement from the DEA, Recio worked as a private investigator for Macey and other South Florida defense attorneys.
The indictment accused the lawyer of “using methods designed to conceal Macey’s own connection to the bribe payments.” But in court papers, Macey’s defense team moved to dismiss the indictment. His lawyers acknowledged that Costanzo ended up receiving about $73,000 in cash bribes and gifts, but they denied that Macey ever asked the veteran DEA agent for anything in return.
How the bribery scheme unfolded
According to court records and trial evidence, this is how the bribery scheme unfolded in the Miami and New York City metro areas:
Upon his retirement from the DEA in November 2018, Recio began operating a Miami private investigative service, Global Legal Consulting LLC, that catered to South Florida defense attorneys, including Macey, and also helped them recruit clients.
Recio agreed to bribe Costanzo, who was the DEA supervisor in Miami, in exchange for his providing the private investigator with confidential information about narcotics investigations, according to court records.
Costanzo gave Recio information about sealed indictments and secret investigations, including the identities of suspects and the anticipated timing of their arrests, according to court records. Costanzo also shared intelligence from the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System (NADDIS), a DEA database that contains information about targets under investigation.
Recio paid Costanzo for this information, which in turn Recio used to help recruit new clients for Macey, according to court records.
Recio paid Costanzo $2,500 in November 2018, shortly after Recio’s retirement from the DEA in Miami, records show. The payment was funneled to Costanzo through a company owned by a close family member. At the same time, Recio began asking Costanzo to run searches in the DEA database on drug-trafficking targets and investigations.
Soon after, Pagan, who has a black belt in jujitsu and runs a defense training business, JEM Solutions, entered the picture. On Jan. 17, 2019, the Coral Gables cop, who was working as DEA task force officer, reached out to Macey by text message to attend a meeting at a Coral Gables restaurant with him, Costanzo and Recio, according to the indictment charging Pagan and Macey.
Less than two hours before the restaurant meeting that same day, Pagan withdrew a $50,000 cashier’s check from a bank located within walking distance of the establishment, the indictment says.
The check was made out to a “close family member” of Costanzo’s — the Miami Herald has learned the recipient was his father, a retired DEA agent not charged in the bribery case. But Costanzo used the money toward a down payment on a condominium purchase, the indictment says. Costanzo then “misrepresented” the source of the $50,000 payment to his mortgage broker.
Twelve days later, on Jan. 29, 2019, Pagan and Costanzo discussed via text the creation of a shell company that Pagan “would use to funnel benefits” to Costanzo to keep the bribery scheme going, according to the indictment.
On Feb. 14, 2019, Pagan established a bank account in the name of the shell company. That same day, Pagan sent the username and password for the shell company to Costanzo via electronic message.
According to the indictment, Recio wrote a check for $10,000 from his investigations company to the shell company in April 2019, and Recio wrote another check for $10,750 in the same manner in June 2019 — all for Costanzo’s benefit in exchange for DEA confidential information on drug-trafficking suspects.
During the course of the bribery scheme, Macey made plans to travel with Costanzo to New York City on April 16, 2019. It would be Macey’s treat, as he paid the bill for an expensive dinner and tickets to a New York Yankees game, according to the indictment.
Before the Yankees game, Macey exchanged text messages in which he told Costanzo that he had bought the tickets to the game “so that [the DEA supervisor] would not be disappointed,” the indictment says. “During the game, [Costanzo] sent electronic messages containing pictures from the Yankees game to [Recio].”
This story was originally published October 13, 2025 at 4:37 PM.
