Thread: Child-porn Search Focuses on Top Miami ICE Agent

Child-porn search focuses on top Miami ICE agent.
BY JAY WEAVER
jweaver@miamiherald.com

FBI agents searched the home and office of Anthony V. Mangione, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in South Florida, over the weekend in a criminal investigation focusing on alleged child pornography on his computer, according to federal sources familiar with the case.

Mangione, 50, has headed ICE’s regional office since 2007. The agency has aggressively targeted child pornography possession, migrant smuggling, counterterrorism, illegal weapons and drug trafficking, among other major crimes.

Mangione, who lives in Parkland, could not be reached for comment on his cell phone regarding the FBI search at his home and West Miami-Dade office on Saturday. There are no court records indicating that he has been charged with any crime.

ICE’s office in Washington, D.C., declined to comment about the investigation and referred all questions to the Department of Justice. Justice spokeswoman Laura Sweeney declined to comment.

As ICE’s Miami leader, Mangione’s name often graced press releases lauding the agency’s efforts to fight child pornography. In statements, he talked about using technology to combat child pornography and his agency’s resolve to combat the crime.

"Too many children are victimized by predators that target the most vulnerable among us -- our children," Mangione said in a 2009 press release announcing that a 20-year-old Palm Beach County man was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on child porn charges.

Mangione was planning to retire this summer as the special agent in charge of ICE’s South Florida office. He has served his entire federal career with ICE and its predecessor, the U.S. Customs Service.

Federal officials, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to comment on the record, expressed shock over the allegations.

Mangione grew up in an Italian-Portuguese family from Rhode Island, graduated from the University of Maine and started his career as a clerk typist at Customs 27 years ago. He is known as a likable team player whose agency’s profile rose dramatically in the post-9/11 era.

Mangione manages a department stretching from Fort Pierce to Key West that investigates both immigration and customs cases, a hybrid mission resulting from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Mangione started his Customs career as an agent hunting down dope smugglers in South Florida’s waters in 1986.

Then he was transferred to the Washington field office. Among his prized cases: cracking a heroin trade from Afghanistan and West Africa in the early 1990s. He had a hand in dozens of convictions and seizures.

But Mangione’s biggest case, during a tour of duty in Customs’ headquarters, came in the mid-‘90s. As the head of financial investigations, he supervised a team of Customs agents in Los Angeles that dismantled a Colombian-Mexican narcotics money-laundering network run by cartels and bankers.

Mangione tapped that experience to develop more complex investigations in his new Customs post: head of the Fort Lauderdale office, in 2001. In 2007 he was promoted to the top job over all of South Florida.



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