STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

Tell us about it

• What would you add to this story? Tell us what we missed.
• Do you have photos from this event? Documents we need to see? Share with us.
• Upload photos & videos
• More ways to get your stuff online and in the paper.

More Local News

• Business Spotlight: Rollsecure Shutters
• Fix investment
• Pet Talk: Cat food for thought

Share and Enjoy [?]

A 32-year-old Marco Island man who paid an undercover detective $5,500 for 9.2 ounces of cocaine during a drug sting near a restaurant last spring has been sentenced to three years in a state prison on a trafficking charge and faces deportation.

Ronny Vincent Ramirez, 468 Waterleaf Court, pleaded no contest this past week to trafficking in cocaine of 28 to 200 grams, a charge reduced from trafficking 200 to 400 grams.

Both are first-degree felonies punishable by up to 30 years in a state prison, but the amended charge reduced the fine and minimum mandatory prison sentence Ramirez faced from $100,000 to $50,000 and from seven years in prison to three years he must serve before he can be released.

Ramirez was sentenced as part of a plea agreement negotiated by Assistant State Attorney Laura Farrell and defense attorney John O. McGowan. Ramirez had considered heading to trial and alleging he was entrapped into purchasing the cocaine.

Collier Circuit Judge Elizabeth Krier adjudicated him guilty, sentenced him and gave him credit for time served in the county jail since his arrest on May 25; he was being held because he was in the country illegally.

His license also was revoked for two years, as required by law, and he was ordered to pay the Collier County Sheriff’s Office $1,550 for investigative costs.

Undercover detectives got a tip that Ramirez, a dishwasher at Cafe Bubbalini Italian Restaurant on Collier Boulevard on Marco Island, was selling cocaine, along with another dishwasher.

An undercover detective working near the restaurant on May 25 negotiated a sale of cocaine to Ramirez, who agreed to pay $5,500 for 261 grams.

Sheriff’s SWAT team members arrested him, as well as a second dishwasher, Eduardo Edwin Diaz, 25, of the same address, after he arrived for work a half-hour later on his bicycle.

Diaz fled and was found hiding in a bathroom stall. He was charged with cocaine trafficking after he was accused of selling an undercover detective 57 grams — 2 ounces — of cocaine for $1,900.

Diaz, who also is being held pending deportation, remains in jail pending his trial in April.