NEW YORK (AP) — Federal prosecutors have charged a prominent Miami defense attorney with orchestrating a bribery conspiracy involving two former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration supervisors who leaked confidential information about drug investigations.
Prosecutors have said that attorney David Macey lavished the agents with cash and gifts, including Yankees-Red Sox baseball tickets, in exchange for sensitive information about the timing of federal indictments and other leads that authorities said put cases and investigators at risk.
The charges remained under seal Thursday, defense attorney David Patton told The Associated Press, adding Macey is expected to appear in federal court Friday. The precise charges against Macey were not immediately known.
“David is a devoted father and husband and a highly respected attorney with an impeccable record as a member of the bar for nearly 30 years. He did not bribe anyone," Patton wrote in an email. "The government’s allegations are false, and we are confident that the evidence will prove his innocence at trial.”
The prosecution has cast an unflattering light on Miami's “white powder bar,” a fiercely competitive circle of high-priced defense lawyers jockeying to sign up suspected narcotraffickers, negotiate surrender deals and convert them into government cooperators.
The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan did not respond to requests for comment. Federal prosecutors have previously called Macey a “crooked attorney” who “paid handsomely for DEA secrets.”
The indictment comes a year after prosecutors filed court papers saying Macey and another well-known Miami lawyer, Luis Guerra, bankrolled the bribery scheme. In a rare move, a judge allowed prosecutors to review nearly 1,000 emails, text messages and recordings of phone calls between the attorneys and Manny Recio, a longtime DEA agent who after retiring went to work for the attorneys as a private investigator.
Attorney communications are normally confidential and almost always shielded from law enforcement, with limited exceptions. Prosecutors can get around that privilege if they can convince a judge that an attorney’s services were being used in furtherance of a crime — a principle known as the crime-fraud exception.
“We’re here scheming about how we’re going to make money, money, money,” Guerra said in one intercepted conversation.
Guerra has not been charged and his attorney has not commented on the case.
Prosecutors called the attorneys' communications "integral to the bribery scheme” following the 2023 convictions of Recio and former DEA agent John Costanzo Jr., veteran lawmen who are both serving federal prison terms after a jury found them guilty of bribery and honest-services wire fraud. That Manhattan trial followed a flurry of misconduct cases involving other DEA agents accused of corruption and other federal crimes.
A former state prosecutor, Macey has defended clients in several headline-grabbing cases in South Florida, including a teenager accused of killing more than a dozen cats. In recent years, he became a significant player in narcotics and money laundering cases, a lucrative line of work that involves some of the highest fees in criminal defense.
Much of the DEA corruption case turned on text messages and wiretapped phone calls. Recio repeatedly asked Costanzo to query names in a confidential database to keep abreast of investigations of interest to his new employers.
The two discussed the timing of high-profile arrests and the exact date in 2019 when prosecutors planned to charge businessman Alex Saab, then a top criminal target in Venezuela and suspected bag man for the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
Recio and Costanzo also discussed confidential DEA plans to arrest a high-level trafficker in the Dominican Republic whom Macey was trying to recruit as a client. César Peralta eluded capture for more than four months despite a massive search involving 700 law enforcement officials.
In exchange for the leaks, prosecutors said, Recio secretly funneled $73,000 in purchases to Costanzo, including plane tickets and a down payment on his condo in suburban Coral Gables, Florida. In 2019, Macey allegedly spent nearly $2,000 on tickets for a Yankees-Red Sox baseball game and a dinner in Manhattan’s West Village for Costanzo, himself and another then-high-ranking DEA official in Mexico.
Prosecutors said Recio had been motivated by greed, pointing to his spending habits and purchase of a 2021 Porsche Macan. The DEA agents used sham invoices and a company listing its address as a UPS store to disguise bribe payments while deleting hundreds of messages and calls to a burner phone, prosecutors said.
The conspiracy relied on middlemen, including Costanzo’s now-deceased father, himself a decorated DEA agent who prosecutors said lied to the FBI. Another alleged intermediary was DEA task force officer Edwin Pagan, who was charged last year after prosecutors said he lied under oath at the agents' 2023 trial.
Pagan, a police officer in Coral Gables, has pleaded not guilty to charges including bribery and perjury. His trial is scheduled for August.
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Goodman reported from Panama City, Panama.
FILE - This photo provided by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan shows David Macey. (U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
