A career criminal whose lengthy rap sheet includes bank robberies, a murder conspiracy and a jailbreak plot pleaded guilty Thursday to killing a political consultant in exchange for money in 2014, adding another chapter to a case that has roiled New Jersey politics. Appearing by videoconference from a jail in New York — where he is awaiting sentencing on a bank robbery in Connecticut — 73-year-old George Bratsenis said he and another man accepted thousands of dollars from another political consultant, Sean Caddle, in exchange for killing Michael Galdieri. Galdieri was stabbed to death in his Jersey City apartment, which was then set on fire. Caddle pleaded guilty in January but didn’t explain why he wanted his onetime friend dead. A man who served time in a New Jersey prison with Bratsenis in the early 2000s, Bomani Africa, also pleaded guilty in the killing in January. He named Bratsenis as the accomplice who helped kill Galdieri. Clad in a T-shirt, the white-bearded and bespectacled Bratsenis answered “Yes, sir,” when assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Cortes asked him if he was pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit murder for hire. “You all have a nice day. Take it easy,” Bratsenis told the group assembled on the videoconference as the proceeding ended. The revelations about Galdieri’s killing jolted political circles in New Jersey, a state infamous for dozens of political corruption convictions in the past three decades as well as skullduggery like the 2013 “Bridgegate” scandal involving traffic jams purposely created near the busy George Washington Bridge for political retribution. Caddle was well-known in northern New Jersey politics, with past clients including current Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez and former Democratic state Sen. Raymond Lesniak. Chief among the questions surrounding the case: Why did Caddle set the plot in motion? What connected him to the two ex-convicts who allegedly carried out the killing? And why have federal prosecutors said so little about the crime? Caddle’s plea agreement referred briefly and opaquely to him providing investigators with information, but didn’t say what. The U.S. attorney’s office has declined comment, as has Bratsenis’s attorney. Less mysterious is the extraordinary depth and breadth of Bratsenis’s criminal past. After serving in the Marines from 1968 to 1974, Bratsenis began racking up convictions in Connecticut and New Jersey for drug, robbery and weapons offenses. In the summer of 1980, according to Connecticut authorities, Bratsenis conspired with a former Stamford police lieutenant and two other men to murder a reputed drug courier, David Avnayim, whose body was found in the trunk of a car in Redding, west of New Haven. Bratsenis wasn’t charged until four years later, but eventually pleaded guilty to murder conspiracy. The ex-police lieutenant, Lawrence Hogan, had previously been convicted of conspiring to buy 2 pounds of heroin from an undercover agent but had the conviction reversed on appeal and then died not long after the murder charges were filed, of natural causes. Private investigator Vito Colucci, who as a Stamford police officer in the late 1970s wore a wire to help expose rampant corruption in the city’s police department, remembered Bratsenis and the people he ran with at the time as being “the kind of guys who would walk down the street and if someone offered them $1,500 to beat someone up, they’d say ‘OK!’ […]

The post 3rd Man Pleads Guilty in Killing of NJ Political Operative appeared first on The Yeshiva World.