Is This 73-Year-Old a Hit Man? He’s Got the Résumé.

George Bratsenis shuffled right into a New Jersey courtroom in shackles, an old-school hoodlum with thick glasses, white hair and a forearm tattoo.

Court docket is a well-known setting for Mr. Bratsenis, 73. So is jail. His Tarantino-esque odyssey spans not less than three states and Canada and contains the killing of a drug courier referred to as the Turk, ties to organized crime and a weird failed jailbreak bid.

He was in court docket now as a result of he had been implicated in a murder-for-hire case involving a veteran marketing campaign advisor that many in New Jersey’s political class suppose might develop into the state’s subsequent large public corruption scandal.

The advisor, Sean Caddle, had admitted to arranging the killing of an affiliate who was discovered fatally stabbed in his burning Jersey Metropolis residence in 2014, and he had named Mr. Bratsenis as his employed hit man.

Mr. Bratsenis’s court docket look, on Feb. 22, ended abruptly with out rationalization, deepening the thriller of his place within the scheme. Readability will in all probability come on Thursday, when, the U.S. lawyer’s workplace in New Jersey mentioned, he’s scheduled to enter a plea.

It’s a new chapter for Mr. Bratsenis, whose prison heyday lasted roughly from 1974 to 1985. In that point — based on interviews, court docket paperwork, different public information and newspaper articles — he racked up 10 convictions, many for felonies like housebreaking, armed theft and, as soon as, conspiracy to commit homicide. He took orders from Gambino crime household associates and was an enforcer for a infamous former police lieutenant in Connecticut.

“He’s a really unhealthy man,” mentioned Alan H. Nevas, who, because the U.S. lawyer in Connecticut within the Nineteen Eighties, gained convictions towards Mr. Bratsenis for financial institution theft and within the homicide conspiracy.

Mr. Bratsenis didn’t reply to an interview request despatched to him on the federal jail in Brooklyn the place he’s awaiting sentencing in a financial institution theft case. His lawyer declined to remark.

Born in Stamford, Conn., Mr. Bratsenis grew up with 5 sisters. (The one to whom he says he’s closest didn’t reply a cellphone message.) In a court docket submitting, he describes a childhood of walks to the park and Little League video games.

He says in the identical doc that he started consuming as a young person earlier than shifting to LSD, cocaine and heroin. He graduated from highschool in 1966 — “enjoys women, water snowboarding, baseball, looking and automobiles,” his yearbook says — after which joined the Marines. He was honorably discharged, has been married and divorced twice — the primary marriage lasted a couple of yr — and has 4 kids.

“I don’t need something to do with him or his household,” his second spouse, Patricia, mentioned in a phone interview. “I want him nothing however yuck.”

Mr. Bratsenis’s prison profession started when he returned house from serving his nation. His father had an exterminating enterprise, however George selected a special path.

An early arrest got here in October 1973, when he and three different males broke right into a seafood restaurant in Westport, Conn. A number of months later, he was arrested 800 miles away in Nova Scotia, Canada, on costs of robbing a bowling alley at gunpoint. He pleaded responsible to armed theft and acquired 90 days in jail.

Again in Stamford, the Gambino and Genovese crime households have been battling over management of the unlawful rackets. Mr. Bratsenis and his cronies “would hyperlink up with organized crime associates and do their bidding — robberies, burglaries, promoting medicine,” mentioned Capt. Richard Conklin of the Stamford police.

“Subcontractors,” Michael Docimo, a retired Stamford officer, known as them: “They’d do something for rent.”

Mr. Bratsenis was “type of a free cannon” with a “sure meanness,” Captain Conklin mentioned. At 6 foot 2 inches and over 200 kilos, he was additionally bodily intimidating — a high quality he used, Mr. Docimo mentioned, as “muscle” for Larry Hogan, a retired Stamford police lieutenant and longtime goal of regulation enforcement scrutiny over his suspected ties to the drug commerce and arranged crime. (Mr. Hogan was convicted in 1982 of attempting to purchase heroin from undercover federal brokers. The decision was reversed on enchantment.)

Mr. Bratsenis’s main companion was Louis Sclafani (he known as himself Set off Lou). From 1979 to 1983, court docket information present, they went on a whirlwind of crime: financial institution jobs in Connecticut; grand theft arrests in Florida; jewellery retailer heists and gun and drug convictions throughout New Jersey.

In 1980, the bullet-riddled physique of David Avnayim, a.ok.a. the Turk, was present in a automobile trunk close to Mr. Hogan’s house. 4 years later, Mr. Bratsenis, Mr. Sclafani and Mr. Hogan have been charged within the killing. Mr. Hogan died earlier than trial. Mr. Sclafani cooperated. Mr. Bratsenis pleaded responsible to a homicide conspiracy cost.

David Golub, a lawyer who represented Mr. Hogan, mentioned in an interview that he had learn concerning the homicide that Mr. Bratsenis was now implicated in.

“Is that this about George Bratsenis rearing his ugly head?” Mr. Golub mentioned when he answered the cellphone, including: “If he’s out of jail greater than a day, it’s a fluke.”

Mr. Bratsenis’s spree resulted in 1983 when he was arrested and charged in one of many jewellery retailer robberies in New Jersey. Earlier than his trial there, he was convicted of robbing two Stamford banks. (Mr. Sclafani cooperated once more.) He acquired 30 years in federal jail for the robberies and 10 to twenty years, to be served concurrently, for the Turk’s homicide.

Subsequent got here the New Jersey trial for the jewellery retailer thefts. Prosecutors mentioned they adopted a typical sample: Mr. Bratsenis and his associates would scout locations to rob. Then they’d set fires elsewhere to distract the authorities.

The trial was a spectacle. Mr. Sclafani, testifying once more as a federally protected witness, was delivered to court docket below the watch of rooftop snipers guarding towards a focused killing.

Then there was Mr. Bratsenis’s escape plot.

Whereas he was in jail awaiting trial, certainly one of his sisters smuggled him a balloon stuffed with a nausea-inducing drug that he stored in his rectum for weeks. He deliberate to make himself sick by ingesting the drug the day the trial began, prompting a visit to a hospital. There, armed males would assist him flee.

The scheme crumbled due to a jailhouse informer and an spy who recorded Mr. Bratsenis’s sister discussing it. The trial proceeded, and he was convicted.

“Now, I’ve at all times mentioned this in passing sentence, that it’s tough to say whether or not a person will commit one other offense,” the choose mentioned in ordering him to spend a minimal of 25 years in state jail. “However primarily based on this defendant’s earlier historical past, his perspective, there’s no query.”

Prescient phrases. Mr. Bratsenis wound up serving 25 years altogether — 9 in federal jail and 16 in state custody — earlier than being paroled in 2010.

Then, on Sept. 29, 2014, he was arrested in Trumbull, Conn., and charged in a financial institution theft there. A second man, Bomani Africa, was additionally charged. Mr. Africa pleaded responsible and acknowledged that he and Mr. Bratsenis had stolen a automobile that they used of their getaway after which set ablaze.

The case acquired little discover till January, when Mr. Caddle, the marketing campaign advisor, pleaded responsible to arranging the homicide of Michael Galdieri, 52, and paying Mr. Bratsenis hundreds of {dollars} in money for the job. Mr. Africa pleaded responsible to participating and mentioned Mr. Bratsenis had recruited him.

Prosecutors say — and Mr. Africa, 61, has acknowledged — that he and Mr. Bratsenis met in a New Jersey jail the place they have been on the identical cell block for a number of years and made plans to commit crimes collectively after being launched.

Mr. Bratsenis’s hyperlink to Mr. Caddle is fuzzier. Mr. Caddle’s brother, James Caddle Jr., is one chance. He, too, spent a number of years in the identical jail as Mr. Bratsenis. He’s useless, and it isn’t clear whether or not they met.

One other supply of intrigue is the admission by Mr. Caddle, who managed an online of darkish cash nonprofits and tremendous PACs, that he has been cooperating with the F.B.I. in what his lawyer known as a “main investigation.” It’s unclear the place his cooperation may lead.

The main points of Mr. Galdieri’s homicide prompted the son of a outstanding New Jersey couple whose September 2014 deaths stay unsolved to hunt an investigation right into a doable connection between the instances.

In a letter to regulation enforcement authorities, the son, Mark Sheridan, wrote that, like Mr. Galdieri, his dad and mom, John and Joyce Sheridan, who have been discovered useless of their house, had been stabbed and {that a} fireplace had been set close by.

No proof linking the deaths has emerged, and the federal and state authorities have declined to remark.

Mr. Bratsenis, who has been in jail since being arrested within the financial institution theft, is to be sentenced in that case subsequent month — greater than three years after his responsible plea. He has written to federal officers to complain concerning the prolonged wait and the circumstances through which he has been held.

“At occasions, I used to be so upset I forgot the place I used to be,” he wrote to a high jail official final March concerning the “inhumane” Metropolitan Correctional Heart in Manhattan. “I mentioned to myself: ‘Self, this isn’t the nice U.S.A.’”

In a court docket submitting, his lawyer, Charles Kurmay, sought a lenient sentence, citing Mr. Bratsenis’s prostate most cancers and superior age.

“He would love to have the ability to not die whereas in jail,” he wrote.

Tracey Tully contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed analysis.