NEWARK — More than four years after his arrest, a once notable New Jersey defense attorney faces sentencing on a host of counts including murder and racketeering.

The saga of Paul Bergrin dates back to May 2009, when he and several associates were arrested and charged with running Bergrin's law business as a criminal enterprise. The U.S. Attorney's Office charged Bergrin with more than 30 counts including racketeering, setting up the murder of a witness, money laundering and drug offenses.

A first trial on two murder counts ended in a hung jury two years ago. But in March a jury convicted Bergrin on nearly two dozen counts. The other defendants had already pleaded guilty.

On three of the counts – conspiracy to murder a federal witness, aiding the murder of the witness, and a related racketeering count – Bergrin, 57, faces a mandatory life sentence. In the federal system, there is no parole.

After an eight-week trial this winter, a jury found Bergrin, once a defense lawyer to rap stars such as Lil’ Kim, drug kingpins and U.S. soldiers in Iraq, guilty of all 23 counts brought against him. It took the jury only two days of deliberations to reach the verdict.

Bergrin, who is also a former federal prosecutor and Army major, was convicted of using his former law office in Newark as a front for a Mafia-like racketeering enterprise marked by plotting the murders of witnesses against his clients, other instances of witness tampering, promoting prostitution and trafficking in kilogram quantities of cocaine.

In the two weightiest counts — on which Bergrin had been tried once before, ending in a hung jury — he was accused of orchestrating the slaying of Kemo Deshawn McCray, an FBI informant against a Bergrin client. McCray was shot in the back of the head in 2004 on a Newark street. The admitted gunman, Anthony Young, testified at trial that several months before McCray was killed Bergrin had shown up on a darkened street to tell the members of his client’s violent gang that their fellow gangster would possibly spend the rest of his life in prison. Then, said Young, Bergrin also looked at the group sternly and told them: "No Kemo, no case."

The sentencing is scheduled for 10 a.m.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.



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