TROY – A man who made a career of robbing drug dealers was paid $1,000 to frighten an alleged South Troy dealer, according to testimony heard Thursday in a Rensselaer County courtroom. Instead, the target ended up dying of stab wounds.

The 2016 death of Jermaine “Maino” Hight, 31, has figured prominently in testimony about how Leonard “G” Ellis, who attacked him, died the following year after another knife attack.

Anthony M. “Mike” Rickett, 52, is on trial for second-degree murder for allegedly killing Ellis, 46. The proceedings have exposed an underworld of retaliatory criminal-on-criminal violence, drug dealing and prostitution that stretches from South Troy to the city’s northern neighborhoods.

Rickett allegedly stabbed Ellis three times on July 11, 2017, in an apartment at 115 Oakwood Avenue, where people went to smoke crack cocaine and meet prostitutes, according to the indictment and testimony. Ellis died four days later at Albany Medical Center Hospital. Rickett was arrested 10 days after the attack after police surrounded his Third Avenue home in Lansingburgh.

Hight, a Rensselaer resident, was attacked on the evening of June 14, 2016, at Madison and Second street in South Troy, according to police reports. But the attacker was not publicly revealed — until this week, during testimony by a friend of Ellis and a detective.

“All indications are that Leonard Ellis killed Jermaine Hight. That’s what detectives believed. The evidence supports this unless something further develops,” Assistant Chief Police Daniel DeWolf said Thursday.

At first, police thought Hight was a car crash victim.

He was found in a car that crashed into another vehicle that night at Hoosick Street and Fifth Avenue in North Central. Hight was being taken to a hospital by a friend at the time of the crash.

Authorities took Hight to Albany Medical Center Hospital, where he died. It was then that police learned that it was stab wounds that caused his death, and not injuries from the accident.

Ellis was paid $1,000 to attack Hight in 2016, according to Stephanie “Star” Simpson, who testified that she accompanied Ellis on some of his robberies of city drug dealers. Simpson only identified Hight by his nickname — Maino — during cross-examination by Timothy Nugent, Rickett’s defense attorney. She also said that people were afraid of Ellis.

Simpson was a prosecution witness whose testimony to the prosecution was used to set up a motive for Rickett to allegedly kill Ellis. She said Ellis robbed Rickett at gunpoint of an "eightball" of crack, and that Rickett later told her he was going to kill Ellis for what he did.

Captain Raymond White confirmed what Simpson had told police about Ellis attacking Hight. Then a detective sergeant, White said he interviewed Simpson in an unmarked detective bureau car. That’s where she told her story about Ellis’ activities and the attack on Hight.

Rickett testified in his own defense for less than five minutes Thursday afternoon, saying he knew none of the people who claimed he was in the apartment at 115 Oakwood Ave. where Ellis was attacked. He also said he didn’t know Ellis and Simpson.

Closing statements will be made Friday morning in Rickett’s trial before County Court Judge Debra Young.