"I’m pretty much the dummy who was almost killed," Michael Dippolito said last year, his tone laced with more pragmatism than self-deprecation.

The words came hours after a Palm Beach County jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict in a retrial of Dalia Dippolito, a trial where prosecutors made the strategic decision to keep Michael Dippolito off the witness stand.

That is all expected to change in a third trial, which will begin on Friday with jury selection.

Michael Dippolito is back on the state’s witness list. Although it is unclear whether he’ll play as big a role as he did when prosecutors won a conviction against his ex-wife in her first trial in 2011, many observers believe his presence alone may be the undoing of the woman recorded on video saying she was "5,000 percent sure" she wanted him dead.

"Having the victim testify this time is a game-changer," defense attorney Jacob Noble said. "Psychologically speaking, the jury wants to see a victim, they want to hear someone say, ‘This person tried to have me killed.’"

Noble and others say a look at the history of the case alone confirms this.

At the first trial, Michael Dippolito was the state’s star witness, spending nearly two days on the witness stand giving testimony that included a hard cross-examination from Dalia Dippolito’s former attorney, Michael Salnick.

Jurors, in that case, convicted her after less than three hours of deliberation. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison but won a new trial three years later when an appellate court ruled the judge should have questioned jurors individually about what they knew of the high-profile case.

Brian Claypool and Greg Rosenfeld, Dippolito’s new attorneys, say they would have relished the chance to question Michael Dippolito during their client’s second trial in December. But without his testimony, a jury spent the better part of two days trying to decide the case before they said they were hopelessly split 3-3 on a verdict, leading Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley to declare a mistrial.

When he testifies this time, Michael Dippolito will certainly face the same questions he did six years ago about his lengthy rap sheet. It includes drug charges, an arrest alleging he solicited a prostitute and, most notably, a two-year prison sentence for a foreign currency scheme. Authorities say he learned the scam by working with a group tied to the Bonnano crime family and later branched out to dupe mostly elderly marks out of more than $200,000 in less than a year.

He and Dalia met through an escort service in October 2008, a year after he married another woman he had known for nine years. By January of 2009, he was divorced and married to Dalia.

Eight months after that, she was in jail, charged with trying to have him killed.

In her first trial, Salnick tried unsuccessfully to convince jurors that Michael Dippolito was in on the murder-for-hire plot and that it was all a ploy to score the couple a reality television deal.

Before her second trial, in December 2016, Dalia Dippolito’s defense team used a television interview and a pair of pretrial hearings to try out a defense that her lover-turned-informant, Mohammed Shihadeh, and her husband had both forced her to go through with the plot in hopes it would get them all acting gigs.

By the time of trial, however, Claypool and Rosenfeld built their defense solely on arguments that Boynton Beach police, intent on a good episode for the television show "COPS," pressured Shihadeh, who in turn coerced Dippolito to carry out the plot.

That appears to still be a strategy going into the third trial, although the defense team in court records earlier this month listed Dr. Lenore Walker, a premier expert on battered women’s syndrome, as a witness.

Rosenfeld in a hearing last week said Walker, if allowed to testify, will say that Dalia Dippolito could have been more willing to go along with what the men involved in the alleged plot were telling her because she was in an abusive relationship. He also has plans to call a body language expert, who is expected to testify that Dalia Dippolito’s facial expressions show she didn’t want to go through with the plot.

Kelley will decide this week whether jurors will hear that testimony, but local attorneys appear skeptical.

"Nowadays, there are experts willing to give an opinion on any issue. Whether or not it is admissible in court is another issue," defense attorney Richard Tendler said.

Of course, whether a Palm Beach County jury will hear the case at all is contingent on whether lawyers on both sides will be able to get a fair jury in a case that has remained a high-profile local news story for more than six years.

Jury selection in December barely survived the defense’s repeated motions for a venue change after nearly two-thirds of prospective jurors said they had heard about the case. Kelley will call up 300 prospective jurors this time around, about 100 more than before. Prospective jurors who know that Dippolito’s case has previously gone to trial or have formed opinions about the case based on what they’ve heard will be eliminated.

Kelley earlier this year also issued a gag order for attorneys in the case, keeping them from publicly discussing evidence outside of court until the start of the trial. Rosenfeld appealed the order, but Florida’s 4th District Court of Appeal upheld the judge’s decision last week.

If convicted again, Dalia Dippolito faces up to 20 years in prison.