Former Fed. Prosecutor Accused of Arranging Hit on Informant

[WSJ Law Blog]

Some strange news out of New Jersey today: A former federal prosecutor who became a high-powered criminal defense lawyer was charged on Wednesday in connection with the murder of an FBI informant. Click here for the early story, from the Newark Star-Ledger; here for the government’s press release; here for the indictment.

Paul Bergrin, 53, now living in Nutley, N.J., was indicted along with three others by a federal grand jury in Newark with running a racketeering operation that also included wire fraud, money laundering and attempts to shield criminal clients from prosecution, according to the indictment.

According to the indictment and press release, in November 2003, Bergrin received the name of a confidential federal informant, who went by the name Kemo, from a client, William Baskerville, and passed along the name to Baskerville’s drug trafficking associates. (Baskerville had just been arrested and was in jail on federal drug charges that carried a potential life prison term.)

The federal charges come two weeks after he pleaded guilty in New York to helping run an exclusive Manhattan call-girl ring.

“These are serious allegations and I intend to mount a serious and aggressive defense,” said Bergrin’s lawyer, Gerald Shargel, who is also, incidentally, Marc Dreier’s lawyer. Bergrin is expected to be held in custody pending his bail hearing, slated for next week.

Bergrin allegedly told the drug traffickers at this meeting that if the informant were killed, Bergrin could get Baskerville out of jail and derail the federal prosecution. As he was leaving the meeting, Bergrin instructed the drug traffickers to remember what he had just told them – “No Kemo, no case.” In March of 2004, one of the attendees of the meeting shot the informant three times in the back of the head while the informant attempted to cross a Newark intersection.

The indictment also accuses Bergrin of hiring a hit man from Chicago to kill at least one witness in a Monmouth County drug case. The slaying never transpired because the hit man was a government informant, authorities said.

On Aug. 5, 2008, according to the indictment, Bergrin traveled to Chicago, met with the hitman and identified “Junior the Panamanian” as the “******* rat” he wanted murdered. Later, according to the government’s certification, the hitman/informant asked Bergrin about the planned murder: “Is it going to help our case or hurt it?” To which Bergrin replied: “It’s going to help it. I got it all figured out . . . . Put on a ski mask and make it look like a robbery and take all the money in the house . . . . It cannot under any circumstances look like a hit.”

Bergrin, who grew up in Brooklyn, worked homicide cases for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office before becoming an assistant U.S. attorney in Newark, where he served between 1985 and 1990.