George Bratsenis, an elderly career criminal whose rap sheet includes bank robberies and a murder conspiracy, was sentenced to 16 years in prison after pleading guilty to killing a political consultant in New Jersey for money.
Bratsenis, 74, pleaded guilty in 2022 to charges that he and his accomplice Bomani Africa accepted thousands of dollars from political consultant Sean Caddle in exchange for killing his colleague Michael Galdieri, 52, the son of a former state senator, in a bizarre conspiracy.
The victim was stabbed to death in her Jersey City apartment, which was then burned down in May 2014. Early last year Caddle pleaded guilty to hiring the two killers, but has yet to be sentenced.
After Caddle learned the next day that the victim had been murdered, he met one of the hitmen in the parking lot of a restaurant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and paid him thousands of dollars for the crime. “It was a callous and violent crime, and this defendant is as responsible as the two men who wielded the knife,” U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said of Caddle in a January 2022 statement.
Africa also pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced last month to 20 years in prison. He named Bratsenis as the accomplice who helped him kill Galdieri.
U.S. District Judge John Michael Vázquez imposed Bratsenis’ 16-year sentence, plus five years of supervised release, in Newark federal court on Wednesday, prosecutors said in a statement.
Africa had served time in a New Jersey prison with Bratsenis in the early 2000s. After their release from prison, both men robbed two Connecticut banks in 2014, even a week before Galdieri’s murder, he said. Fox News.
Caddle was a well-known consultant on northern New Jersey politics. His former clients included current US Sen. Bob Menendez and former state senator and 2017 gubernatorial candidate Raymond Lesniak, both Democrats.
It is not yet clear the motive for the crime or how Caddle was linked to the two ex-con hitmen. Bratsenis served in the Marine Corps from 1968 to 1974 and then began racking up convictions in Connecticut and New Jersey for drug, robbery and weapons offenses.
In the summer of 1980, according to Connecticut authorities, Bratsenis conspired with a former Stamford police lieutenant and two other men to murder a reputed drug courier, David Avnayim, whose body was found in the trunk of a car west of of New Haven.
Following in the footsteps of his father, the late former State Senator James Galdieri, Michael had political aspirations and ran for Jersey City Council in District B in 2005. He ran against the political machine dominated by then-Democratic Mayor Jerramiah Healy. But on the eve of the elections he was arrested and charged with drug and weapons related offences. He claimed he was set up, but accepted a plea deal that reduced his jail time.
The younger Galdieri worked for Caddle’s political consulting firm. It is not clear when they stopped working together.