NEWARK – The case had all the makings of a Hollywood thriller, and one that threatened sequels with the potential to rock New Jersey politics.
Sean Caddle, a prolific Democratic campaign consultant, stunned the Garden State with his confession last year that he had hired hitmen to kill a friend and former employee. His lawyer’s statements — that his client was cooperating in this and other investigations — set off a frenzy over what Caddle might tell the FBI about powerful politicians he once worked for, including U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez and former state Sen. Ray Lesniak.
But when a federal judge sentenced Caddle to 24 years in prison Thursday for the murder of fellow politician Michael Galdieri, Trenton breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Caddle’s cooperation, while “extensive,” had effectively reached its conclusion, Assistant United States Attorney Lee M. Cortes told the court. No other charges were likely. There were no more shoes left to drop.
In the end, the most outrageous thing to emerge from Caddle’s arrest were the details of the bizarre murder-for-hire plot that set him off in the first place.
“This is one of the most unusual and heinous crimes I have ever encountered as a judge,” U.S. District Judge John Michael Vazquez said as he announced the 45-year-old’s sentence. “It’s heartless killing. He killed a friend.”
Caddle, a street political operative who had made a name for himself in North Jersey politics as an expert consultant in the murky world of super PAC spending, told Vazquez last year that he had paid $15,000 to two contract killers who fatally stabbed Galdieri, 52, in his Jersey City apartment on May 22, 2014, then set it on fire.
But in the months after Caddle’s guilty plea, both he and prosecutors remained tight-lipped about a motive for the killing.
Court documents filed ahead of Thursday’s hearing shed new light.
Galdieri had been blackmailing him, Caddle told the FBI, according to the documents, and had threatened to “go public about certain things he had seen, done and heard while working for Caddle on campaigns.”
Caddle told investigators the threat was serious enough that he felt compelled to orchestrate Galdieri’s assassination or risk the end of his political career.
Caddle’s role in the killing only came to light after the men he had hired – Bomani Africa, 62, a former MOVE partner from Philadelphia, and George Bratsenis, 74, a septuagenarian artist from Connecticut – turned him in after he was charged in a series of unrelated bank robberies in 2015.
» READ MORE: Before the murder-for-hire plot that rocked New Jersey, a key player led a prolific criminal career
Bratsenis had told investigators he had met Caddle through the agent’s brother after the two served time together in the same prison in New Jersey. After his release in 2013, Bratsenis said, Caddle offered him a job working on campaigns with him and Galdieri.
But it was only months before Caddle approached him to ask him to kill Galdieri. It was Bratsenis who went to Africa to help, and after chasing Galdieri for days, they finally attacked him—stabbing him repeatedly in the neck, head, and torso—and left him to die in a pool of blood while emptying his apartment with gasoline.
» READ MORE: North Jersey murder-for-hire is ‘eerily similar’ to 2014 death of John and Joyce Sheridan, son says
Bratsenis and Africa are serving prison terms of 16 and 20 years, respectively, for their roles in the plot.
And although Caddle confessed immediately after being confronted and volunteered to help prosecutors investigate other crimes, Cortés said Thursday that none of the assistance he provided overshadowed the seriousness of Galdieri’s murder.
“This was a premeditated and planned murder… done for a pittance of money,” the prosecutor told the court. “He was so self-obsessed that he would end an irreplaceable human life simply out of fear for his business. No amount of remorse or cooperation can make up for that.”
In this case, however, the judge noted, there didn’t seem to be much.
Prosecutors said Caddle sat through several lengthy interviews, shared hundreds of pages of documents with the FBI and made dozens of surreptitious recordings of other people.
Their cooperation led to a new set of charges: the indictment of Tony Teixeira, former chief of staff to New Jersey Senate President Nicholas Scutari, who admitted last year that he conspired with Caddle to defraud of the campaigns they had worked on together between 2014 and 2018 for overcharging for Caddle’s services. Teixeira awaits sentencing next month.
And while Caddle’s attorney, Edwin J. Jacobs Jr., noted Thursday that his client had provided the government with “additional assistance in other matters,” prosecutors declined to discuss that or explain why they had not giving rise to other cases.
They still urged the court to accept the deal they had made with Caddle to forego the mandatory minimum life sentence that includes a federal murder-for-hire sentence in exchange for the information he provided.
“If the government doesn’t make a case in these cases,” Cortés said, “we don’t talk about them and we don’t talk about why.”
Vazquez seemed less impressed.
Although he agreed to accept the basic outlines of Caddle’s plea deal, sparing him life behind bars, the judge described his time as an FBI collaborator as “self-serving.” The 24-year sentence he imposed exceeded by nearly a decade what prosecutors had asked for.
Vazquez noted that Caddle had begun secretly taping others in his orbit even before he was charged with Galdieri’s murder, suggesting that he thought those tapes could help him if he was ever caught.
“He was already looking to protect his own skin,” the judge said.
Meanwhile, Caddle, dressed in a casual plaid shirt with no tie, said nothing when it came time to address the judge. He had been under house arrest since being charged in January 2022. His lawyer said Thursday they would make “no effort to minimize, explain or excuse” Galdieri’s murder.
Still, Vazquez concluded that Caddle had attempted just that.
Asked before sentencing what he would have done differently, Caddle told probation officers he “should have surrounded himself with a different class of people of higher moral character,” the judge
And yet, Vazquez scoffed, “it was Mr. Caddle’s idea to kill his friend because Mr. Caddle didn’t want to be exposed.”
And after all the talk about who else his cooperation could help put in jail, it was ultimately Caddle who walked out of Thursday’s hearing escorted by U.S. marshals, his wrists cuffed and his future sentenced to a prison sentence of almost a quarter of a century.
