Former husband convicted of trying to hire a hit man

A state jury deliberated less than an hour Friday before finding former document courier Anthony Mark Albert guilty of trying to hire someone to kill his ex-wife’s boyfriend in 2007.

Albert, 58, faces a mandatory 20-year prison term at sentencing in January. The Hawaii Paroling Authority will decide how much time Albert will have to spend behind bars before being eligible for parole. Albert has been in custody since 2008 and has already spent more than six years behind bars.

This was the second time Albert stood trial for criminal solicitation to commit murder. He represented himself in both trials.

His first trial last year ended with the jurors deadlocked on two counts. One was for allegedly paying a person who turned out to be a police informant about $5,000 in 2006 to do the job. The informant told police he kept the money even though he didn’t do the job.

The second charge was for attempting to hire someone who the informant told him was a professional hit man but who was really an undercover Hono­lulu police officer. To discuss the job, the undercover officer picked up Albert in a pickup truck that was rigged with audio and visual recording equipment.

Albert told both juries that the police entrapped him, that he believed the undercover police officer was in cahoots with the informant to try to extort more money out of him and that he played along with them to deceive them.

Prior to the start of the second trial, Circuit Judge Colette Garibaldi dismissed the count involving the informant, who died of a heart attack in 2012.

Albert’s ex-wife and the intended target of the murder married, then later divorced.