LINCOLN — Convicted bribery conspirator Robert R. Picerno was arrested yesterday morning and charged with hiring two men to attack then-Town Council member Dean L. Lees Jr. in 2001.

Picerno, 61, was arrested at his North Providence home and arraigned in District Court on one count of threatening a public official and one count of conspiracy in the Jan. 4, 2001, attack on Lees. He was released on $25,000 personal recognizance bond, according to the state police. He faces potential maximum sentences of five years in jail on the threatening charge and 10 years on the conspiracy count.

Lees, who has been off the Town Council for four years, said he was gratified to hear about Picerno’s arrest.

“On behalf of myself and my family, I want to thank the state police for maintaining their due diligence on the resolution of this very important issue,” Lees said.

Lees said he was not surprised that Picerno, who in 2004 pleaded no contest to four counts of soliciting bribes and three counts of conspiracy to solicit bribes while serving on the Lincoln Planning Board, and with whom Lees had repeatedly clashed, was charged in the case.

“I had always expected Picerno to be a part of it,” Lees said. “The dots did connect in his direction.”

“Whenever a public official is threatened or assaulted because of a public service that he or she has provided, it is a serious matter,” Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch said in a statement. “ … The defendant is no stranger to us and we will prosecute the case against him to the fullest extent of the law.”

State Police Maj. Joseph R. Miech said the state police had always wanted to find out who was behind the attack on Lees.

“With any unsolved case, if the statute of limitations hasn’t been exceeded, we’ll follow a case where it leads,” he said

Two men, Scott P. Coutu and Robert Rinn, pleaded no contest in 2001 to the actual assault, but at the time didn’t say if anyone hired them to do it.

The state police had been looking at Picerno in connection with the Lees case for years. In testimony during ex-Town Administrator Jonathan F. Oster’s bribery trial earlier this year, contractor Robert Gelfuso testified that when he wore a hidden microphone to meetings with Picerno, state police investigators specifically told him to bring up the Lees assault and see if Picerno would make any incriminating comments. If Picerno did, it wasn’t mentioned during the trial.

In a 2002 investigative interview with Stephen Balestra, the town’s housing rehabilitation director under Oster, detectives pressed him on whether Picerno had a vendetta against Lees. Balestra said Picerno tried to get the town building inspectors to investigate Lees’ house, but said Picerno denied involvement in the beating.

Lees was attacked in the parking lot outside the Georgia Carpet Outlet on Branch Avenue in Providence by two men he didn’t know. Lees said as left the store and headed to his car, he was struck from behind and hit eight to ten times on the back of his head. He said recognized one of the assailants as a man who was in the carpet store before the attack.

One of the men told him during the assault that “You know who I am” and “If you keep doing what you’re doing in the town, we’ll be back.”

Lees had defeated Picerno’s son, Robert R. Picerno II, in the August 1998 Democratic Town Council primary and by 1999 the two were bitter political enemies.

In the summer of 1999, Lees accused Picerno, then a member of the Planning Board, of inappropriately lobbying the Town Council about a duplex development in the Lime Rock section. Picerno sued Lees for slander in September 1999, claiming the councilman had smeared his reputation. The suit was dismissed by mutual consent a year later.

According to a state police affidavit filed in support of Picerno’s arrest, the investigation got a jolt in December 2007, when the state police were told by a confidential informant that Picerno contacted him about “a murder-for-hire plot against an unknown individual.” That information allowed them to get a wiretap on Picerno’s cellular phone.

No charges emerged from the murder-for-hire allegation, but the unidentified informant was arrested Jan. 17 on a motor vehicle charge, according to the affidavit. He then gave the police a formal statement about Picerno hiring him to attack people twice in the past. The informant said Picerno had approached him in late 2000 about whether he would be willing to beat up Lees.

He told the police that Picerno said Lees was “throwing wrenches in his, in his plans for residential, you know, like construction sites and stuff like that.”

The informant said within an hour of agreeing to go after Lees, Picerno gave him $7,500 in cash. He said Picerno gave him $5,000 more after the assault. That was $2,500 less than the agreed-to amount.

“That was how it worked out,” Meich said.

Of the two men who were charged in 2001, Coutu pleaded no contest to two charges of aiding and abetting a felony in connection with the attack and to an unrelated breaking and entering charge as well. He was sentenced to 10 years, with 3 1/2 to serve. Rinn pleaded no contest to simple assault and making threats against a public official. He was sentenced to three years.

Miech would not comment on whether Coutu or Rinn was the informant.

The affidavit said the informant also told the police that Picerno had paid him $1,000 to assault Pawtucket lawyer Edward Lawson in 1995. Lawson filed a complaint with Pawtucket police on Nov. 14, 1995, charging that two men attacked him in his law office using an aluminum bat. The affidavit said Lawson told the police at the time that he believed Picerno was behind the assault, because he was suing Picerno. No one was charged in that case. Miech said the 10-year statute of limitations has expired on the Lawson assault, so no charges were possible.

Lawson could not be reached for comment.

In 2004, Picerno pleaded no contest to four counts of seeking or soliciting bribes and three counts of conspiracy to solicit bribes in a state police investigation into corruption during Oster’s 2000-02 term in office. Prosecutors said the two set up a system to extort money from people doing business with the town.

Oster was convicted of two counts of bribery and two counts of conspiracy to commit bribery in a separate trial in February of this year. He committed suicide in his Lincoln law office Feb. 22, the morning after the verdict.

—With reports by staff writer Mike Stanton

jhill@projo.com