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He could be headed back to the joint for another 18 months, however.
Video captured a celebratory welcoming committee greeting Albert Robinson outside the Passaic County Jail in Paterson after he and co-defendant Darnell Reeves were released.
Robinson – known as “Albee Al The Gladiator” – and Reeves had been held since September 2019 following their arrests on attempted murder charges, among other offenses, in a non-fatal shooting on Wall Street in Passaic two weeks earlier.
They’d spent the past eight months in the Bergen County Jail before their attorneys negotiated plea deals that would win their freedom.
Both Robinson, 34, and Reeves, 38, pleaded guilty in a Paterson courtroom on Monday to aggravated assault.
Hours later, they were processed and released from the Passaic County Jail.
The plea deal each man got comes with a mandatory 18 months in prison, Passaic County Prosecutor Camelia Valdes said.
The prosecutor didn’t say, however, whether or not Superior Court Judge Imre Karaszegi, Jr. would credit both men for the time they’d already served behind bars when she sentences them on Oct. 14.
It was the second time in less than a decade that Robinson, most recently of Irvington, avoided a lengthy state prison stretch.
Jurors in Jersey City had acquitted Robinson in 2014 of murder, aggravated manslaughter, and reckless manslaughter after prosecutors accused him of tossing the body of a 17-year-old boy his cousin had shot and killed during a huge downtown brawl into the Hudson River four years earlier.
Joshua Robinson was sentenced to 10 years for "passion/provocation" homicide, which he’s serving along with a 188-month federal sentence on a drug conviction.
"Albee Al" wasn’t immediately freed after the 2014 verdict: He had to serve out the remained of a prison term for a separate gun offense.
Robinson was later grazed by gunfire in Jersey City shortly after his release. Bullets “must be blanks ‘cause they keep missing,” he chanted on Snapchat.
Robinson avoided the spotlight after that until the New Jersey State Police Fugitive Task Force arrested him in Avenel and Reeves in Kenilworth on Sept. 6, 2019.
It was on Aug. 23, Passaic County prosecutors said, that the pair shot two Paterson men on Wall Street in Passaic just after 2 a.m.
One of them, 34, was taken to St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson. The other, 30, didn’t require hospitalization.
Looking at a potential 10 to 20 years for convictions on each attempted murder count, Robinson and Reeves initially held fast, refusing to take a deal. Judges, in turn, agreed to prosecutors’ insistence that both remain jailed until trial.
Assistant Passaic County Prosecutor Stephanie Faloyin eventually secured deals with Robinson’s defense attorneys, Adrienne Edwards and Jay V. Surgent, and Reeves’s lawyer, Thomas McQuillan.
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