The Kings County district attorney’s efforts to weed out corruption in the Brooklyn judiciary received a boost yesterday when jurors found a former divorce court judge, Gerald Garson, guilty of rendering unequal justice in exchange for wine, cash, and cigars.

He faces up to 15 years in prison.

Garson stared straight ahead, his face flush, as the foreman pronounced him guilty of bribery and official misconduct for giving a lucrative legal guardianship and strategic advice on divorce cases to a dining companion, Paul Siminovsky, a now-disbarred attorney who testified against Garson.

The jury acquitted the ex-judge of four other felonies in connection with the guardianships.

Gone was the brazen man caught on hidden surveillance tapes accepting gifts, threatening to deprive a young mother of her children, and calling litigants names like “schmuck,” “crazy,” and worse.

In his place was a 74-year-old convicted felon who struggled to whisper “yes” when promising the jurist presiding over the case, Justice Jeffrey Berry, that he would check in every week with the Probation Department — Mr. Berry denied a prosecution motion to send him to jail immediately — until he is sentenced on June 5.

The Kings County district attorney, Charles Hynes, has been unable to prove that judgeships were for sale for tens of thousands of dollars by a Brooklyn former Democratic party boss, Clarence Norman Jr. — a claim Garson made when he was first arrested in 2003.

But the corruption inquiry that Garson’s allegations catalyzed has altered Brooklyn’s judicial landscape: Norman, who helped Garson get elected to the bench, was sentenced this week to prison for shaking down judicial candidates, and the very way judges in Brooklyn were selected has been declared unconstitutional.

The chief prosecutor in the Garson case, Michael Vecchione, said the investigation into judicial corruption is continuing. He declined to elaborate.

Mr. Vecchione credited the guilty verdict to the cameras the district attorney secretly installed in Garson’s robing room. His team played tapes for the jury that prosecutors said showed Garson committing crimes and perverting justice in Brooklyn.

“People have to do what’s right,” Mr. Vecchione said outside the courtroom where Garson was convicted, explaining the message of yesterday’s verdict. “And whether you’re a judge or an ordinary citizen, you need to do what’s right.”

During the trial, the recordings showed Garson using vulgar language to advise a litigant on how to win a pending divorce case — a violation of court rules barring judges from communicating with attorneys without the other side present — and accepting a cash-filled envelope and a box of cigars from Mr. Siminovsky, part of a sting organized by Mr. Hynes’s office.

Garson’s defense, led by Michael Washor, tried unsuccessfully to convince the jury that his client was himself a victim of Mr. Siminovsky, who had been arrested before Garson on bribery charges and who ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.

Mr. Washor argued that the cash and the cigars were part of a setup provided by the district attorney’s office, and that Garson may have acted improperly but didn’t commit a crime.

After the verdict was read, Mr. Washor said he was disappointed, and he vowed to appeal Garson’s conviction.

The investigation into Garson started in earnest when a pregnant mother, Frieda Hanimov, complained to Mr. Hynes’s office that she was receiving unfair treatment from the judge in her divorce case. She said she heard from a man connected to Garson that her estranged husband had bribed the judge.

Ms. Hanimov, a 38-year-old mother of three, became a vital component to Garson’s downfall when she agreed to go undercover and wear a wire to catch the corruption. She said yesterday she felt vindicated.

In addition to lawyers who came occasionally to watch the trial gawking at the spectacle of a disgraced judge on trial, more than a dozen dissatisfied divorcees sat in the courtroom gallery throughout the four-week trial. Few if any had had their cases before Garson, but most said they felt that Garson was emblematic of a corrupt marital court bench.

“People are going to open their eyes and see how the system has got to change from top to bottom,” Ms. Hanimov said last night in a telephone interview.

A half dozen people connected to Garson, including a law clerk and a court officer, have been convicted or pleaded guilty to crimes related to his corruption. Garson, who has cancer, had rejected a plea deal that would have sent him to jail for less than two years.