A lawyer for the reputed mob boss known as Vinny Gorgeous asked an appeals court yesterday to order the trial judge to step aside from the case because the judge himself is the target of an alleged murder plot hatched by the mobster.

The lawyer, Jane Simkin Smith, told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan that a U.S. District judge in Brooklyn, Nicholas Garaufis, cannot be fair because the judge’s name appears on a hit list allegedly written by the mobster that will be included as evidence in the case.

Ms. Smith said her client, whose real name is Vincent Basciano, was being treated unfairly in the case, in which he is accused of plotting to kill a prosecutor.

“There is a serious question whether he has personal animosity towards a person who has allegedly sought to kill him,” Ms. Smith said. “We’ve argued from the beginning that there is no such plot to murder the judge but there’s never been an evidentiary hearing on that subject.”

An assistant U.S. attorney, John Buretta, said Mr. Garaufis was correct when he ruled Basciano had made a hit list in part to get the judge recused. Prosecutors say Mr. Garaufis, a prosecutor, and two informants were included on the list.

Judge Pierre Leval asked Ms. Smith if she believed “that a defendant can elect to get a change of judge by making a credible plot to kill him?”

She said that was not her position.

Basciano, who once owned the Hello Gorgeous salon, is serving a life sentence after he was convicted of racketeering, murder, and attempted murder.

Mr. Buretta said that after Basciano was convicted, he told his wife in a secretly recorded phone call “that he wants a different judge, that he’s going to pull every rabbit out of the hat, that he’s going to fight fire with fire.”

The prosecutor called Basciano a sophisticated defendant who made arguments directly to the judge sometimes during his trial and required his lawyers to make legal arguments they did not otherwise wish to make.