YOUNGSTOWN — Brandon R. Mace, 45, spent an hour on the witness stand Wednesday in the federal retrial of attorney Robert J. Rohrbaugh II, 49, of Canfield, telling jurors about more than a dozen fraud criminal cases he has had since he turned 20.

Mace, of Weathersfield, is likely to be a key witness in the trial because Rohrbaugh is accused of aiding and abetting Mace when Mace obtained a fraudulent $1.3 million federal income tax check in 2015 while Mace was in federal prison and needed a way to get it cashed.

Judge Benita Y. Pearson is presiding over the trial, which began with jury selection and the start of testimony Tuesday.

Rohrbaugh, whose law office is on Belmont Avenue in Liberty, represented Mace in many of Mace’s cases involving passing bad checks, receiving stolen property, forgery, motor vehicle theft and money laundering, Mace testified while under questioning by a federal prosecutor. Mace already pleaded guilty in the case and is awaiting sentencing. He pleaded guilty in 2020 to three charges similar to the ones Rohrbaugh faces.

Mace’s earlier offenses took place mostly in Mahoning, Geauga and Stark counties, with one of his first cases occurring in Boardman in 1996 when Mace was 19 years old and living on South Pricetown Road in Berlin Center, according to Mahoning County court documents.

He also lived on Hunter Street NW in Warren many years later, and also lived in Canton, according to testimony and court documents.

The questioning also focused on the ways that Mace was able to file bogus income tax returns while in state prison in 2012 and later in federal prison in 2015.

Mace said prisons offer inmates access to legal resources to help them with their criminal cases, but Mace also used them to get the names and addresses of companies he could pretend to work for or pretend to operate for tax-return purposes, he said.

Various people provided Mace with tax forms to fill out, he said. He had access to email and telephone service while in prison — both institutional phones and cellphones passed among inmates — to facilitate his IRS schemes, he said.

He could not file tax returns himself, but he was able to get them to others so that they could file them, he said.

The charges Rohrbaugh faces — conspiracy to commit a federal offense, aiding and abetting the theft of government property, aiding and abetting a false tax return and conspiracy to commit money laundering — involve a 2015 bogus tax return Mace filed.

Rohrbaugh went on trial in April in the case, also before Judge Pearson, but the jury found him not guilty of filing false tax returns and could not decide on his guilt or innocence on other charges, so he is being retried.

Mace was sentenced to more than six years in federal prison in 2013 for claiming false income tax refunds of $5.5 million, according to a 2013 U.S. Attorney’s press release. Mace was an inmate in a state prison at the time he filed those bogus tax returns, the press release stated. Mace said on the stand Wednesday he was in Belmont Correctional Institution.

He was in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., when he created the false tax return that resulted in the IRS sending a $1.3 million refund check to an address Mace was using in Arlington, Texas, he testified.

During Rohrbaugh’s first trial, prosecutors presented one or more emails between Mace and Rohrbaugh in 2015 about filing paperwork with the state of Ohio to register a company called Speed Werks for Mace.

It was the company under whose name Mace filed the bogus tax return.

The trial resumes today.