BEVERLY — On a hot June night just over five years ago, a worker at Beverly's Electric Insurance saw something straight out of a movie: the blade of a Sawzall coming through the wall.

The worker called 911, and police caught the burglars — covered in Sheetrock dust and sweat — running to a rented car.

But what seemed at first like an open-and-shut case of breaking and entering soon turned into a five-year legal battle between one of the suspects — a notorious computer hacker — and the Essex County District Attorney's Office.

That battle ended yesterday when Jason Copson, 37, of Annandale, Va., pleaded guilty to breaking and entering and was sentenced to six to 10 years in state prison.

Copson's plea came on the day his long-delayed trial was finally set to start in Lawrence Superior Court.

Prosecutor Greg Friedholm, who had hoped to convince jurors that Copson was there to steal new Cisco computer servers worth more than $150,000, had been seeking an eight-to-10-year term.

Judge Leila Kern offered the shorter sentence if Copson would plead guilty yesterday. The six-to-10-year prison term is identical to a sentence offer that Copson rejected three years ago.

The computer servers had just been shipped to the Conant Street business to replace an identical set of servers that had been stolen two weeks earlier. While Copson was not charged in that theft, investigators learned that he had been in town at the time — he had rented a car at Logan and stayed at the same motel, the Clipper Ship Inn, just as he did before the June 30 break.

And they learned that during his earlier visit to the area, he had shipped three large boxes, weighing more than 40 pounds apiece, while staying in Salem.

At the time, Copson was on federal parole for interstate transportation of stolen goods — other pieces of computer hardware.

He has a record of similar crimes around the country, including in Texas and Virginia.

Copson is known to law enforcement as a hacker, the prosecutor told the judge.

Copson was featured in a 1996 profile in Texas Monthly magazine, which covered his role in a group of hackers who called themselves "Dark Side Research." The magazine reported that Copson hacked into telephone switching computers, and that while in prison he avoided having his calls monitored by stealing a chaplain's phone and carrying it around in parts.

Skipped out of town

That was information a Salem District Court prosecutor apparently did not know when she did not ask for any bail during Copson's initial arraignment in 2003. Although Copson and co-defendant Ryan Day, from Reston, Va., had out-of-state ties, they walked out of court that morning. Day later pleaded guilty and received a six-month jail sentence and probation.

But Copson would not return to court for more than a year, surfacing only after he was sentenced on a federal parole violation.

Then, he and his lawyer convinced a Salem Superior Court judge to dismiss the case, saying that Copson's rights were violated by officials who did not return him to Massachusetts quickly enough for him to receive a fair trial. The Supreme Judicial Court reinstated the case against Copson two days later.

The case was further delayed by repeated motions by Copson's lawyer, Ray Buso, seeking to continue the case, have it sent to another judge and suppress evidence, among other requests.

Just as the case was about to go to trial in March, Buso told a judge that Copson was in custody in Maryland, where he had turned himself in on a 4-year-old warrant. That, a judge later found, was an intentional effort to avoid trial.

Copson insisted that Buso had advised him to deal with the warrant even though trial was just days away; Buso denied this, and as a result, Copson got a new lawyer, Anthony Rozzi, who also filed a series of motions and, when they were denied, an appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court.

On July 24, Justice Robert Cordy agreed with the Salem judges that Copson "deliberately absented himself to avoid going to trial," and refused to grant a stay.

During yesterday's hearing, Rozzi asked if Copson could delay starting his prison time for 30 days so he could transfer his computer business — a request the prosecutor slammed as another attempt to manipulate the court.

Kern gave Copson, who is being held in Middleton Jail, until Sept. 4 to begin serving his prison term.

He will remain in custody in the meantime.