An investigation by the Suffolk Police Department’s Cold Case Unit resulted this week in the federal indictment of a Suffolk man in a 2001 murder-for-hire case.

Michael Donnell Butts, 52, faces federal charges of conspiracy to retaliate against a federal informant, tampering with an informant, retaliating against an informant and aiding and abetting the use of a firearm, resulting in death. The charges could net him the death penalty if he is convicted.

According to the grand jury indictment, which was unsealed on Thursday, Butts paid an unindicted co-conspirator $1,000 to kill 37-year-old Junior Bivins Jr., whom he suspected of cooperating in a federal drug investigation.

The indictment charges that Butts drove the killer to a street near Bivins’ Suffolk home on Nov. 20, 2001, and gave him a gun. Bivins was shot in the front yard of his home in the Lake Kennedy area. He died at the scene.

Butts drove the shooter from the area, the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a press release Friday afternoon.

Investigators from the Norfolk office of the Drug Enforcement Administration worked with the Suffolk Cold Case Unit on the case.

Butts’ indictment and arrest marks the third murder case cleared by arrest since the Cold Case Unit was reactivated about a year and a half ago, Suffolk spokeswoman Debbie George said Friday evening.

At the time that he was killed, the indictment states, Bivins had been providing law enforcement officers with information related to various federal criminal offenses, including narcotics distribution and weapons violations.

The killing, according to the indictment, was in retaliation for Bivins’ cooperation with the federal probe and constituted murder in the first degree in that it was “deliberate, malicious, willful and committed with malice aforethought.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura M. Everhart is prosecuting the case for the United States.

Butts is in jail awaiting a bond hearing on Wednesday.