A Staten Island lawyer is set to go to trial in May on charges that he and two accomplices ran a violent scrap metal fraud ring that once involved shaking down a co-conspirator at gunpoint for $10,000 in the lawyer’s office.

But Richard Luthmann, a flamboyant Staten Island attorney who made headlines a few years ago when he challenged another lawyer to “trial by combat,” and his two co-defendants argued on Wednesday before a federal judge that they shouldn’t be stuck with the label of “organized crime.”