A Dorchester man has pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hitman to ice his wife and her boyfriend — but the would-be-assassin was actually an undercover federal informant.

Mohammed Chowdhury, 47, entered a plea deal in his case in federal court in Boston Thursday that calls for a minimum of seven years and three months and a maximum of nine years in prison for two counts of use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire.

Plea agreements are not set in stone and federal Judge Leo T. Sorokin can sentence him for up to 10 years for the offense.

He was arrested on Jan. 18 of last year, just a day after he paid undercover federal agents a $500 deposit on the $8,000 job to kill his wife and her lover, the Herald reported. He initially pleaded not guilty to the charges the next month.

The plot was timidly constructed over several weeks, according to court documents. The first guy Chowdhury approached to take out his wife and the man she was cheating on him with took the money and ran, never to be heard from again.

That left Chowdhury, not a rich man, at a disadvantage but he found another person — who was working with the FBI — and had several meetings to haggle over the price and just exactly what he wanted done, according to court docs. He said that “he wanted the undercover agents to rob and beat his wife and her boyfriend so that he would not be a suspect” and he needed it done because his wife wouldn’t let him see his kids.

Chowdhury at first told the man that he wanted the boyfriend beaten up in a way that would resemble an attempted robbery gone very badly. Then he thought about having the man shot and maimed but not killed. But that was no good, the fake assassin said; beat-up jobs were too messy and it had to be murder or he’s out of the deal.

“We don’t leave witnesses, so for us, it’s either all or nothing, so you have to make a decision, what you want,” the agent told him, according to the documents. “So, you need to think about it.”

The agents asked for $10,000 a head but Chowdhury, in meetings at Codman Square-area restaurants including Charlie’s House of Pizza and El Barrio Mexican Grill, eventually haggled that price down to $4,000 a head — for a total of $8,000 for the full job.

Chowdhury, according to the law enforcement affidavit filed with the criminal complaint, “needed the murder done as soon as possible and that he would get the money, indicating that he would even rob a store if necessary to do so.”

While the fake hitman pooh-poohed the idea to just beat the lover up, they did like Chowdhury’s idea that the hit look like a robbery gone bad. The agent told Chowdhury over messaging app Telegram that “We did our homework, there’s robberies that happen all over this (expletive) place” in the Roxbury neighborhood where the wife lived.