Say hello to your little verdict.
A brazen gun trafficker who liked to quote from “Scarface” — and who was caught on surveillance video selling an AR-15-style assault rifle on a Chelsea street corner — was quickly convicted by a Manhattan jury yesterday.
It took less than five hours to find Sentell Smith guilty of the entire 21-count indictment against him, including the state’s toughest gun-sale statute, first-degree criminal weapons sales, reserved for gun dealers caught selling 10 or more guns.
The experience left jurors shell-shocked.
“That was a scary gun,” one juror, who declined to give her name, said of the .223-caliber Remington semiautomatic assault rifle Smith sold for $2,000 to an undercover parked at 27th Street and Seventh Avenue in July 2011.
Steven Hirsch
SENTELL SMITH Kingpin? Try pinhead.
A year-long investigation by the Manhattan DA’s Violent Criminal Enterprises Unit and NYPD caught the Alabama native on video getting into a car with the rifle hidden inside a long body pillow. Footage shows him tossing the pillow onto the back seat before he climbs into the front passenger seat and negotiates the sale.
“You f--k with me, you f--king with the best,” Smith boasts on another surveillance tape, quoting Al Pacino’s character in the iconic ’80s gangster flick.
Smith sold undercovers a total of 11 guns, including two sales he brokered on a Rikers pay phone. Investigators said each gun sold for $1,000 or more, and each had been circulating on the streets for years.
Smith was a rarity: a gun-trafficking defendant who took the stand in his own defense. “I was entrapped,” he told jurors yesterday, claiming bizarrely that the money he was taped handling was actually just being loaned.
“The defendant’s story really stretches the boundaries of the laugh test,” assistant district attorney Christopher Prevost said in closing arguments.
Smith faces at least 25 years prison when he is sentenced Feb. 13 before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward McLaughlin.
laura.italiano@nypost.com
Guilty gun seller ‘Scarfaces’ 25 yrs.
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Guilty gun seller ‘Scarfaces’ 25 yrs.
