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This is the face of New York’s gun scourge.
Accused gun dealer Sentell Smith — who likes to quote “Scarface” and pose fanning himself with wads of cash — was so brazen that he carried a loaded assault rifle in a white body pillow to a Chelsea street-corner sale, according to evidence in a frightening Manhattan weapons trafficking trial.
“[Its] just the weapon for the woodlands of New York City,” one law-enforcement source quipped wryly of the camouflage-pattern AR-15-style assault rifle.
Sentell is caught on surveillance tape tossing the Remington .223-caliber rifle — along with its magazine clip and five rounds — into the back seat of an undercover cop’s car at West 27th Street and Seventh Ave., before pocketing $2,000 in return, prosecutors say. The gun is the same caliber as the AR-15-style assault-weapon used in the Newtown massacre.
As he peddled his weapons, Smith seemed to think he was in a movie.
“You f–k with me, you f–king with the best,” Smith declared on another sale surveillance tape, quoting Al Pacino’s character in the iconic ‘80s gangster movie, “Scarface.”
Today, a jury begins deciding if Smith, 30, is guilty under the state’s toughest gun-trafficking statute, first-degree criminal weapons possession. Reserved for the sale of 10 or more guns, the charge carries a sentence of up to 25 years.
“Hold him accountable for what he did,” Christopher Prevost, a prosecutor with the Manhattan DA’s Violent Criminal Enterprises Unit, urged jurors yesterday.
Investigators call Smith a rarity — a trafficking defendant who, despite the months of incriminating surveillance recordings typical to these indictments, decided to testify on his own behalf.
He turned out to be the best witness against himself.
“On the videos, you can see these wads of money that get handed over by the undercover to you, correct?” the prosecutor asked Smith at one point.
“Correct,” Smith said.
“And when you said, ‘When you f–k with me, you f–king with the best,’ you were talking about selling guns?” the prosecutor asked.
“Correct,” Smith again said.
Smith is claiming that he’s just a hapless ex-felon from Alabama who was set up by coercive cops.
“I was entrapped,” he insisted.
Prosecutors counter that Smith kept selling guns even after his arrest last year — using Rikers Island pay phones to broker a co-defendant’s alleged sale of two guns in hopes of raising bail.
Officials also confronted Smith with photos recovered from his cellphone showing him posing with a wide “fan” of cash.
”It was my birthday,” he said, defensively, of the bills he waved and the sporty sweater and thick gold chain he wore in the picture.
“I keep myself pleasantly groomed,” he told the prosecutor.
Smith insisted to jurors yesterday that he never made a penny selling guns and only did so because a confidential informant “pestered” him.
“What I’m saying is, I understand what I did was wrong,” the not-so-bright accused trafficker rambled on the witness stand.
“I do admit that very much,” he said. “What I am saying is that I was entrapped.”
In closings, Prevost scoffed, “The defendant’s story really stretches the boundaries of the laugh test.”
Since being established by Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. in 2010, the Violent Criminal Enterprises Unit, working with NYPD undercover cops, has taken down 15 trafficking rings and removed more than 500 guns from the streets, officials say.
Still, there were 177 shooting victims in the borough last year, resulting in 24 deaths.