A New Jersey man confessed last night to taking part in the Carnegie Deli massacre – but insisted he was only an accomplice and didn’t shoot anyone, The Post has learned.
Cops charged Andre Smith, 30, with murder after he admitted taking part in the triple slaying in an apartment over the famous Seventh Avenue eatery, police sources said.
Smith, who lives in Newark, N.J., told cops he was a friend of Sean Salley, the prime suspect in the May 10 bloodbath – and blamed Salley for planning the crime and pulling the trigger, according to the sources.
Cops hunting for Salley believe he may have fled to Georgia, where he once lived.
Investigators pinpointed Smith as a suspect after an acquaintance identified him from a security videotape taken in the stairway outside the apartment of marijuana dealer Jennifer Stahl, where the killings took place.
Detectives had been unable to locate Smith – until he walked into the Midtown North station house in Manhattan on Sunday, offering to talk to investigators.
For many hours, he denied having anything to do with the crime.
But finally, last night at about 9 p.m., Smith cracked – admitting to cops that he was with Salley in Stahl’s apartment, the sources said.
Smith said Salley, whom he’d met just days before, told him he was going to rob Stahl but didn’t say he planned to kill anyone.
Smith told cops that after they entered the apartment, Salley took Stahl into a back room, while Smith bound the four other people in the apartment with duct tape, the sources said.
Then Smith said he heard the gunshot that killed Stahl.
Smith said Salley then came back into the room and shot the four other people, the sources said. Two died.
Smith and Salley grabbed about $1,000 in cash and a small amount of marijuana, stuffed it into a knapsack and fled – heading back to New Jersey in Smith’s Ford Escort, the sources said.
There, they divided the loot and split up. Smith claims he does not know where Salley went after that.
Cops say Salley knew that Stahl, 39, who ran a thriving marijuana business out of her apartment.
Police believe he left the area the day after the murder on a Greyhound bus, which he rode as far as Virginia.
Police have now focused their search for Salley on Georgia, where he was arrested in 1998 on charges of carrying a concealed weapon.
A palm print taken after that arrest matched a print found on the duct tape at the Carnegie murder scene, cops say.
Salley, who once worked as a roadie for funk musician George Clinton, has a long arrest record, including busts for robbery and assault.