NEW YORK (AP) – A New Jersey man who was arrested after he and an accomplice tried to sell Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez’s stolen wedding video back to the couple for $1 million pleaded guilty Thursday to attempted grand larceny.

Steven Wortman, 49, a retired postal worker from Sayreville, admitted in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court that he and Tito Moses, 31, tried during telephone negotiations to get amounts ranging from $250,000 to $1 million for the stolen video.

When Justice Bonnie Wittner asked Wortman whether he and Moses demanded the money in telephone calls between Dec. 20 and 27, 2005, “in exchange for not releasing (the video) to the general public,” the defendant replied, “Sorrowfully, yes.”

Wortman pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny, a misdemeanor, in exchange for a sentence of three years probation. Wittner scheduled his sentencing for Aug. 4 and said he will be allowed to report to probation officials in New Jersey.

A video copy of Lopez and Anthony’s June 2004 wedding was in a laptop computer that was in Anthony’s Cadillac Escalade when it was stolen in Linden, N.J., in October 2005. The salsa star’s car was recovered in Newark but the laptop was gone.

Prosecutors said Wortman and Moses, an ex-convict from Newark, called Anthony’s production company and talked with a man they thought was a representative of the celebrity couple. That “representative” was in fact an undercover detective.

At one point, the undercover detective balked at the demand for $1 million and Wortman threatened to destroy the laptop and its contents, prosecutors said.

The detective, when negotiating later with Moses, haggled him down to $250,000 and the defendant agreed to bring the laptop to a diner at Sixth Avenue and Grand Street, prosecutors said. Police met the two men there and arrested them.

Moses pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny two weeks ago in exchange for a sentence of 18 months to three years in prison. Wittner said she will sentence Moses after he is sentenced in a related, pending New Jersey case and that the terms will run concurrently. His New Jersey case involves the theft of Anthony’s SUV.