and 157,000 rounds of ammunition, most of which were manufactured in America. Harrison spent an estimated US$1 million in the 1970s purchasing over 2,500 guns for the IRA. According to Brendan Hughes, a key figure in the Belfast Brigade, the IRA smuggled small arms from the United States by sea on Queen Elizabeth 2 from New York via Southampton, through Irish members of her crew, until the network was largely shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the early 1980s after almost a decade of effort. These Queen Elizabeth 2 shipments included Armalite rifles, and were driven from Southampton to Belfast in small consignments. In the late 1970s, another IRA member, Gabriel Megahey, was sent to the United States to acquire more arms and he was able to procure more Armalite AR-15 rifles, plus a number of Heckler & Koch rifles and other weapons. Again, the purchase of these weapons was funded by Irish American republicans. A batch of M60 machine guns stolen from a U.S. National Guard armory was imported in 1977. Since the conflict began in 1969, the United States Department of Justice began furiously cracking down on the IRA arms trafficking network in America. By 1975, the Justice Department started to significantly weaken the Harrison network by prosecuting dozens of IRA arms trafficking cases, and as early as 1973, the IRA already found more lucrative sources of funding and weapons from foreign states, including Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The prosecutions of IRA gunrunners in America were so great that according to Belfast author James Holland, "Harrison was not aware of any major shipments of arms that had successfully reached the IRA from the U.S. since the late 1970s; that is, before his network's destruction [in 1981]." U.S. House Speaker Tip O'Neill told Northern Ireland Secretary of State Roy Mason in mid-October 1977 that "[t]he flow of guns and money had been greatly reduced." In 1980, De Meo was arrested and convicted of smuggling arms to the IRA. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. However, in a secret meeting at a hotel on Manhattan's East Side in August, FBI agents agreed to a deal with De Meo's lawyer that his sentence would be reduced to five years if he can surrender the IRA's primary gunrunner. At that time, the FBI had no idea who was the prime leader of the IRA arms support