George de Meo was an

Italian-American Italian Americans ( it, italoamericani or ''italo-americani'', ) are Americans who have full or partial Italian ancestry. The largest concentrations of Italian Americans are in the urban Northeast and industrial Midwestern metropolitan areas, ...

arms dealer, most famous for supplying weapons to the

Irish Republican Army The Irish Republican Army (IRA) is a name used by various paramilitary organisations in Ireland throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Organisations by this name have been dedicated to irredentism through Irish republicanism, the belief th ...

(IRA) through their operative George Harrison. De Meo lived near Harrison in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, having moved there with family in 1949, and owned a gun store in the city. Having

mafia "Mafia" is an informal term that is used to describe criminal organizations that bear a strong similarity to the original “Mafia”, the Sicilian Mafia and Italian Mafia. The central activity of such an organization would be the arbitration of d ...

connections, De Meo supplied guns not only to the IRA, but also to Cuban rebels. George De Meo was convicted of federal charges of conspiring to send arms to the IRA, in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1980.

References

Sources

''The rebel with a cause…''
Western People (Ireland). 23 February 2005. *Robert D. McFadden. (6 November 1982)

''The New York Times'' Arms traders People from Brooklyn Criminals from New York City American gangsters of Italian descent Year of birth unknown Year of death unknown {{Ireland-paramilitary-bio-stub