Kelly also said that last year “detectives learned through an unrelated undercover narcotics investigation that guns were being sold in the Oceanhill community of Brooklyn.” 
 
 Above the Country Kitchen restaurant on Atlantic and Saratoga avenues, within the 81st Precinct, they discovered a 26-year-old aspiring rapper, Mathew Best, who lived on Saratoga Avenue. Walker met two times last year with the middleman and the undercover officer at the rapper's Brooklyn recording studio to sell the undercover firearms, the indictment said. “Best posted several photos of guns and cash on Instagram, and in the video he posted on YouTube, he boasted, ‘Packing more guns than the Air Force,’ ” Kelly said. “There is no doubt that the seizure of these guns – the largest bust in the city’s history – has saved lives,’’ Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement. Walker of Sanford, NC, and Earl Campbell of Rock Hill, SC, would bring up their haul to New York on their favorite mode of transportation — cheap buses to Chinatown — and transfer them to Brooklyn-based broker Omole Adedji, authorities said. New York Police Department officials and prosecutors announced details of the case on Monday, citing it as another example of a persistent black market in which firearms from the South can sell for three times their original price in the city. Wiretap evidence showed that sellers in the Carolinas knew the weapons were destined for New York, said Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan.
– The NYPD has made its largest gun bust in recent memory, seizing 254 firearms in a 10-month operation. The guns were smuggled from North and South Carolina into New York City by two gunrunners, who hid the weapons in luggage on discount buses, then purchased by an undercover cop pretending to be a gun broker across a number of transactions, the AP reports. The alleged smugglers, Walter Walker, 29, and Earl Campbell, 24, and 17 others—including Matthew Best, an up-and-coming rapper from Brooklyn—have been arrested. Best's involvement is an interesting one: Authorities stumbled on the gun smuggling operation during a drug investigation, after the rapper posted Instagram photos of handguns and cash. Turns out, Best was helping Walker sell his guns, the New York Post reports. Walker and Campbell bought the guns both on the black market and through gun dealers, and would then stuff a dozen or more into bags and courier them on cheap Chinatown-based bus services, the AP reports. On one occasion, authorities say, Campbell brought along his girlfriend, who carried a deconstructed assault rifle in her zebra-striped suitcase. She then tried to reassemble the gun by looking up a YouTube instructional video on her phone, but couldn't put it back together. The undercover officer bought it for $1,100 anyway.