This essay appeared in the New York Times on August 30, 2007.
TERROR’S PURSE STRINGS
DANA THOMAS
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Luxury fashion designers are busily putting final touches on the handbags they will present during the spring-
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“There is a kind of an obsession with bags,” the designer Miuccia Prada told me. “It’s so easy to make money.”
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Counterfeiters agree. As soon as a handbag hits big, counterfeiters around the globe churn out fake versions by the thousands. And they have no trouble selling them. Shoppers descend on Canal Street in New York, Santee Alley in Los Angeles, and flea markets and purse parties around the country to pick up knockoffs for one-
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“Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys shop here,” a private investigator told me as we toured the counterfeit section of Santee Alley. “Affluent people from Newport Beach.” According to a study by the British law firm Davenport Lyons, two-
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At least 11 percent of the world’s clothing is fake, according to 2000 figures from the Global Anti-
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“At least 11 percent of the world’s clothing is fake . . .”
An international criminal police organization
Most people think that buying an imitation handbag or wallet is harmless, a victimless crime. But the counterfeiting rackets are run by crime syndicates that also deal in narcotics, weapons, child prostitution, human trafficking, and terrorism. Ronald K. Noble, the secretary general of Interpol,° told the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations that profits from the sale of counterfeit goods have gone to groups associated with Hezbollah, the Shiite terrorist group, paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland, and FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
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Sales of counterfeit T-
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Most fakes today are produced in China, a good many of them by children. Children are sometimes sold or sent off by their families to work in clandestine factories that produce counterfeit luxury goods. Many in the West consider this an urban myth. But I have seen it myself.
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On a warm winter afternoon in Guangzhou, I accompanied Chinese police officers on a factory raid in a decrepit tenement. Inside, we found two dozen children, ages 8 to 13, gluing and sewing together fake luxury-
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What can we do to stop this? Much like the war on drugs, the effort to protect luxury brands must go after the source: the counterfeit manufacturers. The company that took me on the Chinese raid is one of the only luxury-
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The people who lived during the reign of Victoria (1819–
Luxury brands also need to teach consumers that the traffic in fake goods has many victims. But most companies refuse to speak publicly about counterfeiting—
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So it comes down to us. If we stop knowingly buying fakes, the supply chain will dry up and counterfeiters will go out of business. The crime syndicates will have far less money to finance their illicit activities and their terrorist plots. And the children? They can go home.