Think twice before you pay cash for a fake Gucci bag this holiday season – you may be funneling money straight to Osama bin Laden.
Law-enforcement agencies and trademark specialists are actively exploring links between counterfeiting organized-crime groups and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas.
“More than 60 percent of New York City’s counterfeit trade is run by Nigerian organized-crime groups working directly with al Qaeda,” said Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy and author of “Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed – and How To Stop It.”
Americans buy $200 billion worth of counterfeit items every year, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In New York City, the comptroller’s office has estimated a $1.25 billion loss to the city economy from counterfeiting, said Barbara Kolsun, general counsel for handbag designer Kate Spade.
“You can’t complain about the subway going to pot if you’re buying into this,” said Kolsun, whose client loses $70 million a year to fakes.
New York City counterfeiters thrive in Chinatown and “Counterfeiting Alley” – 25th Street to 32nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Even before 9/11, New York’s Joint Terrorist Task Force reported a Manhattan counterfeit T-shirt ring helped finance the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing.
And by 1996, the FBI confiscated 100,000 counterfeit T-shirts from a ring run by followers of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was later convicted of plotting to bomb New York landmarks.
More recently:
* A raid of a Midtown souvenir shop last fall yielded a suitcase “full of counterfeit watches and . . . flight manuals for Boeing 767s, some containing notes in Arabic,” according to a report submitted to Congress by the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, which represents companies ripped off by knockoffs.
* A similar raid of a knockoff purse shop in Manhattan uncovered faxes relating to the purchase of bridge-inspection equipment, according to the IACC. In May, truck driver Iyman Faris pleaded guilty to plotting with al Qaeda to cut the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and topple the landmark crossing.
* Two weeks later, New Jersey cops investigating a Lebanese gangster found fake drivers’ licenses and lists of suspected al Qaeda terrorists – including the names of workers from the knock-off purse shop, the IACC said.
Although cops and anti-terrorist task forces know where the counterfeiters are, they say they are too ubiquitous to stop.
“We can do a raid today and tomorrow there will be more out there,” said Nancy Sherman-Kratzer, assistant director of fraud investigations at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.