It Was You, Charlie
Two things — one, isn’t it “easy” to allow smuggled goods into the country if you set up a sting to do it? And two, when you think about it, the fact that an undercover customs agent can pose as a bribe-taking longshoremen’s union official and stay undercover sort of says something about the longshoremen’s union:
Posted: December 6th, 2007 | Filed under: Follow The Money, Followed By A Perplexed Stroke Of The Chin, Law & OrderFederal officials announced the arrests yesterday of 10 people they said were members of an international smuggling gang that illegally shipped millions of dollars’ worth of counterfeit apparel into the New York region from factories in China, often in falsely labeled shipping containers.
The smuggling scheme, involving fake merchandise with a retail value of more than $200 million, was one of the largest smuggling operations ever discovered, the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan said.
The charges, revealed yesterday in a complaint issued in Federal District Court in Manhattan, followed a yearlong investigation in which an undercover customs agent posed as a longshoremen’s union official and took nearly $500,000 in bribes to let the illegal shipments pass through the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey.
The undercover agent had nearly daily contact with the smugglers, who included Chinese manufacturers, a customs broker and a husband-and-wife team that owned a Brooklyn trucking company, officials said.
While officials declined to say how the investigation started, the complaint said that in August 2006, Michael Chu, 70, of Manhattan, approached the undercover agent and asked for his help in moving the illegal containers through the port. Mr. Chu paid the agent $100,000 in cash bribes to smuggle about 20 containers carrying fake consumer goods with a value of more than $24 million, the complaint said.
The apparent ease with which the containers — 40 feet long, 8 feet wide and 9 ½ feet high — were moved through the port with false bills of lading highlights frailties in the security system at the region’s ports, said Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney in Manhattan.
