From The New York Times
Time was, if you wanted a knockoff purse, you went to Canal Street in Chinatown and looked for a store with a back room. The police raided these stores and took the bags, but more always arrived. Finally, the handbag companies began to sue the landlords of the buildings, who in turn drove out the purse vendors.
By 2011, the operations had moved from Canal Street to surrounding streets, like Hester and Mott. There, vendors held paper catalogs or their phones with pictures of purses. A customer would choose one, the seller would make a call and someone would hurry out of a nearby apartment building with a bag.
Now, the vendors and their suppliers, like so many New Yorkers, have turned to that recession-proof New York City industry geared toward hoarders and the cramped: self-storage.
At a CubeSmart self-storage building in Ridgewood, Queens, three units — 5153, 5154 and 5156 — looked like all the others from the outside. Behind the metal doors and padlocks of neighboring compartments sat the Christmas ornaments, outgrown baby clothes and high school yearbooks of hundreds of New Yorkers, tucked away for a modest monthly fee.
But these three lockers held something different this month. Their contents had most likely been shipped from China in large containers, hidden among legitimate goods and transported to the city.
Inside the lockers were hundreds of purses — counterfeits of the high-end handbags sold in flagship stores eight miles away on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
On Nov. 1, the police raided the CubeSmart building with a search warrant, seizing knockoffs labeled Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Burberry, among other brand names. Two Queens residents, Jing Ye, 43, and Xu Jing, 46, were arrested and charged with counterfeiting.
The setting for the raid, far removed from the traditional black-market operations in Chinatown, suggests a continuing game of hide-and-seek.
“We keep building better mousetraps, but all we’re doing is getting smarter mice,” said William P. Ryan, a retired New York City police detective and president of Ryan Investigative Group, who has conducted investigations for the companies who produce the real bags.