With the holiday shopping season in full swing, police and city investigators conducted a massive raid of alleged knock-off shops along two blocks of Canal Street that ended early Tuesday morning.
Steel barriers kept pedestrians at a distance from the piles of confiscated “designer” merchandise and the open stalls along Canal Street, between Broadway and Church Street, after 29 ground-floor retail shops were ordered shut down between 6 p.m., Monday and 12 p.m., Tuesday.
The raid was the city’s fourth major strike against alleged counterfeit merchants in the Canal Street area this year, according to Jason Post, a spokesman for the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement. No arrests were made, but Post said police seized about $1 million worth of imitation and allegedly counterfeit trademarked handbags, wallets, jewelry, perfume and other items purported to be genuine products of high-end designers like Gucci, Chanel and Tiffany. Post said the raid was the city's largest this year.
"We’re just not going to have any tolerance for people selling knock-offs," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday afternoon. "It’s not fair to those companies that invest in their brand. [There is] nothing wrong with somebody making a less expensive product, but you can’t use the name of a more expensive product and sell it as though that was what it was."
Post said investigators spent the last month buying the knock-offs from stalls spread throughout 10 buildings on the south side of Canal Street, then used the items to get a court’s permission to shut down the vendors. The owners of the 10 buildings raided will not face criminal charges. In order to prevent new counterfeit merchants from setting up shop in vacated stalls, Post said the city negotiates requirements for tenant review with the building owners, and imposes a "hefty fine" if the illegal activity returns.
In addition to the fake goods, Post said police found a series of hidden doors leading to escape routes behind some of some of the stalls.
If the raid were to serve as a warning to other merchants in the area on Wednesday, that effect seemed confined to the south side of Canal Street. Those corners were free of the usual crowd of vendors who sell their goods out of duffle bags. On the north side of Canal Street, however, shops that appeared to be displaying many of the same products police were busy stuffing into evidence bags were open for business.
Since its creation in 2006, Post said the Office of Special Enforcement has conducted more than 20 raids on alleged counterfeit merchants in the Canal Street area. A year ago, the city raided a total of 34 retail stalls east of Broadway, half of them along one block of Canal between Centre and Lafayette Streets.