He also called the DEA to ask if it had ordered the hit on the sunglasses. A DEA official, says Glaser, laughed. "Sunglasses, we have nothing to do with that," Glaser says he was told. "We only do drugs."
Monty Drake denies saying he was connected with the DEA and claims the shop employees voluntarily surrendered their bogus Oakleys. Drake also says he had the final word in the counterfeit wars. Days after his failed attempt at the seizure, he returned with ten HPD officers. This time, he seized more than 100 pairs of sunglasses. Three shop owners and employees on Harwin were arrested.
Wandering among the shops of Harwin, running your hands through the piles of merchandise haphazardly arranged in many of the stores, it can be hard for the average shopper to get particularly exercised over the issue of fakes, even if the FBI has labeled theft of intellectual property the crime of the 21st century. (Intellectual property is a broad term that covers any original work with a registered trademark, including everything from screenplays and software to the Ralph Lauren polo player logo.)
True, the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition points out that the economic costs of counterfeiting exceeds $200 billion a year. The group -- a lobbying organization representing manufacturers, investigators and patent attorneys -- also warns darkly that 750,000 jobs, and billions in tax revenues, are lost due to foreign counterfeiting of U.S. products. Mark Green, New York City's Consumer Affairs Commissioner, has estimated that counterfeiting has cost his city more than $350 million in lost tax revenues.
There are no figures available for what Houston may have lost in tax revenue to sales of fakes, though obviously some money fails to make its way into the city's coffers. I can testify to that first hand: when I bought a Dooney & Bourke look-alike forest green and black vinyl key chain at Kas Trading in the 8000 block of Harwin, the clerk, who recognized me from a previous visit, attached, without asking, a gold Dooney duck to the generic $2 ring. A real Dooney key ring in leather sells for $20 in Macy's. I paid cash for my downscale item given upscale cachet. There was no sales slip, no tax. When I asked about the tax, the clerk smiled. "For you," she said, "no tax."
A bargain for me, but not necessarily a bargain for the city of Houston. But that's not all, according to the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition. The lobbying group suggests that my purchase not only robbed my hometown of its rightful cut, but that by buying my $2 key chain, I had furthered the aims of organized crime. Because counterfeit operations are relatively risk free, and offer enormous profits, the Coalition says they are fertile ground for serious bad guys. The Coalition suspects everyone from the Islamic extremists linked to the World Trade Center bombing in New York to the Irish Republican Army of being involved in producing and selling counterfeit goods to fund terrorist activities.
But Customs official Dan Young is a bit skeptical of such claims. He's never noticed a substantial link between counterfeit goods and organized crime on Harwin, he says. Instead, he offers, "Harwin is mostly about people trying to make a buck."
Or trying to save one. Court documents show that the attorneys for the seven shop owners arrested in the 1994 raid on Harwin argued not only that there was no fraud involved, since both seller and buyer were fully aware that the merchandise was fake, but that customers who shop on Harwin are not the same as those who purchase legitimate bags at Saks Fifth Avenue or Neiman Marcus. Therefore, the defense attorneys argued, companies such as Dooney & Bourke don't suffer any lost sales or profits.
But judging from some of the expensive cars seen parked on Harwin, this probably isn't the case. Bargain shopping isn't necessarily a respecter of incomes. At least one Houston stockbroker admits to shopping both in Neiman's and on Harwin. She bought a fake Chanel bag in the backroom of a Harwin store recently, but in the past she's paid $1,800 for a real one.
These days she doesn't carry either bag. The proliferation of fake Chanel bags has, in her mind, killed the bag's status, whether it be fake or real. Steve Abbott, a Houston attorney who represents Dooney & Bourke, puts it another way, saying, "A symbol of status has now become a symbol of suspicion."
That argument doesn't sway Harwin booster Hedy Feder-Glaser, who blames the runaway popularity of the counterfeits on the designers who insist on selling purses the average person can't afford. (A Harwin clerk agrees. "Who is to say who is cheating whom?" she asks. "Is a Chanel bag really worth $1,800? Or is charging $1,800 the real crime?") Feder-Glaser adds that she considers the rise of the knockoffs the "rise of the proletariat."
Who would have thought it? The rhetoric of Marx and Engels being resurrected in defense of unfettered capitalism. But then again, maybe the final secret of Harwin is a simple one about the human desire that motivated the early followers of both communism and laissez faire economics. "People want the good life, and they will get it any way they can," says Feder-Glaser. "They aren't robbing for it. They're just buying a purse.
