Counterfeiters, Santee Alley, and Organized Crime

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — An article that ran in yesterday's LA Times makes a throw-away comment that I found interesting. Twice in this piece on Santee Alley they connect counterfeit merchandise to organized crime.

In the last few years, said Acosta, who oversees the Los Angeles Police Department's Central Division vice squad, downtown Los Angeles has become the nation's second counterfeit capital — after Canal Street in New York City. And LAPD, he said, has begun finding connections between those fake goods and organized crime.

and...

"But we're seeing the impact of these acts," [LAPD Asst. Chief George Gascon] said. "We forget that if you are purchasing this kind of merchandise, you are engaging in a conspiracy of theft" that can extend to organized crime.

Though this connection is made wider than just counterfeit DVDs, the organized crime connection has been widely talked about there. But is there any reality behind it? Articles that ran Friday on boing boing and Wired News would say no.

Asked to cite actual U.S. convictions involving organized crime, the RIAA and MPAA instead presented a handful of pending piracy cases against warez networks, commercial replicators, a few members of street gangs and a smattering of individual drug dealers -- but no John Gotti or Tony Soprano.

"It's not organized crime families, as in 'the mob,'" admits Bradley Buckles, head of the RIAA's anti-piracy unit and former director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "But large groups engaged in organized criminal activity are involved."

Interesting reading.