Six members of a counterfeiting ring face $3.6 million in civil penalties and a 10-year injunction barring them from downtown L.A.’s Vogue District after promoting hundreds of knockoff luxurious objects, the Los Angeles metropolis lawyer’s workplace introduced Tuesday.
Ivan “Puppet” Zamora, Arnold “Hustler” Estrada, David Montiel, Jose Guadalupe Perez Jr., Wilfredo Antonio Belloso Jr. and Julio Cesar Santana bought clothes and niknaks made to look as objects from luxurious manufacturers similar to Burberry, Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton within the Vogue District and Santee Alley way back to 2006, in keeping with the L.A. County Superior Courtroom judgment filed final month.
The topics of the injunction, who had gang ties, additionally provided to promote Xanax and marijuana, in keeping with the judgment.
“Promoting knockoffs is a supply of earnings for some felony gangs, who can use that cash to fund different illicit actions. Furthermore, fakes typically are made by victims of labor trafficking,” Metropolis Atty. Mike Feuer mentioned in a launch. “It’s important to proceed to disrupt gang-involved counterfeit rings in L.A.”
The group reportedly oversaw a complicated operation that operated from sidewalks and storefronts to stairwells and parking heaps and employed lookouts and radios to assist transfer merchandise and keep away from detection.
The six males have been hit with a $2,500 high-quality for the sale of every merchandise made throughout undercover operations; high-quality totals for every particular person vary from $12,500 to $1.3 million. They bought at the very least 1,439 counterfeit objects, in keeping with the judgment, which referred to as that a “giant undercount” of all the products bought and possessed, as a result of it represents solely the objects purchased or in any other case recovered by undercover investigators.
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