August 13, 2004

The perils of bargain shopping on Canal Street

Time Out's cover story this week, "I Was an Undercover Spy in Chinatown," makes some tenuous links between the sales of knockoff purses and watches to the funding of terrorism, but it does have a few interesting anecdotes, mostly from anonymous sources. It refers to "Canal Street - a maze of tunnels and hidden chambers harboring everything from caches of counterfeit goods to indentured servants -- illegal aliens toiling over watch facades in puddles of their own urine." And while the FBI is said to back the theory that the 1993 WTC bombing was in part funded by the sale of fake Hard Rock T-shirts on Canal Street, another anonymous source in the story says if terrorists are getting money from selling knockoffs now, its the sellers in Midtown, not Chinatown, who are suspect.

August 13, 2004 05:34 PM in Cheap Stuff, Downtown, Shopology

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