Customs on the trail of contraband cigarettes

In September of 2008, the Customs Department made a bust on a container load of fake Marlboro cigarettes. At that time the eight hundred and fifty-five cartons were valued at over four million dollars. This past Wednesday, Customs made another bust that yielded in excess of nine hundred cartons of counterfeit Marlboro cigarettes made possible by the profiling techniques used by the department. Custom officers vetted the manifest of a particular vessel and highlighted several suspect containers. One was checked at the Customs Inspection Shed and inside the forty foot container, they found the cartons of fake Marlboro cigarettes. It did not take the department long to figure out that something was wrong because what was declared on the manifest was a string of very different products. The goods originated from China and were destined to a company within the Free Zone. Our investigations reveal that the owner of the Free Zone company already has a previous run-in with the law for other bogus items, Microsoft chips. In the latest incident, the company is known to export the counterfeit cigarettes to Mexico under the name of Blue Moon. The preliminary investigation which is underway includes the joint efforts of the Customs Department, the Police Department and the US Embassy. Though the customs department has not valued the cigarettes, that figure could be up in the millions of dollars.