Six men with alleged gang ties have been slapped with $3.6 million dollars in civil penalties for hawking fake Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and other high-end brands at the Los Angeles Fashion District.
City Attorney Mike Feuer said the defendants — who have also been banned for a decade from visiting the district — sold their counterfeit goods in parking lots, alleys, street kiosks and storage units in Downtown Los Angeles, some as far back as 2006.
“Selling knock-offs is a source of income for some criminal gangs, who can use that money to fund other illicit activities,” Feuer said in a statement. “Moreover, fakes often are made by victims of labor trafficking. It’s vital to continue to disrupt gang-involved counterfeit rings in L.A.”
According to the complaint, the defendants– Ivan Zamora, Arnold Estrada, David Montiel, Jose Guadalupe Perez, Jr., Wilfredo Antonio Belloso, Jr. and Julio Cesar Santana — deployed a complex system with “runners ” in the Santee Alley shopping area and used two-way radios to warn each other when police were nearby.
The city attorney also alleged some of the illegal vendors openly claimed gang membership and allegedly offered to sell Xanax and “large quantities” of marijuana to undercover investigators.
The six men were served with copies of the complaint in Oct. 2020, officials said. Five of the six defendants didn’t respond to the complaint, so a default judgement was entered against them in court, banning them from the Fashion District area for a decade, said Rob Wilcox, spokesperson for the L.A. City Attorney’s Office.
Belloso was the only defendant who responded to the complaint, Wilcox said. He is also held to pay $10,000 in civil penalties.
The other five defendants, however, must pay a total of $3.6 million in civil penalties. All the men were banned from the fashion area for 10 years.
While the six defendants are not facing criminal charges for this case, they could be arrested if they violate the injunction order to stay away from the Downtown Fashion District area.
“We made a decision that in this case a civil enforcement action was more effective to solve this problem than a criminal case,” Wilcox told The Post. “In a criminal case, their probation– assuming they were not given diversion– would likely be two years. Using the Unfair Competition Law, we were able to submit 650 pages of evidence and pleadings to the Court to give a full, detailed view of all of the related activities by these defendants that warranted a 10-year ban from the Fashion District.”
The majority of counterfeit apparel and related goods came from China, Wilcox said.
The case was a coordinated operation between the LA City Attorney’s Office, Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and private investigators