NEWARK — Dwarfed by towering stacks of boxes stuffed with toy cars, play sets and Christmas lights, federal safety agents armed with bulky lead detector guns and little else comb through mountains of shipments arriving at the nation’s ports.
For months leading up to this time of year, three agents working for the Consumer Product Safety Commission poke and prod thousands of toys, extra vigilant for hazards in the nation’s holiday gifts. Are the cars made with lead? Will the Christmas lights catch on fire? Does the play set pose a choking hazard? Their counterparts who work for the federal customs agency wonder if those designer pumps are real or counterfeit.
Inside a vast warehouse at Newark, the largest port on the East Coast, violations can spill over into various enforcement jurisdictions, and several federal agencies are tasked to sift through the goods.
The Drug Enforcement Agency, for example, might worry about the cocaine stuffed into a Transformers action figure. Customs and Border Protectionwould want to know if the Transformer was a fake. And the safety commission agents might assess whether the toy’s head posed potential choking risks.
Despite those efforts and stricter laws meant to curb the flow of dangerous products into the United States, shoppers are warned during the holiday season to be extremely careful about things they might buy on the street or in discount stores. The consumer safety agency acknowledges that it does not have enough money or staffing to screen, search and seize thousands of faulty products, even though Congress approved an additional $4 million this year for the commission’s port surveillance program.
“I think we’re only looking at a small fraction of the products that are coming in,” said Elliot Kaye, the chairman of the commission, in a recent interview. “What’s keeping us from doing that is funds.”
So, in addition to scouring the crates and monitoring port shipments, the commission recommends that shoppers try to protect themselves from fraudulent or dangerous goods by sticking to established retailers they trust. Many of the toy knockoffs wind up in flea markets, dollar stores and lower-end retailers that cannot, or do not, check every step of their supply chain.
The safety commission does not know much about shipments before they get to America. It can screen a limited amount of data collected by the customs agency, like checking for importers that have violated safety laws in the past.
Using that system, agents can flag suspicious shipments for inspection. They test for lead, one of the most common violations, especially in toys from China, using the XRF guns, which look like a cross between the Starship Enterprise and the label guns used in grocery stores.
In 2007, Mattel recalled nearly a million toys that came from a Chinese contract manufacturer. One month later, China agreed to ban lead paint on toys exported to the United States.
For choking hazards, the inspectors carry small tubes about the size of a young child’s throat. If an object fits inside, it poses a choking hazard and should come with a safety warning.
Some smuggling rings eluded agents for years, as authorities seized everything from fake Betty Boop dolls to Pokémon trading cards, sending them off to an undisclosed location to be incinerated. In some cases, the toys were unsafe. In others, they violated copyright and trademark rules.
It turned out that the toys did not come from a disparate group of one-time offenders, but from a well-organized family business that managed to escape prosecution for nearly a decade.
A group of relatives, some living in the same apartment in Queens, used various companies to import Dora the Explorer watches and Winnie the Pooh bubble blowers. When one company attracted too much scrutiny, they would switch to another, often changing the principals in the process, according to a federal indictment.
The last of the five men pleaded guilty to various safety and trademark violations in August. But the time it took to shut their operation down underscores the difficulty of spotting such sophisticated operations, officials said.
“These are not fly-by-night companies,” said one agent, Stephen Long, deputy chief officer for the customs agency’s cargo processing branch at Newark. “These are very well-organized people who have a clear chain in terms of how business is being done.”
More than 60,000 shipping containers come through ports in the United States every day.
Customs agents are constantly on high alert for fake Gucci bags, Lacoste shirts and Rolex watches in the months leading up to Christmas. But counterfeiters have become experts at making fake Fendis.
In November, customs agents in Georgia seized nearly 200 counterfeit Hermès bags from China that arrived at the Port of Savannah. Officials estimated that the bags could have sold for close to $2 million if they had made their way to the market.
New Yorkers are particularly familiar with such bags. They’re often displayed on the sidewalks, sitting on top of blankets that can be wrapped up quickly should the police arrive.
Luxury manufacturers, eager to keep counterfeit merchandise off the streets, will often teach Customs and Border Protection to look for subtle differences in stitching, zippers and lining that can identify a knockoff. But border agents are also the front line for illegal drug trafficking disguised in an ever-changing list of products.
Around Valentine’s Day, smugglers have filled rose stems with cocaine. During the 2008 presidential election, importers tried to stuff drugs into fake Nike sneakers emblazoned with Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” campaign slogan.
“The methods that the drug cartels have used to organize and essentially smuggle narcotics have been adopted by the counterfeiters in the way that they try to conceal merchandise,” Mr. Long said.
Years ago, Mr. Long said, agents even found 12 boa constrictors sewn up with cocaine. Some of them were still writhingly alive.
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