Inside New York City's blackmarket DVD trade.
On
a chilly morning last winter, Eric Sandoval descended the cellar steps
of a West Broadway warehouse. Ushered along by an old Chinese man,
he made his way through a narrow, dimly lit hallway, passing several
rickety wooden doors along the way. At the end of the hallway, the
man opened what looked like a door to a circus funhouse: it was wooden,
and about five feet high. Sandoval ducked as he entered the room.
At the far wall of the cramped space, illuminated by fluorescent lights,
were what Sandoval had come for: dozens of stacks of pirated DVDs.
Sandoval
shuffled through discs from every genre: children’s movies,
historical dramas and romantic comedies. Many had opened in theaters
only days before. Their slim, black cases had high-quality cover art,
but lacked the usual adornments. There were no blurbs, no special
features, no film company logos. Inside the cases were generic, label-less
white discs. Sandoval selected 75 of these DVDs, packed them in a
blue gym bag and handed the man $115. Before leading Sandoval back
out onto the street, the Chinese man dialed a lookout on a cell phone
to see if any cops were patrolling the area.
Sandoval’s
distribution center is ground zero in one of New York City’s
most visible underground economies: the illegal DVD trade. This sprawling,
intricate maze of thieves, salesmen and consumers stretches from New
York to Russia to New Zealand, snagging more than $3 billion from
the movie industry every year, according to the Motion Picture Association
of America (MPAA). But the MPAA puts New York City at the heart of
this illicit web, claiming it’s the point of origin of 50 percent
of the bootlegs circulating the globe.
Sandoval,
as I’ll call him, is a 30-year-old Dominican-Puerto Rican street
vendor, and a former gang member who spent five years in prison for
manslaughter and drug trafficking before he found his career peddling
movies from a card table in the Financial District. He has large,
bug-like eyes and two scars that run the length of his left cheek
(he got them in prison, he says, from rival gangbangers). He wears
tan construction boots, baggy jeans and a baseball cap—usually
the Mets—turned to the side. He reads “both” papers
every day (the Daily News and the Post), and is a natural salesman,
constantly plugging his other “hustles” (selling discount
jewelry and Gucci purses on ebay).
Sandoval’s
day begins across the New York Harbor, far from his Wall Street card
table. Every morning at four, he leaves his large, Staten Island apartment,
and walks past the yellow and maroon awnings on Stuyvesant Place to
the Staten Island Ferry. By 5 a.m., he’s in a vending cart,
peddling hot coffee and blueberry muffins to the Wall Street crowd.
The job, which he found through an inmate he knew in prison, is lucrative
enough that he keeps it as a steady income. It’s also how he
got his start in the counterfeit DVD trade.
He
used to sell untaxed, Indian reservation cigarettes from his cart
until he was charged a fine for a tax violation. Moving on to counterfeit
DVDs, which appeared on New York City streets a little under a decade
ago, was a natural step for him. When the bootlegs began garnering
more cash than the blueberry muffins, he set up shop a few blocks
away and began the routine that he has today: coffee in the morning,
DVDs in the afternoon. Sandoval knows he’s breaking the law,
but he feels no remorse. He even sells counterfeits to his brother’s
girlfriend, who in turn peddles them at her office job. “It’s
not like I’m selling crack,” he says.
At
noon, Sandoval packs up the cart and heads east, past Wall Street’s
towering skyscrapers to a meet up with a rotating team of one or two
other guys who sell DVDs with him. He trusts them to watch over his
goods if he’s not there, and if they leave, the DVDs are handed
off to a street vendor around the corner (who also sells a few bootlegs
himself). In return, Sandoval shares a third of his net profit, which
can reach $1000 a week.
Frankie,
a short, squat Puerto Rican with slicked back hair, a finely trimmed
goatee and the finesse of a car salesman, is one of Sandoval’s
best peddlers. Before Frankie’s recent offshore venture to Puerto
Rico, where he and his wife opened up their own bootleg DVD business,
he and Sandoval would be on the corner all afternoon. They would usually
stay until five or six—or after the evening rush—working
the crowd, flinging one-liners and sales pitches like they were on
the set of an infomercial. “Buy one for your girl…or your
guy, whatever your pleasure,” Frankie would often shout to men
wearing suits and overcoats. Or: “Not happy with them? Bring
them back, I’m always here,” and: “Hey girl, this
would look good with your flowers.”
Their
customers are as varied as New York itself: young and old, black and
white, Latino and Asian. They buy new releases, b-horror flicks and
porn—one of Sandoval’s best sellers. One regular who works
in an office building around the corner from the DVD table makes good
on Frankie’s promise when he gets a bad bootleg. The customer,
who looks like a cop—he has slicked back hair, a blue suit and
an NYPD Counter-Terrorism Task Force keychain around his neck—trades
in his crummy copies for good ones, and every week he faithfully places
orders with Sandoval. Many customers even have Sandoval’s cell
phone number in case, say, they get a sudden urge to watch Cinderella
Man—or, more likely, Bomb Ass White Booty 3. Customers might
have a vague sense of how they get a film the day after it’s
released in theaters, but few know the specifics.
The
process usually begins in the theater where films are “camcorded,”
or copied directly from the movie screen, with a tiny, fist-size camcorder
held steady by a tripod. The pirate then uploads the movie to a computer,
and sends it out over the web to international markets. The movie
is also burned to a dozen or so master copies. Those copies are then
sold to labs all over New York City for anywhere from $50 to $200,
depending on the film’s popularity, according to the MPAA.
Once
a film lands in a lab, tens of thousands of copies are produced on
dozens of DVD towers—or large, CPU-like devices that contain
several burners in each machine. With each technological advance,
this process is sped up. In the pre-DVD era it took pirates the length
of the movie to produce a copy of a video. With the latest technology,
that time is more than halved. If a lab has just a handful of towers,
with a few burners per tower, it can produce thousands of DVDs in
an eight-hour work cycle. From the lab, the discs are then sold to
distributors, who in turn sell to individual peddlers like Sandoval.
Depending
on how briskly Sandoval’s business is doing, he’ll meet
with his distributor to purchase new DVDs in bulk anywhere from two
to three times a week. He pays a little over a dollar per DVD, and
resells them for five a piece.
As
with most links in the supply chain, Sandoval doesn’t know anything
about his distributor. They don’t even speak the same language.
When Sandoval asked the man for a beastiality flick he sells called
Horsefucker, the man looked dumbfounded. So Sandoval let out a Mr.
Ed-style neigh. Without blinking, the man opened the drawer of another
cabinet and removed a disc. On the cover was a cheap Photoshop image
of a man and a horse. Above the image, in all caps, was the movie’s
title: “HORSEFUCKER.”
Sandoval
says he can’t imagine that he’ll still be on the street
hustling ten years from now. But at the moment, he doesn’t have
much of a choice. He was hired for the last legitimate job he applied
for—a janitorial position at a downtown gym—but was fired
as soon as his background check was completed. Supplementing street
vending with DVD bootlegs, he says, affords him a lifestyle that provides
at least a glimpse of his perfect world. “All I want is the
basic shit,” he says. “A house, dental care, two vacations
a year. I just want a little money and a little peace.”
For Bill Shannon, the chief east coast investigator for the MPAA,
Sandoval is part of a much larger problem. A former organized crime
investigator for the New York Police Department, he’s investigated
hundreds of piracy operations from Puerto Rico to New York to Ontario.
He argues that pirates are hurting “the little guys” in
the movie industry. “People’s livelihoods depend on this—and
not just the millionaires in Hollywood,” he says. “The
kid that sells popcorn and the ticket-takers, their livelihoods are
on the line.”
Sitting
at a large table at the MPAA’s offices in Yonkers, Shannon’s
pail skin and white, slicked-back hair look ghost-like beneath the
room’s fluorescent lights. He’s a small man wearing an
outfit that seems too large for him—giving him the look of a
cartoon character—but he his voice booms within the small conference
room.
Like
other MPAA investigators all over the world, Shannon’s job is
to collect piracy evidence, which he then gives to the NYPD’s
“trademark team”—the division responsible for busting
bootleg operations. As it is, New York City’s counterfeit laws
aren’t quite what the MPAA wants them to be. Peddlers that are
arrested with under 100 DVDs are charged with a civil violation—or
a $250 fine that carries less criminal weight than a misdemeanor.
The MPAA is lobbying for a felony charge across the board, but local
lawmakers aren’t biting. At a meeting last December, Shannon
and other MPAA reps met with legislators and lawyers to pitch the
idea. It bombed. (Shannon later said that policymakers are “reluctant”
to “upgrade” the laws.)
Counterfeit
DVD peddlers are nearly everywhere in New York City, Shannon says,
though much of the business is concentrated in immigrant communities.
“There’s no average profile,” he said. “We’ve
seen West Africans, Mexicans and Chinese. We’ve seen people
who are here legally and illegally, and people who have been here
a short time and a long time. It runs the gamut. It’s a crime
of opportunity.” Shannon says he’s seen no connection
between counterfeiting DVDs and traditional organized crime, nor has
he seen a link between terrorism and bootlegging—though the
latter has become a pop culture favorite, turning up as the subject
on shows like Law and Order.
Most
MPAA investigations begin with a tip from either a hotline call or
a confidential informant. Shannon says he largely stays away from
peddlers like Sandoval, concentrating instead on labs and distributors.
Most
of the labs in New York City are in the North Bronx, while distributors
tend to concentrate in Manhattan. Giant warehouses along “Counterfeit
Alley” (the area where Broadway intersects Fifth and Sixth Avenues)
house tens of thousands of discs. Further south, around Canal Street,
there are hundreds of small cellars—like the one on West Broadway—
that are chopped up into a dozen tiny rooms for a constant rotation
of black market renters. Distributors often rent a room for a month
or two and then move into another basement.
Camcording,
the biggest problem for the investigators, is extremely difficult
to track. “We’ll put two or three field investigators
into a theater to go up and down and look for that little red light
on the camcording machines,” says Pete Rogers, also a former
organized crime detective who’s now an investigator with the
MPAA. “But that’s very hard nowadays because everyone
has a cell phone”—meaning that little red lights are ubiquitous.
The industry has come up with two techniques that use infrared light
to interfere with the recording process, but ultimately neither proved
viable.
If
the MPAA is unable to stop the recordings, it can track them. “Every
film has a watermark on it. So if a film shows in the Lowes Kips Bay
on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week, that film has a specific
mark on it, and we know it’s in that theater, and we know the
days it was there,” he said. “Now we’re able to
say which ones came from New York, which ones came from Houston, which
ones came from Miami, which ones came from Ontario,” says Shannon.
Not
everything about the cat-and-mouse game Shannon plays with pirates
is so grim. In fact, he has developed a grudging respect for the techniques
used by the more sophisticated pirates. Shannon explains how many
clean up their films with editing programs, slicing out a sneeze here,
the silhouette of a moving body there. Hearing this, Rogers retrieves
a recently apprehended King Kong disc and puts it in a DVD player
at the far end of the conference room.
A
blue screen with several yellow bars is the first image to appear
on the massive television set. A few moments later, a giant Universal
globe spins across the screen and the audience claps. The camera is
completely still. “This one looks to me like it’s been
cleaned up,” Shannon says. Then the film’s title pops
up on the screen. The “k” in “King” is missing,
as is the “g” in “Kong.”
“It’s cut off. That’s another telltale sign,”
Rogers says.
“Are you sure?” Shannon shoots back. “I thought
the name of the movie was ‘Ing Ong.’” The men snicker
as the film’s opening shots of monkeys, rhinos and elephants
in a zoo flash across the screen.
“Look at it, it’s beautiful,” Rogers says.
“They’re getting better and better and better,”
Shannon adds, nodding his head.
After watching for a few minutes, Shannon offers me a copy. “It’s
just for your home viewing,” Rogers says, laughing.
Back
in Staten Island, Sandoval, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt,
sits in a large plush chair in his living room. It’s a barren
space with wood floors, white walls and a weight set in the corner.
He’s emptied his blue gym bag at one end of the sofa, lining
up dozens of DVDs as if his couch were a table at a flea market. His
brother’s girlfriend, who I’ll call Joan, is scheduled
to come by this afternoon with her two kids to pick up a handful of
bootlegs.
Business
hasn’t been so good for Sandoval lately. Frankie was arrested
and hauled in to the police station, where they confiscated a gym
bag packed with DVDs. They charged him with a civil violation, and
he was back out on the corner the next day. Sandoval was arrested
around the same time, and also charged with a civil violation—though
he says the cops didn’t take his stash. Other members of Sandoval’s
crew were also arrested. One pimply 19-year-old kid from the Bronx
“sang like a bird”—as Sandoval put it—telling
them everything about the operation.
These
brushes with the law make Sandoval nervous. He’s been on parole
since he got out of prison three years ago, and if he were charged
with a felony, he’d go right back. He doesn’t think the
police have much interest in arresting peddlers except, he says, when
“Hollywood wants them to crack down.” This is why he keeps
his counterfeits in the family.
When
Joan shows up, she rummages through the DVD selection. Her young daughter
and son bounce around Sandoval’s apartment, poking through the
selection, begging for cartoons and Disney flicks. “You can’t
look at these,” Joan says, fending her kids off from Sandoval’s
porn stash. “There are certain movies that aren’t for
kids’ eyes.”
“Yeah,”
Sandoval says, leaning forward in his chair. “They’re
called ‘nature videos.’”
Joking,
he suggests she get them the “Ashanti sex tape,” the R&B
singer’s movie debut. Dazed by her children’s nagging,
Joan hands them the DVD.
“No,
it’s the Ashanti SEX tape,” he says, laughing as he scolds
his sister-in-law. “You might as well wrap it up with a bag
of weed.”
Joan
tears the DVD from their hands and throws it on the couch. A minute
later, she’s on her way out door—but not before Sandoval
offers her some of his discount jewelry, which he’s laid on
the coffee table next to the sofa. In tiny plastic bags, there’s
a silver Celtic cross attached to necklace. The price tag reads $990.
There’s a diamond-studded silver cross for $1,620. There’s
a diamond ring for $1,430.
Explaining
that he’ll cut the price of the jewelry in half, she declines,
and marches out the door with her two children. Sandoval shrugs, leans
back in his chair and puts his feet up on the coffee table.
The
next day, he’s back on the street. His jewelry business isn’t
doing too hot, so he sticks with what he knows will sell: coffee and
blueberry muffins in the morning, DVDs in the afternoon.
Sandoval
has a new crew of peddlers, and a new batch of discs. He’s still
haranguing customers, telling them that he’s always on the corner,
and always available for a refund.
But these days, he’s looking over his shoulder, watching out
for the Hollywood crackdown.
