A Jericho man was arrested for allegedly selling counterfeit The North Face jackets after investigators seized 20,000 of the coats with a street value of more than $1 million, authorities said.
Rahul Biswas, aka Kazi Aziz, was charged with trademark counterfeiting. Judge Joseph Girardi set his bail at $100,000 cash or bond.
“Counterfeit products can pose unseen safety threats to those who purchase them, and the trafficking of cheap knockoffs causes harm to consumers, trademark holders, their employees and families,” Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas said.
Federal agents and investigators with the district attorney’s office seized the jackets after executing search warrants at the 56-year-old suspect’s Old Bethpage warehouse, where the jackets were stored after being shipped from Bangladesh.
Investigators also raided the office of his Jericho-based business, TRB Designs and Resources, Inc., where they seized business records and two Bangladeshi passports, one in Biswas’ name and another in an alias, authorities said.
Neither he nor his company are authorized distributors of The North Face products, but he sold them to other distributors, according to investigators, who described the jackets as inferior quality and not as warm as the real thing. The counterfeits sell for as little as one third the price of the original.
He is due back in court Monday and faces up to five to 15 years in prison, if convicted.
