Intellectual Smugglers

Prosperity's wand seems to have touched almost every kind of business man in the Common Market -- even the smugglers. Europeans have always been adept at slipping all sorts of contraband across their tangle of national boundaries, but the smugglers were usually small-time dealers in such items as coffee and cigarettes. Today's smugglers are sophisticated businessmen who shun 50 lbs. of coffee in favor of 50 tons of steel, or deal in complex electronic calculators rather than cigarettes. Nowhere in Europe do these "white-collar smugglers" thrive more than in West Germany, where harassed customs officials figure that roughly $160 million worth of smuggled goods a year gets by them. Last year the cost to West Germany in uncollected duties was $15.5 million.

Horse Goulash. The new class of big-time duty dodgers is made up of businessmen of outwardly high repute, worthy of being called mein Herr. Unlike other smugglers, they do not usually seek to avoid customs altogether, in stead try to beat down the duty they have to pay by a host of wily methods. They lie on their declarations, and use forged documents, doctored contracts, paper shuffling and tricky bookkeeping to fool the customs men. Their schemes often involve bringing in cheaper merchandise from behind the Iron Curtain: canned meat from Poland and Yugo slavia, steel, machinery and porcelain from East Germany, heating pipe from Hungary and even camel hair that probably originates somewhere in Asiatic Russia.

Using a third country as a false point of origin is a favorite trick. One German steel firm shipped East German steel to the duty-free port of Antwerp, filed off its origin markings and cleverly forged papers to make it appear as if it came from Belgian mills, from which it could be imported at a low duty within the Common Market. East German machines are sometimes shipped to Amsterdam, where they are doctored and remarked as Swedish products to make a big saving on import duties. Some Germans have become "meat millionaires" by working the same dodge to bring in canned Yugoslavian horse meat -- labeled beef goulash -- and Ethiopian pork and beef. A meat company imported almost 3,000,000 lbs. of beef from South America by sending it first to Ireland and Australia, making false bills and shipping it on to Germany; the swindle was discovered when someone forgot to extract a bill of lading from a South American harbor.

Bogus Honey. Germany has tried to check the third-country gambit by routing all import certificates through the Customs Criminal Institute of Cologne, the only one of its kind in Europe. To ferret out forgeries and check suspicions, the institute's Falstaffian head Dr. Ludwig Franzheim, and his staff have a central smugglers' file of 62,000 names, a list of 7,000 suspicious shipping agents and boat owners, and dossiers on 6,000 unreliable truckers. But, mourns Franzheim, "intellectual smuggling dominates today," and already the smugglers have found ways to beat the tariff collectors by falsifying customs declarations.

A chewing-gum base from the U.S. entered Germany recently falsely labeled "raw gutta-percha"--a duty-free item. Hard-to-recognize electronic devices are classified as items simpler and cheaper; high-grade steel is listed as low-grade. "Many goods are thoroughly packed," says a badgered customs man, "and with great amounts coming through, we can't unpack everything."

But Cologne's sleuths are using scientific methods to keep the smugglers on the defensive. They recently caught an importer who was shipping in great quantities of honey labeled as Common Market produce. Cologne's labs made chemical tests of the honey, proved that the pollen from which it was drawn belonged to flowers that were native only to South America.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.