Three weeks later, Manager Chiang’s first batch of superfakes arrived at their rental unit, ready to be mailed out across the country to their shoppers. The Bottega Veneta Pouches and Dior Book Totes and Valentino Rockstud bags, in all the latest colors and finishes, were so precisely rendered that a one-to-one grading didn’t do them justice; these were in a tier of their own. The shoppers returned the bags to unsuspecting boutiques, while their real counterparts flew out of Winnie and Ava’s eBay store. Profits doubled, spurred by handbag fanatics on the online forums, who raved about Winnie and Ava’s merchandise as well as their customer service.
Where do they get their bags? How do they get them so quickly? How do they stay in business? more than one user asked. I bought my beige-and-black Gabrielle from them at retail when there was a waiting list at Chanel, and other sites were selling lightly used versions at a premium!
To keep up with demand, Ava hired more shoppers and fanned them out to buy, buy, buy. (And return, return, return.) And through it all, Winnie and Ava reminded each other to never get complacent or let down their guard. They communicated with their shoppers via an anonymous Telegram account; they ignored interview requests from nosy fashion bloggers and journalists; they paid a service to scrub the internet of any details that might link their identities to their business.
In the end, though, despite their meticulousness and rigor, all it took was a single innocuous act to send the entire enterprise crashing to the ground.
The instigator was one Mary-Sue Clarke of Canton, Ohio, an otherwise unremarkable woman who happened to have turned fifty in October, three months after Ava signed the new contract with the Maks. To mark the occasion, Mary-Sue’s husband, Phil Clarke, gave her a Louis Vuitton Clapton wallet in the iconic Damier canvas. Phil had purchased the wallet at a Neiman Marcus in Orange County while on a business trip.
As Winnie’s private investigator would later report, Mary-Sue was thrilled with the gift—that is, until a mere few days later, when one of the tiny golden screws holding together the weighty clasp suddenly loosened and disappeared, rendering the wallet unusable.
To be fair, this was a design flaw on the part of Louis Vuitton and not indicative of the Mak factory’s workmanship, not that the distinction would have mattered to Mary-Sue. Dismayed by the quality of this so-called luxury item, she paid a visit to her neighborhood cobbler, who told her it’d be impossible to find a screw that would be a perfect match. She had no choice, then, but to get in her car and drive to the nearest Louis Vuitton boutique, an hour away in Cleveland.
There, a saleswoman with a sharp asymmetrical bob donned a pair of white gloves to examine the wallet—an affectation that Mary-Sue must have found theatrical, pretentious. The woman assured Mary-Sue that the wallet would be sent off to their workshop for repair, which would, of course, be complimentary because Louis Vuitton stood by their goods.
Mary-Sue left satisfied. From the car she phoned her husband to tell him the good news but was interrupted by another incoming call. It was the store manager. In a clipped manner he informed Mary-Sue that further inspection had revealed that the wallet wasn’t one of theirs. He used that phrasing exactly.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“This isn’t a Louis Vuitton wallet, madam.”
“What are you talking about? It says LV all over it.”
“I’m sorry, madam, but it isn’t an authentic Louis Vuitton.”
“How can that be? It’s from Neiman Marcus.”
“I suggest you take it up with them.”
After more back and forth, the manager told Mary-Sue that store policy technically dictated that they confiscate all inauthentic goods, but if she returned before the end of the day, she could retrieve her wallet.
And so she pulled off the freeway—in rush hour traffic, no less—and went back to the boutique. The young woman who’d been so helpful earlier handed over the wallet pinched between thumb and forefinger, as if it were a dead fish.
Once she was back on the road, Mary-Sue called her husband and berated him. How could he have humiliated her so? Why hadn’t he simply told her the truth? What else had he lied about? Would the diamond solitaire on her finger turn out to be cubic zirconia?
Phil Clarke, by nature calm and taciturn, knew to let his wife finish her rant. When she finally paused to take a breath, he said, “It cost one thousand and eighty dollars, plus tax. I kept the receipt in case you wanted to exchange it.”
That evening, he and Mary-Sue called the Newport Beach Neiman’s. They spoke to a supervisor who apologized profusely and offered an immediate and full refund, plus thirty percent off their next purchase. The supervisor also requested that they mail back the wallet for further investigation.
From there, things would swiftly unravel.
Overnight, Neiman Marcus tightened their policies, subjecting all returns of luxury leather goods to an extra layer of scrutiny. One of Winnie and Ava’s most reliable shoppers, a Korean American grad student who used the screen name Purse Addict reported walking into the Boston Neiman’s in Copley Square, right before closing time, to return a Balenciaga City superfake in hot pink. She grew wary when the sales associate unzipped the bag’s inner pockets and felt around as though looking for a breast lump, and then squinted at Purse Addict’s credit card (though the woman was way too young to need reading glasses). Turning her back on Purse Addict, the sales associate got on the phone and called for an “authenticity expert” to come to the floor.
Immediately, the shopper lunged for the replica and slipped out the doors.
A couple days later, another shopper ran into the same problem at a Neiman’s in Dallas. This time, the sales associate hung on to her credit card and never gave her a chance to get away. Thankfully the Bottega Veneta woven clutch in question, a particularly excellent replica made from fine intrecciato grosgrain, passed muster, and the return was accepted. But the shopper was so shaken she resigned minutes later.
Soon, it was clear that their Asian and Asian American workers were being racially profiled. What had once been their greatest strength—their perceived docility and obedience, their relative invisibility—had become their weakness. The narrative flipped. Now their Asian features read as scheming, perfidious, sly. Word spread from Neiman’s to Saks and Nordstrom and the rest. All the department stores unleashed stricter return policies. Profits plunged. The Maks demanded to be paid for inventory, even if the superfakes were simply piling up in their South San Francisco office unit, their car trunks, their homes.
Once law enforcement got involved, Winnie and Ava studied their predicament from every angle before concluding they had no choice: the handbag scheme had become a liability, and, like a gangrenous foot, they had to saw it off to survive.
But even if they shut everything down before the most incriminating information was uncovered, it was too late to clear their names.
Sitting before her laptop in her Los Angeles penthouse, Winnie purchased a ticket on the last flight out of LAX and then called Ava. “There’s a midnight flight from SFO to Taipei with one seat in business class.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ava said. “I can’t just pack up and go.”
Winnie looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows of her bedroom. How she would miss this sky, so clean and blue, with clouds so fluffy they appeared painted on. She said, “I’m going to spell this out for you. We are a step away from being arrested and thrown into prison for months, maybe years. I’m getting the hell out of here, and I strongly suggest you join me.”
“And what do you advise I do with my son?”
“Is Maria there?”
“Winnie, don’t be absurd.”
Winnie jumped up and paced the room. “It’s temporary. We can figure out the details later.”
“You want me to leave my kid behind indefinitely?”
Winnie turned and kicked the wall, stubbing her big toe. “What do you think will happen when you get locked up?”
Her words were met with silence on the other end.
“Ava?” said Winnie. “Ava, did I lose you?”
“I’m here,” she said, her voice eerily composed.
“There’s no other way, you hear me?” Winnie drummed her fingers on her dresser, trying to figure out how to make her friend understand. “There’s no other way.”
“Wait,” Ava said. “I think there might be.”