The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 125

Palm Beach Post-Times, Sunday, November If, ll7iFF U.S., Other Nations Cracking Down On Makers of Counterfeit Merchandise Catching the Phonies By DAVID DUGAS UnlH Prt NifanMliMMl NEW YORK A Houston housewife, Mrs. John H. Winn, stepped into the Car-tier jewelry shop in Mexico City's Maria Isabel Sheraton last August and paid 4,900 pesos ($215) for a wristwatch. "My Husband wanted me to nave one, she said. The shopkeeper assured her the elegant looking timepiece would be serviced by any Cartier dealer in the United States.

So when it quit running a month later, Mrs. Winn sent it to the New York jewelry firm. "They returned it and said it was counterfeit It couldn't be fixed. There was nothing to the watch." Mrs. Winn since has written to the Maria Isabel Sheraton, to ITT which owns the international Sheraton Hotel chain, and to her U.S.

senator, John Tower She now knows the Cartier company has tried in vain to close six Mexican jewelry shops that falsely claim they are part of the prestigious firm. Nor are Cartier's problems confined to Mexico, as Fred Graves recently discovered. The Miami lawyer, formerly head of the consumer fraud division in Florida state Attorney General's Office, purchased what he thought was a bargain Cartier watch in a Miami shop. "I figured maybe somebody had returned it. There was no question In my mind it was real.

I was very proud of it. Then one day the stem came off." Graves, now in private practice, hopes to get his money back from the shop but still has the watch. "I don't want to give the evidence away," he says. Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery. But a growing number of com known labels.

Walker says the coalition wants customs laws toughened and a crackdown on makers of counterfeit merchandise. William N. Walker, counsel for the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, displays some counterfeit merchandise bearing well- "Mexico protecti them (counterfeiters)," Stanley Wentling, manager of the Gucci shop in Palm Beach, said. "We can do nothing about stopping them. But the products are so inferior, they're obvious." Wentling said counterfeit Gucci merchandise shows up occasionally for exchange that the Worth Avenue store in Palm Beach.

Tom Foster, manager of Cartier Inc. in Palm Beach, said he has seen a few fake Cartier watches, but most of the counterfeit merchandise shows up in New York. Not all products are vulnerable to counterfeiting, of course. No one has yet tried to sell an Imitation Boeing jumbo jet But Walker cites Bell Helicopter Corp. as a victim of counterfeit spare parts and litigation stemming from helicopter crashes.

"Dunlop had never bad a problem until it discovered the company's top line tennis racket was being copied. There are stories of (imitation) Salk vaccine being imported into the U.S., of pacemakers (also imitation) being sold internationally," Walker says. Some companies have declined membership in the coalition, fearing even the suggestion their products are being faked could hurt business. Others, like General Mills, feel the organization is a good insurance. The company reports only "minimum problems" with foreign counterfeiting of its Gold Medal flour brand and even the Monopoly game made by its Parker Bros, subsidiary.

"But we can see where we could have problems in the future," says a General Mills executive. "That's why we decided to join the coalition. We wanted to lend our moral support." The faking of Gucci leather goods and Louis Vuitton luggage and bags, not to mention Adidas T-shirts, takes its toll not only in company profits but in lost consumer money, time and confidence. James Bikoff, general counsel for Car-tier in New York with an office in the company's Fifth Avenue store, estimates "in the last 12 months we've had at least 100 people come in here with fake Cartier merchandise from Mexico just Mexico asking either a refund, or repair or exchange. We have to refuse them.

We tell them, 'Unfortunately you've bought a counterfeit "We've got counterfeiting problems with just about every possible luxury ranging from perfume and watches to jewelry and clothing. And it's escalating. has always been infringement of the Cartier trademark, but in the past few years we've found a tremendous increase in the number of cases. In the past two years, Cartier has instituted, in the U.S. alone, more than 100 lawsuits involving watches.

The worldwide figure is probably double or triple that amount. We've had litigation in virtually every state." In his office he displays a brandy-sized bottle with a fake Cartier perfume label from Venezuela and just in a copy of the Cartier "tank-style" watch bearing a name cleverly contrived to look, even at second glance, like Cartier. The cheapest Cartier watch currently retails for about $450. Cartier President Ralph Destino explains why he thinks some buyers ignore the possibility a seeming bargain actually is a fake. "No one would pay $50 for a fake watch.

Everyone would pay $50 for a stolen watch. It adds a certain mystique if a watch is hot. Nine out of 10 people will buy it." i i If II 'I kV II 1 i i II i ii I i Can You Spot the Phony? Recognizing the famous Cartier signature is the only giveaway. The genuine watch is to the left, the fake one to the right. Many corporations in the United States and abroad, including Cartier jewelers, have formed a coalition against makers of counterfeit mer chandise.

panies in the United States and abroad are finding the counterfeiting of their products a costly boost for their corporate egos. Pierre Cardin recalls his astonishment at finding his name on a store in Tehran. Stopping to investigate, he found it stocked with clothing bearing his distinctive trademark and labels all of it fake and of inferior quality. The shop was closed through the intercession of his friend Empress Farah Diba, the shah's fashion-conscious wife. American fashion designers have problems, too.

"I was shocked and amused the other day to go by Saks and see one of those boys on the street hawking shirts like Yves St. Laurent, Pierre Cardin and Bill Blass," says Blass. "They were in no way connected with us. They were simply shirts with the names on them. A friend of mine stopped and bought some because she thought it was amusing.

I was the only American designer they were selling." Recently some 20 companies banded together to seek a worldwide crackdown on the copying of their products and illicit trading on their good names. The group was the brainstorm of Levi Strauss the San Francisco manufacturer of jeans and sportswear. The firm's own international security force recently closed in on some 150,000 pairs of counterfeit Levi jeans in European customs offices and traced them to an English firm's Taiwan factory. With Wall Street attorney William N. Walker as its counsel, the group currently counts among its members Cartier jewelers, Dunlop sports equipment, General Electric and General Mills, Germany's Puma sporting goods manufacturer, Sam- sonite luggage, the French fashion empires of Cardin and Christian Dior and the Federation of Swiss Watch Manufacturers as well as distilling companies in England and France.

The coalition's goal, says Walker, is a toughening of customs laws and a crackdown on makers of counterfeit merchandise estimated to cost legitimate manufacturers $100 million a year. Disney also loses on unauthorized use of its characters on children's games, books and toys. Walker cites instances where clothing bearing fake well known labels has been seized by customs authorities and later freed, either for import or for reexport to another country, simply upon the removal of counterfeit labels which can be reattached later. The solution, says Walker, is an international agreement requiring customs offi- cials to confiscate counterfeit goods, ending any chanoe they eventually will find their way to market. He ranks Taiwan as a leading producer of counterfeit merchandise.

"It's notorious. And there is a great deal of it in South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. Italy as well." Computers Finding ie Qyiet Compaimy Way Into Markets The Computer Store is one of a half-dozen outlets strung from Massachusetts to Florida in a fran chise arrangement run from Bur lington, by Richard F. Brown, a former products man for Digital Equipment Co. NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL LIFE is proud to announce the appointment of DONALD R.

WILKINSON, CLU as district agent for Palm Beach, St. Lucie and Martin Counties. Brown and Faber figure a retailer needs from $125,000 to $150,000 to open a computer store with half an inventory mix aimed at the commercial market, half toward the con sumer market items bought by CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) -Tucked between a submarine sandwich shop and the Elegant Tailors, is a new breed of retailer, one of many stores throughout the nation that hope to sell 500,000 personal computers next year. It's the kind of place where a window-shopping customer walks in, orders an Apple II computer over the counter for about $1,200 and lugs it in its box to his car.

That scenario has happened once since the store was opened in August by Don Orifice, a 24-year-old computer bug from Melrose, who would rather retail than study for his college degree. But thousands are betting the scene will become commonplace in a business with what many see as an awesome future. "I've been in computers 21 years," says Edward E. Faber, who runs what he claims is the country's largest franchise retail computer the hobbyist or home user. Independent operators may find the field suddenly crowded with major manufacturers.

Digital, the $1.4 billion Maynard, microcomputer maker, has opened its first retail store on an ex DONALD R. WILKINSON, CLU Don, native of Belle Glade, Florida, is a graduate of Palm Beach Junior College and Florida State University. He has been associated with Northwestern Mutual Life since 1973 and is a Million Dollar Round Table member, winner of National Sales Achievement Award and National Quality Award. He has recentlly received his Charter Life Underwriter certificate chain from his base in San Leandro, Calif. "I can say without reservation the growth of the retail computer market is the most exciting thing that's happened in computers in my time.

The market is expanding faster than the capacity of manufacturers to supply it," he says. Faber has 55 stores in Australia and the United States under his chain name, Computerland. That's down from an earlier prediction of 90 by the end of the year but enough so he claims the four or five opening each month is a faster rate of expansion than set by McDonald's hamburger chain. He said he will open his first European store in Brussels early next year. "Two years ago, the market for personal computers did not exist," says an analyst for the Cambridge think tank, Arthur D.

Little Inc. "It was a nonmarket Thirty-thousand personal computers were shipped in 1977, 250,000 will be shipped this year and next year, it will approach 500,000, a $1 billion perimental basis in a shopping mall in Manchester, N.H. Steve Watson, a Digital marketing specialist, says another experimental store will open in downtown Boston. Unlike Orifice's store and Faber's chain, which offer a variety of computer brains, the Manchester store offers only DEC models, starting at about The DEC store, Orifice's Computer Store and others aim to sell to the small businessmen, whom large computer salesmen ignore in their quest to sell items $40,000 and up to firms. Typical buyers often return five or six times, asking questions all the time, before they buy, say Orifice and Watson.

Orifice said that was the experience of Fred Ruland Sr. who bought an Apple computer and accessories for his Watertown, firm, which makes nuts and bolts and slip clutches. He uses it to prepare invoices. "It cost him $3,000 for what is essentially a smart typewriter," said Orifice, who took over the Computer Store for Brown from a failing operator last summer and has given up a degree course at Boston University to concentrate on the enterprise. The store and a consulting business will earn him about $25,000 this year.

Most computer stores are on the West Coast The East is just beginning to fee what Faber called the retail phenomenon. "We will see nothing but expansion." be says. The Quiet Company 8 NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL LIFE New Convenient Location Intersection of 45th Street and 1-95 5061 Corporate Way, Suite 420 West Palm Beach Phone 689-1103 Many of them will be sold through retail outlets such as Orifice's, a storefront on Massachusetts Avenue in a residential neighborhood about six city blocks from Harvard Square, the heart of Harvard University. A red sign over the store front proclaims it "The Computer Store." In the window is a television screen and a display of computer rhess games. 1.