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Illegal vendors on Canal Street are back in full force, taking over a four-block stretch with displays of knockoff designer purses and watches — as cops scramble to bust up the never-ending counterfeit chaos.
Dozens of bootleg bag peddlers have set up tables and rugs on the pavement from Centre Street to Broadway, leaving only a five-foot sliver of sidewalk for pedestrians, after seemingly endless attempts to get rid of the hucksters.
The cut-throat street cloggers were aggressively jockeying for space this week as they hawked everything from fake $80 “Rolexes” to $250 Dior bags and $20 Prada sunglasses.
“I can’t believe this is Manhattan — it doesn’t look like it,” one local groused of the area, which looked more like the seedy streets of Bangkok than the Big Apple.
Other illegal hucksters spread out their fake fashion wares on sidewalk blankets, selling knockoff Prada sunglasses and fugazi luxury bags.
When a Post reporter visited Friday, an irate vendor shouted, “Get the f–k out of here!” and smacked the phone she was using to record the scene.
A police officer who responded to the incident cited the vendor, who was selling knockoff sunglasses, with harassment — but made no arrests for the illegal vending.
One of the vendors was also cuffed by cops on Canal Street at around 4:20 p.m. Thursday, though it wasn’t immediately clear why he was arrested instead of others.
“You didn’t see me selling nothing!” the vendor shouted as he tried to slip away from the police officer, according to footage obtained by The Post.
The police officer then wrestled with the seller before restraining him between two cars. At least two other arrests were also made on the street Thursday, Post reporters observed.
But law-enforcement sources said their hands are tied by New York’s “revolving-door” justice, describing the situation as a frustrating game of “whack-a-mole.”
Cops can sweep the area and issue summonses or desk appearance tickets, but the vendors are back on the street the very next day, sources said.
“The idea that you’re going to solve this problem with cops would mean you would need to flood the zone every day. And then the problem migrates; City Hall Brooklyn Bridge, Midtown, on and on,” one source said.
“No one is dying over it so how do you create the appetite for aggressive criminal enforcement? There is none. That’s why it’s catch and release,” said another source.
But neighbors and local business workers are fed up with the chaos on Canal, calling it a quality-of-life nightmare.
“On certain streets you cannot even pass by,” said Wellington Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation. “You have to wait for people to squeeze by.
“It’s a game of cat and mouse,” he told The Post. “You put pressure on one corner and they move down to the other corner, and the next morning they’re back.”
Sajib Datta, an employee at the nearby Loknath Gift Shop, said she’s also had enough.
“Sometimes they block our entrance and my boss has to call the police. The city’s losing money on it because the buyers aren’t paying taxes,” she said. “I think it should stop.”
The unsightly illegal open-air marketplace in Chinatown has cropped up frequently in recent years — with NYPD conducting a raid as recently as July.
A police department spokesperson, when asked for comment, pointed The Post to an operation in June where $151 million in bootlegs goods was recovered.
So far this year, the NYPD has attempted to stamp out illegal vending on Canal by making 88 arrests, issuing 335 summonses, confiscating over 10,000 bags of peddler property and seizing 66 vehicles that were being used in the illicit operations, a spokesperson said.
The occasional police raids have forced the illicit merchants to bolt when police show up to confiscate their ill-gotten goods — only for them to return when the coast is clear.
Federal immigration agents even stormed the street in April with no lasting effect.
“Law enforcement comes and they quickly dash dropping bags and they run down the block,” he said. “We do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. We need a new methodology,” said Chen.
“The volume is so huge and most is a desk ticket appearance so at the end of the day the ticket doesn’t mean much or even the item confiscated is only a drop in the bucket. That’s why the legislature needs to do more,” he said.
After winning the election in November, Mayor Zohran Mamdani put out a video decrying immigration operations on Canal Street — and urging New York immigrants to “stand up to ICE.”
The illegal merchant problem then worsened after the democratic socialist took over, elected officials wrote in a letter earlier this year.
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Lawmakers at the city and state level have urged the Big Apple to fix the problem.
“To address this persistent problem in Canal Street, we urge all of your agencies — the NYPD, the Department of Worker and Consumer Protection, and the Department of Sanitation — to engage with us to find a solution to this quality-of-life- crisis,” they wrote in a letter addressed to Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch January 14.
“Entrances to small businesses and residential buildings are completely blocked by vendors, making it difficult for people to enter their homes or for customers to support the businesses in our districts. Theseneighborhood residents and small businesses face regular harassment and in some cases haveallegedly experienced physical assaults,” the letter said.
But Mamdani shied away from saying the NYPD should be out on the street clearing the vendors, and instead decried ICE after the agency conducted raids late last year.
“Addressing the quality-of-life issues on Canal Street is a priority for the Mamdani administration and we are committed to using a whole-of-government approach to doing so,” City Hall spokesman Sam Raskin said.
The Department of Sanitation — which assists the NYPD in enforcement operations but focuses on situations where vending has created dirty or unsafe conditions and setups that block entrances to stores or subways — said it issued 5,870 summonses and warnings to street vendors this year.
That was a 17% spike compared to last fiscal year, which the agency attributed to an increase in 311 requests for vendor enforcement, according to data from most recent mayor’s management report.
— Additional reporting by Joe Marino, Craig McCarthy and Amanda Woods
