A crackdown on underground cigarette dealing spearheaded by the Queens D.A.'s office has resulted in 12 arrests and the seizure of over 4,000 cartons of bootlegged cigarettes. At a press conference yesterday, D.A. Richard Brown stood behind a mountain of cigarette cartons which have been seized over the past three months; the smokes were smuggled into New York from overseas and out of state, and included the seizure of 22,000 untaxed cigars and nearly $400,000 in money and property. Heh, looks like investigators really smoked out these smugglers. Brown said the defendants cost NYC and the state $270,000 in tax revenue.

"Cigarette smuggling to evade state and local taxes is a multi- million dollar industry," Brown said in a statement. "It is a highly profitable tax-free cash business for those involved in it. However, it cheats taxpayers who must dip into their pockets to pay higher taxes. And it cheats the government as well by fueling an underground economy which does not pay much needed State and City taxes." For a counterpoint, we reached out to smokers' rights advocate Audrey Silk, who sent us this rebuttal from her tobacco-curing compound:

"And it cheats the government by fueling an underground economy which does not pay much-needed state and city taxes."

That's rich. The whole point of their high cigarette tax is to get people to quit smoking. I appreciate Mr. Brown being candid in letting everyone know that when the nannies succeed then everyone else will have to pay higher taxes. At the same time it illustrates that only one segment of society (those "damned smokers") is burdened with paying an exhorbitant tax that benefits all the rest. Who's being cheated? "Prosecutors say the haul amounted to $11,000 in lost tax revenues." Ignored is that this is no average tax rate that's being skirted. It's at a level meant to be malicious (government driven deprivation of the ability to purchase a particular product). You can't "lose" what wasn't yours to take in the first place. It's the unethical going after the government manufactured "criminal." But for their use of tax for the purpose of social engineering this situation wouldn't exist. And how much more money are they wasting enforcing this "underground economy" that government is responsible for?

Busted suspects include one Bobirjon Shakirov, who was allegedly caught traveling from Uzbekistan to JFK airport earlier this month with 170 cartons of cigarettes in his bags (a tax value of $10,982). Also in the hot seat is Giuseppe Sciulara, a Middle Village man who was the focus of a long-term investigation. Last year investigators searched his car and storage facility and found eight "master cases" (each containing 60 cartons) of various cigarette brands. They took another 566 cartons from his residence, plus two bags containing a total of $45,620 in cash, a loaded .25 caliber handgun, assorted rounds of ammunition and a “BB” gun.

Brown noted that besides the lost tax revenue, the cigarettes recovered pose an even greater health risk because they have bypassed U.S. safety inspections and some contain extremely high levels of tar and nicotine. They're also in violation of a New York State law requiring cigarettes to be "fire safe"; "meaning that they include a mechanism designed to extinguish the cigarette if the smoker discontinues its use for a small period of time." In short, these cigarettes are bad for you.

But despite the impressive photo op, Brown's haul is still dwarfed by a cigarette smuggling bust back in 2004, when the feds seized a multi-ton cigarette cache at JFK. Back then you could get a carton of bootleg Marlboros for $13—and smoke it in the public park of your choice. (You still can light up in the park, but only for one more month, at which point you risk getting... oh, a dirty look from a non-smoker?)