For as long as borders have existed, people have been going to great lengths to smuggle things across them.
An extreme example is the Ontario man who in 2014 taped 51 live turtles to his lap and legs, then drove across the US-Canada border. Caught later by investigators after trying to ship the turtles for sale in China, the 27-year-old admitted his crime in a Michigan federal courtroom, where he was convicted of six counts and ordered to pay more than $17,000 in restitution.
While the turtle trafficker’s methods and motive were unusual, he fit a familiar pattern. A smuggler tries to traffic something clearly unlawful — illicit drugs, counterfeit goods, illegal plants or animals, even people — and customs agents try to intercept the contraband. But there’s another kind of American smuggler, a throwback to the last time US tariffs were this high. President Donald Trump’s trade policies mean the country’s wealthy now have strong incentives to go on luxury shopping sprees abroad, then sneak their hauls back without paying duties.
Risk-Reward Calculus
This used to happen in the US all the time. Consider Charlotte Warren, a wealthy heiress included on New York’s Gilded Age “Four Hundred” list. In 1915, when she and her husband, the famous architect Whitney Warren, returned to New York from a humanitarian trip in war-torn Europe, she was accused of evading customs by undervaluing thousands of dollars of French gowns. Warren claimed the dresses, spread across several of her trunks, were cheap “war bargains” from Paris, but agents insisted no such deals existed. An angry judge fined Warren $8,000, implying he only spared her from prison because of her charity work. She immediately paid the penalty with a stack of $100 bills.
If you’re prone to schadenfreude, it’s fun to imagine today’s celebrity influencers or fashion-obsessed billionaires embarrassed at the border in a similar way. But this breed of smuggler is tough to spot. They appear no different from any other affluent traveler, while carrying perfectly ordinary items. Instead of drugs or turtles, agents must look for Swiss watches, French handbags, Italian shoes or high-end South Korean skincare products.
Warren’s dresses faced a tariff of 50 percent, the rate the US recently slapped on imports from India, which fashion experts point out can be an excellent place to go for intricate embroidery and beading like that found on wedding gowns. Switzerland and its astronomically expensive timepieces, meanwhile, were hit with a 39 percent tariff. Even when the new duties are a mere 15 percent — as they are for the European Union — the savings from an overseas shopping trip can be considerable. An American buyer in Paris can apply for a refund on their value-added tax (VAT), bringing total savings to 35 percent or more.
While smuggling is flagrantly illegal, “the risk-reward calculus is certainly more favourable as tariffs soar,” says Susan Scafidi, director of Fordham University’s Fashion Law Institute in New York.
Even when rates were lower, travellers often tried to sneak back products duty-free, Scafidi says, with overseas sales associates and personal shoppers “often happy to advise or assist.” Now US tariffs are the highest since 1935 — an average of nearly 17.4 percent, according to Yale’s Budget Lab. The group estimates that American consumers will pay 35 percent more for apparel and 37 percent more for leather goods such as shoes and handbags.
A century or so ago, wealthy travellers found these sorts of incentives impossible to resist. The rich smuggler was a well-known character in popular media, and a constant frustration to customs inspectors. In 1870, an indebted 22-year-old from a wealthy English family was discovered entering the US with diamonds taped to his calves. In 1910, Carrie Aronson, the wife of a glove manufacturer, was found with thousands of dollars of jewellery hidden in her stockings and other clothing. “It is usually people who are well off and can easily afford to pay the duties who give us the most trouble,” an anonymous official complained to the New York Herald Tribune in 1928.
The temptation to smuggle wasn’t just about saving money. By leaving the US, you could get your hands on merchandise not available at home. People smuggled fancy liquor, wine, cigars and jewelry. Especially enticing were higher-quality apparel and expensive fabrics such as silk and lace. Paris and even Canada were popular destinations for brides getting outfitted for their weddings.
A similar dynamic may start to emerge after Trump terminated the “de minimis” tariff exemption on shipments of $800 or less. As online shopping gets more expensive, it starts making more sense to go check out merchandise in person. (Indeed, Americans who shop abroad IRL can typically bring back up to $800 worth of goods duty-free, as long as their trip was more than 48 hours.) Shopping-focused travel is already common elsewhere, especially in Asia. Embark Beyond, a New York-based travel agency catering to the ultra-high-net-worth crowd, says requests in May for international shopping trips surged 45 percent year-over-year.
The Smuggler’s Playbook
If a customs agent asks you about a luxury item in your bag or on your person, a couple of lies might work (though we don’t endorse them). You could claim that a $3,000 Louis Vuitton handbag was purchased years ago, for example, or that it’s really a cheap knockoff. Just hope no one later checks the credit card receipts. Like our turtle trafficker, smugglers are often caught afterwards, when they do something — such as re-selling their loot — that triggers an investigation.
In recent years, US border agents have rarely bothered to scrutinise wardrobes or open up luggage, but going through customs used to be more of a chore. When the Aronsons arrived in New York on an ocean liner, they declared $100 in foreign purchases, which was then the legal limit. But Carrie looked nervous, so agents inspected the couple’s luggage — almost a dozen bags — and found a clue: a suspiciously empty jewellery box. Two female inspectors took her aside for a body search that revealed a brooch, bracelet and watch.
Knowing they’d be scrutinised, smugglers got creative, using tricks newspapers loved to document. Some wore multiple layers of clothing to hide new items. Gemstones were stashed in shoes, sewn into garments or even concealed in nostrils, ears and stomachs. One man rolled up watches in a sticky substance and stuffed them in his armpits. A shipment of French clocks was discovered in a coffin, with a real corpse included for authenticity.
Dealing with all this subterfuge, agents had to be vigilant. One inspector searched the picnic baskets of Canadians on a day trip to Niagara Falls, saying he worried they might “bring a huge basket full of kid gloves into the United States, instead of sandwiches.”
It’s possible that kind of vigilance will return as Trump’s tariffs take effect. The Justice Department is reportedly preparing a crackdown on smuggling, while a tax and spending law signed by Trump on July 4 hands US Customs and Border Protection billions of dollars in new resources. “This administration has made it loud and clear that they are interested in stopping customs evasion to the best of their ability, and pursuing those who are evading customs to the fullest extent of the law,” says Jonathan Todd, a trade attorney at the Benesch law firm in Cleveland.
For now, however, prosecutors’ primary focus seems to be companies skirting tariffs, not individuals. And most of the new border-patrol money is aimed at intercepting fentanyl and undocumented immigrants, rather than luxury purses or perfume. A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection said the agency “conducts inspections of goods entering the United States in accordance with applicable laws, regulations and enforcement priorities” and “uses a variety of intelligence methods to identify high-risk travellers and shipments in order to concentrate inspectional resources,” including “non-intrusive inspection technology.”
‘A Victimless Crime’
Even if you can break the law for a bargain, should you? Legally, there’s no grey area here. But Fordham’s Scafidi wonders if travellers who dislike Trump might see their overseas shopping as a form of civil disobedience.
Of all the crimes you can commit, smuggling might be the most glamorous. Fictional smugglers like Rhett Butler in “Gone With the Wind” and Han Solo in “Star Wars” get romanticised as sexy rogues. A few US founding fathers were almost certainly involved in smuggling: British accusations that John Hancock illegally brought wine into Boston harbour in 1768 sparked a controversy that helped precipitate the American Revolution.
“There’s absolutely a sense that smuggling is a victimless crime,” says Syracuse University historian Andrew Wender Cohen.
Attitudes can shift, however. In the decades after the US Civil War, paying then-high tariffs was seen as a patriotic duty, says Cohen, whose 2015 book, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century, explores the history of this period. Though some Americans — especially in rural areas — hated paying tariffs, they were the government’s main funding source until a constitutional amendment introduced the income tax in 1913.
Advocates argued that duties upheld American democratic values by keeping out foreign luxuries and protecting US workers from unfair competition from foreign labor, which was often seen as enslaved and exploited. Tariff avoidance, meanwhile, was associated with the former Confederacy, which sustained itself on smuggling during the war.
At a time when women couldn’t vote, the trade debate was also blatantly sexist. Because tariffs were designed to raise wages and “enable men to be the family’s sole provider,” Cohen writes, “protectionists saw the custom house as the guardian of the American family.” Meanwhile, women were seen as natural smugglers, supposedly due to their skill in deceiving customs agents and their inability to resist a good deal. In 1872, one New York newspaper mocked a women’s convention as supporting “free love, free trade, free suffrage, free labour and free soil.”
Today, America’s wealthy may be the best-positioned to smuggle, given their disposable income and propensity to travel. But almost any frequent flyer, such as flight attendants, could seize the opportunity to bring back some duty-free goods to keep or re-sell. The same temptation faces anyone living near the US’s thousands of miles of border with Mexico and Canada.
Nowhere does shopping abroad seem easier than in Detroit, where the Canadian border lies less than a mile across the Detroit River — and, uniquely, to the south. Bootleggers funnelled huge quantities of liquor across the river during Prohibition, and in 1872 a newspaper estimated “at least every tenth woman” making the trip was carrying contraband.
On Detroit’s highways, drivers today pass exit signs warning: “Bridge to Canada, No re-entry to USA.” More than 5 million cars and trucks entered the US via the bridge and a nearby tunnel during the last fiscal year, according to Customs and Border Protection. A third crossing, the Gordie Howe International Bridge, is set to open this fall after seven years of construction. Alongside six lanes for vehicles, it will feature a path for pedestrians and cyclists.
On the Michigan side, acres of state-of-the-art customs facilities await: 36 inspection lanes, a giant X-ray machine for trucks and an agricultural building with animal pens. There’s also a station for checking out the walkers, runners and bikers coming off the bridge. It’s hard to imagine sightseers and exercisers smuggling much contraband into the US — though surely someone will try.
By Ben Steverman