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From: Food and Drug Administration/Office of Criminal Investigations & US Department of Justice/Southern District of Florida

January 23, 2019

Abhishek Shukla and Harish Shabhai Panchal, both citizens of India, entered guilty pleas, along with the India-based company, Jubilee Tobacco Industries Corp., to conspiring to smuggle counterfeit cigarettes into the United States.

Benjamin G. Greenberg, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Peter H. Kuehl, Acting Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Office of Criminal Investigations (FDA-OCI), Miami Field Office, Mark Selby, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (ICE-HSI), Miami Field Office, and Scott Israel, Sheriff, Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO), made the announcement.

From: la Repubblica | Blog

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The conditions that de Luzenberger describes are not new. Nor is the involvement of children in criminal activity. Photographs from the beginning of the 1900s onwards show children selling contraband cigarettes, a local “industry” that one smuggler kingpin of the 70s described as being as important to the city of Naples as Fiat was to Turin. But while petty crime among children struggling to survive has always been as common in Campania’s capital city as it was in Dickensian London, the widespread use of minors as drug runners, and in some extreme cases even killers, began in the mid-1990s. With many of its members in jail as a result of government crackdowns, the Camorra began to systematically use children under fourteen, because minors were immune from prosecution.
Kids in the 1940s selling contraband cigarettes
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