But Moritz never showed up in New York. Berger was not prosecuted, and Mrs. Schmidbauer was given a six-months suspended sentence.
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One of the largest smuggling rings dealing in Swiss watch movements was broken up by customs agents in 1956 on a tip received from customs officials in Germany. This ring involved a foreign shipping firm working with an American importer, an American shipping official, and a dishonest customs broker in New York.
This case began to develop when four packing cases of roughly the same dimensions arrived in the foreign trade zone in Germany from Switzerland. Two of the cases, documented as containing camera tripods, were consigned to a firm in the United States. The other two cases were documented as containing 4,488 Swiss watch movements.
A German customs officer became suspicious when he saw two men transferring the watch movements from their original cases into the cases marked as camera tripods. The Customs officer made no move at that time to interfere with the transfer of the merchandise, but he notified his superiors and an investigation was begun. The Germans at that time believed that it was an effort to avoid payment of German customs. When they realized that the transfer was being made as part of a scheme to violate American customs laws, the U.S. Customs agent stationed in Bremen was informed of the facts in the case. These facts were forwarded to agents in New York, who were alerted to be on the lookout for the arrival of the boxes labelled as carrying “camera tripods.” Several days later a German customs official advised the Customs agent in Bremen that the two suspect boxes, marked IH74 and IH75, were being shipped aboard the SS Black Falcon manifested as camera tripods valued at $200.
The SS Black Falcon arrived at the port of New York on January 23, 1956, and docked at the Smith Street Pier in Brooklyn. Customs agents kept the two boxes under surveillance. They were watching as the boxes were moved from the pier by a trucker to a warehouse. Agents hidden in the warehouse saw the trucker and the broker switch the watches from the cases and replace them with camera tripods.
Had this scheme succeeded, the chiselers would have paid duty on camera tripods valued at $200 rather than on watch movements valued at more than $50,000.
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Stephen Schrieber of New York City was one of the cleverest of the chiselers. He was a tall, thin, balding man in his middle years who was engaged in the import-export business. Customs had no reason to suspect Schrieber of wrongdoing until agents got a tip that he was smuggling gold out of the United States, selling it on Europe’s black market, and then smuggling diamonds into this country.
On April 29, 1952, Customs agents learned that Schrieber was preparing to make another trip outside the country and that he had booked passage for Cherbourg, France, aboard the SS Queen Mary. Schrieber also had arranged to export a car on the Queen Mary as “accompanying baggage.”