I could tell that Sam wasn’t lying, but the bags he had laid out on a white bed sheet were. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hermès, Fendi. They were good, but not quite good enough. Sam [not his real name] came from Western Africa to Italy as an indentured servant. I didn’t get the details of his story when I offered to buy him a bottle of juice this summer while I was, as chance would have it, teaching a course on forgery, but what he did tell me meshed with what I had been told by a member of the Italian Carabinieri military police (a force with which I’ve collaborated over the years in my role as a specialist in art crime). He was selling fake luxury goods, but a very high level of fake that takes an educated eye to spot the difference. He isn’t quite aware of the distinction, but has been told not to accept less than 50 Euro per bag, which makes his wares fairly high-end, when it comes to fakes, when the originals sell in the hundreds.

Sam is part of what is a subsection of human trafficking, not quite a modern-day slave, but not far from it. He volunteered to be smuggled out of his home in Africa to a new life in Italy. He is housed and fed, and bused into the city center, where he sells alongside a team of fellow refugees, catering mostly to tourists. He is paid, but barely, and is expected to repay those who organized his transfer from Africa to the promise of Italy, and who keep him fed and housed, in a system designed for him never to quite buy his independence.

Think that no one get hurts when you buy a knockoff item? You’re sometimes dead wrong