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Software forging is safer than drug running. Narcotics money, often bearing residues of cocaine or heroin, can be detected by drug-sniffing dogs. Software pirates, on the other hand, often ship their profits back to Asia via U.S. Priority Mail. Besides, the penalties for getting caught are less severe, although that is changing. Law-enforcement agencies, including the fbi and the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, have made investigating this kind of crime a priority.
Leading the new war on software gangsters are two detectives who, like the criminals they are pursuing, have spent the past 20 years in the traditional underworld of homicides, robberies and narcotics. They are Detective Jess Bembry and Sergeant Tom Budds of the Los Angeles County sheriff's department Asian Crime Task Force. Early this year, Bembry flew up to Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters, where he took a crash course in uncovering software fakery. The company sent him home not really expecting that the department's 11-man team would come close to breaking an international counterfeiting ring. But after the raid last week, Bembry and Budds had confiscated a total of $18 million in illegal software as well as $1 million in cash. They had also arrested eight suspects, and are looking for the man they believe is the ringleader of the major Microsoft-bootlegging ring. If only the folks at Microsoft could train a dog to sniff floppy-disk residue on dollars.
--REPORTED BY ELAINE LAFFERTY/LOS ANGELES