COLUMBIA
JOURNALISM
REVIEW
SPRING
2021:
J oshua
H unt 4 7
On the Edge The ethics of going undercover
by Joshua Hunt Illustrations by Tim McDonagh
A
few years ago, on a July afternoon in Shanghai, I descended an escalator at the Science and Technology Museum, headed to a vast underground market, and switched on my iPhone’s video recorder. I placed the phone in the breast pocket of my shirt, lens facing out, so that the camera captured the world as it appeared before me: one long, brightly lit hallway after another, lined with shops selling everything from NBA jerseys to iPads—dozens of storefronts stocked with thousands of products, all of them counterfeit. Knockoffs have been estimated to be a four-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year industry in China and Hong Kong. I was shadowing a pair of agents from Pinkerton, America’s oldest private
detective agency, which helped pioneer the field of “brand protection.” Azim Uribe, a thirty-year-old American Pinkerton agent, was working on behalf of some corporate clients to trace and disrupt the illicit supply chains fueling Shanghai’s black market. Uribe had told me that he was relying on a network of informants, often criminals themselves, who sold him information on rival operations. I was relying on Uribe. He and his boss, Angelo Krizmanic, an Australian, had invited me to tag along with them for the day. “We’re going to meet a guy named Kevin,” Krizmanic said as we entered the mall. “He thinks Azim and I are just a couple of expat businessmen, so be careful not to call us by our real names.”
