Mondo Molehill

At around 1 p.m. on Wednesday, June 8, police raided the Mondo Kim's on St. Marks Place. The store was shut down for five hours, and when it was over, cops had confiscated an estimated 500 bootleg CDs and DVDs, together with nine DVD burners, a scanner and the computers containing the store's sales records and customer database. Five employees were arrested and charged with trademark counterfeiting.

That Kim's was in the bootlegging business should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who's ever been there (they regularly have DVD copies of popular films available long before the film's official home video release).

For those customers who've had to put up with a shade too much attitude from the shop's notoriously snotty employees, news of the raid may trigger a tiny flicker of schadenfreude-and that's understandable. But some disturbing questions remain about the bust. For instance, what's going to happen to all those customer records? Will everyone who (knowingly or unknowingly) bought a bootleg at Kim's now be sued by the RIAA?

The real question, however, is this: The NYPD (and most everyone else) knows damn well that the city's bootleg industry is headquartered in a collection of offices and warehouses peppered along Broadway from the mid-20s to the low-30s. Compared to the operation taking place there right now-which produces and distributes millions of counterfeit CDs and DVDs every month-Kim's was something less than small potatoes. So why were they targeted? Was it just because some 21- year-old NYU film student looked down his nose one too many times at a cop who really liked Adam Sandler movies? Or had Mr. Kim simply forgotten to pay his, um, "bill" this month?