Until his death in 2003, Tony Gurka's name was synonymous with one aspect of IPR enforcement. Long before anybody else knew that fighting piracy would itself become a booming industry, Gurka had opened a private firm in Hong Kong focusing on IPR investigations. His influence as a pioneer carries on: the majority of top investigators in Greater China today worked for him earlier in their careers. So when Tony agreed to see me in 2001, it felt as if I were being ushered into the center of things (and not just because I had to pass through six doors to get to his office).

I found Tony standing in front of a large map of China and North Korea. After briefly introducing my research, I jumped to my first question, about cigarette counterfeiting in China. “What you should know,” he said, “is that these days counterfeiting of top-end foreign brands is sometimes done in North Korea, not in China. All materials are Chinese, but the final assembly takes place at a factory in North Korea, and then the containers are shipped back to a Chinese port. In fact, there is a forty-foot container full of counterfeit Marlboros en route from Nampo to Dalian right now. We won't inform Chinese Customs about it – we will let this one go. But next time, when they send in a really big shipment, we will get them.” A forty-foot container, I thought, is not big enough?