A former Hermes craftsman created the perfect fake Birkin and built a knockoff empire. The fashion industry would stop at nothing to take him down.

IT was just past 9 a.m. on a Thursday in late January 2012 when Romain Chollet-Ricard stepped out of a flat in a wealthy Paris suburb and got into the German sedan parked outside.

Driving through the city’s rush hour traffic, past the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysées, the sedan stopped briefly at a car park near the luxury boutiques on Avenue Montaigne before continuing onto the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. On a quiet residential street, a man and woman, both Asian, appeared on the sidewalk, and Romain got out of the car to open the trunk. His childish face, framed by a mop of brown hair, gave him the air of a genial young businessman.

He carefully unwrapped the handbags, one after the next. Each was a different color and even at a glance betrayed the supple textures of real luxury. Indeed, many were Birkin bags, icons of high-end style made by the fashion house Hermès. Only these weren’t made by Hermès.

No matter. Even as he watched the man and woman scrutinize the bags, Romain knew they were perfect. He’d spent years at the Hermès factory making Birkins himself. Few people in the world had a better eye. The couple finished their visual inspection and then stuffed them into trash bags in what seemed almost a defilement. The woman handed Romain a chunky envelope. The deal was done. Romain got back in his car and headed towards Paris. The investigators had been tailing him all morning followed at a discreet distance. This was their whale, their illusive kingpin, the man who had been making a fool of the house of Hermès at a scale never before seen in the history of high-end fashion counterfeiting.

Seven Years Earlier

The young leather craftsman knew something was wrong.

The clanking and whirring of sewing machines filled the leather workshop at Hermès, just north of Paris, where highly skilled craftsmen worked on some of the world’s most expensive leather goods.

Romain Chollet-Ricard, a 24-year-old leather cutter, was sitting at his workstation, preparing sections of premium cowhide leather to be sewn into a Birkin–the world-renowned handbag named after singer and actress Jane Birkin. The bag he was making could go for anywhere from $10,000 to $2 million–the harder part for those well-heeled enough to afford them was finding one that was available.

Romain was an outgoing character who came from a working-class background. But his humble exterior – the floppy hair and baggy clothes – hid a burning ambition. He had joined the prestigious fashion house straight after school five years earlier, and despite being one of the youngest recruits, he was already a craftsman. Landing a job at Hermès was a dream for a young leather worker. Working at the fashion house afforded the Frenchman a measure of pride. It was an entree into a world of comfort that was denied to most people.

But now, as he walked down the corridor after being called into his boss’s office, he was certain that this would be his last day.

Officially, he was fired from Hermès for “insufficient productivity and quality,” but he knew there was another reason. For the past four years, he had slowly been building a successful side business reselling what were known as “voucher” bags – bags given to staff as gifts.

Every year, as a reward for their hard work, Hermès–somewhat absurdly–allowed its workers to make just one luxury item for themselves. The idea was to allow employees to own one of the products they knew so well but remained so out of reach on their relatively modest salaries. But there were conditions to the employer’s generosity. Employees had to pay for the materials out of pocket, and the bags had to be made outside working hours. Each artisan was entitled to one bag and one small leather item per year, intended for personal use only. Reselling items was strictly forbidden. Employees signed contracts and each of these custom bags was stamped with a marking in the shape of a shooting star so that it could be easily identified.

Hermès executives closely monitored the program, but still, it was difficult to imagine the company’s mostly male employees making practical use of dozens of Birkins.

“Hermès could clearly see that the same employee was making 12 identical or almost identical Birkin bags over 12 years and that this could not simply be for family use,” Romain would later recall. And many did find a way of selling them on the secondary market – it was too tempting. These bags represented a hefty bonus for someone making an artisan’s salary.

In his steady, quietly focused way, Romain started small. He bought voucher bags from colleagues, put them online, or took them to resale stores in the high-end 8th and 16th arrondissements and sold them for three times the price. According to Romain, it was all an open secret at Hermès. “I didn’t hide my voucher bag resale activities to anyone so that employees could come to me when they wanted to sell.”

But his operation, and perhaps his penchant for organizing a gray market enterprise under the noses of management, had become too conspicuous. Romain was given the boot, and Hermès assumed they were rid of their wayward employee.

They had no idea what was coming.

Romain’s firing was a blow to the voucher bag operation, which by now had grown to include other key players. He broke the news to Alexei Kozyrev, a Latvian businessman with connections in Russia’s moneyed–and some might say criminal–circles. Alexei was a charismatic man in his late thirties, a born networker and salesman with a desire to step up operations in the luxury business.

You had to love Russians. Alexei couldn’t have picked more perfect customers. His contacts seemed to have an insatiable appetite for luxury goods and bottomless pockets.

Alexei was only too happy to oblige. He was one of the primary redistributors of Romain’s fledgling voucher bag operation, and so he took the firing perhaps harder than Romain did.

The two had met in a Paris boutique four years earlier and immediately hit it off. They bonded over a shared heritage – Romain’s grandmother was a Latvian Jew, a fact that had landed her in Auschwitz. Following their meeting, Alexei even invited Romain and his family to Riga and helped him gain access to the national archives to retrace his ancestors’ history.

If the young leather worker felt uneasy around the older man’s shady Russian connections and a revolving cast of beautiful female companions, he nevertheless relished the business opportunity. The charming, expansive Alexei became Romain’s biggest buyer, and his Russian clients came to expect a ready supply of essentially authentic Birkins.

That was no small feat.

The Birkin dates back to 1984 when Hermès’ then chief executive, Jean-Louis Dumas, found himself sitting next to famous singer Jane Birkin on a flight from Paris to London. Carrying all of her belongings in a small basket, the story goes, Birkin asked him why he didn’t make bigger bags with pockets. Dumas got out a pen and paper and quickly sketched a practical yet sophisticated bag, complete with a dedicated space for her baby’s bottles. (Birkin said it was she who sketched it on the back of a vomit bag). The Birkin was born “in the sky” to solve the travel needs of busy mothers. It quickly became an icon, sought after and scarce.

Nowadays even the wealthiest people in the world struggle to get their hands on a Birkin. Hermès produces a limited number each year (how many exactly is a closely guarded secret), but it is estimated that there are only around 200,000 in circulation.

Hermès partially engineers the scarcity, but the daunting realities of making the bags also keep production low. Every Birkin takes around 40 hours to make and is a unique work of art, hand-sewn by a single pair of hands. Only a handful of people undergo the five years of training required to learn the intricate skills that go into making one. Hermès artisans work with a broad range of leathers, such as Togo (made from baby calf or calfskin), Epsom (a lighter weight material from the male calfskin), and exotic leathers like ostrich or lizard. Crocodile and alligator are the rarest and the most desirable among collectors. One 12-inch Hermès Birkin matte Himalayan crocodile handbag, complete with white-gold hardware set with 10-carat diamonds, was billed as “the most valuable handbag in the world.”

In the wake of Romain’s firing, Alexei urged a new and more ambitious plan: They would set up their own workshop and make Birkins exactly as Hermès did. This wouldn’t be easy. Even the best artisans couldn’t do much with inferior materials, and Hermès prided itself on using the best in the world, of which there was a tight and closely watched supply. Here, Alexei–a man whose livelihood was based entirely on his web of connections–had an answer.

The luxury leather goods store on Boulevard Haussmann sat just a few steps from the Opéra. Alexei and Romain entered the modest shop off the busy shopping street and were welcomed by the owner, Daniel Khodara, a man in his 50s with longish gray hair.

Alexei had been a client of Daniel’s since he first entered his shop a couple of years earlier seeking exotic leather: crocodile, snake, lizard, ostrich. All these materials were in high demand among clients in Russia, who, Alexei said, used them to make furniture or phone and laptop cases. Better yet, Daniel Khodara had a criminal streak–he had even tried to sell Alexei counterfeit Birkins at one point, albeit of a quality that wouldn’t pass muster with discerning Russian clients. Nevertheless, this told Alexei that the merchant was a man he could do business with.

Perhaps the best thing about Daniel, however, was that his supplier was none other than Louisiane, the company that supplied Hermès itself. Based in Milan, the tannery specializes in supplying major fashion brands with exotic leathers. It had recently been tasked with supplying Hermès with the best leather on the market on an exclusive basis, however, anything that was rejected by the fashion house could be sold to other clients. Daniel was a major buyer of these castoffs, often containing few discernable blemishes. Daniel himself had been on the hunt for a craftsman who could make high-end counterfeits, owing in part to his relationship with a Russian arms dealer who liked to gift expensive bags to his best customers during their visits to Paris and was prepared to pay upwards of €30,000 for the most prized bags.

Kozirev wanted Romain to determine whether the leathers Daniel was selling were close enough to Hermès standards. A central part of a leather cutter’s job is selecting the leather. No two skins are alike and no two can be treated the same way to obtain the best result. Only a well-trained eye can identify the best part of the skin, which must be closely inspected for any flaws that could result in tears or imperfections.

That day in Daniel’s shop, after Chollet-Ricard had concluded that the leather was of the highest quality, the three men formalized a new venture around their aligned interests. With their expertise, contacts, and prestigious clients, they had everything they needed to rival even Hermès itself.

Jean-Claude Masson had a big problem.

A representative of Hermès’ internal investigation team, he was part of an internal unit tasked with stamping out counterfeiting. Fraud was on the rise. It was more than a headache, it was an existential threat to the brand. Internal investigations rooted out counterfeiters here and there, but the syndicates had grown ever more sophisticated, their goods more and more similar to the real thing.

That’s why the lucky break was so welcome. Anonymous tips had dribbled in about a company that was producing counterfeit jewelry for Birkin bags and Hermès belt buckles. The informant had even offered a name, Daniel Khodara. According to the anonymous phone calls, aside from jewelry, Daniel was also buying leather and supplying various clients, including one in Hong Kong.

Armed with this information, in the summer of 2011, Masson filed a complaint with the research section of the Versailles police. The company estimated that over thirty crocodile “Birkin 35” bags were being sold each month, each for at least 15,000 euros.

This was a major problem for Hermès. The company’s value proposition was that it made one-of-a-kind items whose production and sale it exclusively controlled. Cheap knockoffs were as old as fashion itself, and sure, they could hurt a brand by diluting its rarified image. But top-quality counterfeits that had been popping up on Hermès’ internal radar of late were something else entirely: They struck at the very bedrock of the fashion brand’s business. If a counterfeit could pass a close inspection without revealing itself to be fake–and internal investigations had confirmed this shocking and unprecedented development–that bag could be considered, for all practical purposes, the real deal on the open market.

Hermès wasn’t just losing control of who wore its bags, it was losing control of who made and sold them. The idea of high fashion itself was under assault. In France, which held tight to its claim as the world’s purveyor of Western taste, this was a very serious threat indeed.

The case landed on the desk of Jerôme Briard, the chief investigator at the Versailles police headquarters. It wasn’t the first time that former employees of Hermès had attempted to copy its prestigious bags. A year earlier, a 17-year veteran of the company had been tried for counterfeiting between 100 and 200 bags, making over 600,000 euros in the process. The brand had become so accustomed to fighting these efforts that it even had an entire team of specialized lawyers whose job it was to protect authenticity.

But for Jérôme, a lanky Parisian with black-rimmed glasses, this time was different. The file shocked, even excited him. The criminal network seemed to be operating internationally, and the scale of the supposed counterfeiting activities, to say nothing of the quality of the bags, was unprecedented.

Jérôme quickly did some back-channel research on Daniel and his leatherwork company, KLS. The number of crocodile skins he ordered from Louisiane was enormous, unlike anything Jérôme had ever seen. He knew crocodile skins cost around 1,600 euros each, and to make a Hermès handbag required three or four. If Daniel was involved in a counterfeiting scheme, as the anonymous tip suggested, the number of bags the operation was churning out had to be massive.

There was another surprising detail in that initial report: one of the main suspects, a man previously unknown to police named Romain Chollet-Ricard, appeared to be operating from Hong Kong. The investigation would be challenging, but this motivated Jérôme even more. In the early days of gathering evidence, he kept coming across a name, someone who appeared to be at the center of the scheme.

Who was this Romain Chollet-Ricard who dared to take on Paris’ premiere fashion house?

With the counterfeit business taking off, Romain saw his life change in big ways too. He married a woman named Natsumi, and they now had a daughter, upping the stakes to grow the business and avoid detection.

Asia was a booming luxury goods market. In Japan alone, demand for Hermès items was estimated to be larger than the company’s annual worldwide production. Romain and his collaborators decided Hong Kong would be the perfect base. Romain would move his family and set up the systems necessary to produce top-quality bags at scale. With money pouring in, Romain was able to buy a luxurious flat in the Hermitage, a new residential development of six high-rise blocks overlooking the busy district of Mong Kok.

Romain and his young family made the most of the move. According to court documents, Natsumi assumed a role in operations, delivering bags, taking payments, and maintaining order at the new workshop. Romain may have contented himself with the idea of building a new life for him and his family. Perhaps, too, he felt relieved to be leaving the reach of the French police apparatus, which he knew had been cracking down on fashion counterfeiting.

Shortly after he moved to Hong Kong, Romain perfected the manufacturing process and was ready to expand the workshop in Asia and take operations to the next level. However, producing bags that could pass as authentic required highly skilled artisans, each specialized in a different stage of the process. To make it work he would have to recruit current or former Hermès employees and arrange regular trips for them to Hong Kong. It would still be worth it: the crocodile Birkins they could produce would sell for 23,000 euros each.

By September, Romain had gathered everything he needed to start production and made arrangements for his fellow Hermès leather craftsmen to travel to Hong Kong. Another longtime Hermès employee assisted in shipping the materials from France. Romain conducted business through two separate companies which he set up in his wife’s name to avert suspicion: one for purchasing the supplies and one for sales. Over the following months, the Hong Kong team would involve six people and produce 175 crocodile Birkin bags, sold for an average price of 16,000 euros each.

With money pouring in and his family adjusting to life in the former British colony, Chollet-Ricard experienced a period of relative ease. Daniel had turned out to be an ideal partner back in France: he was one of his main customers at the same time that he took care of all the supplies. Aside from sourcing the leather, which was checked and selected in Paris before being shipped to Hong Kong, Daniel had also managed to track down another crucial supplier: a skilled jeweler, Joao Luis Paulista, who could counterfeit metal pieces and precious accessories needed for the bags to appear authentic. Along with master fence Alexei Koxyrev, they comprised a sophisticated counterfeiting syndicate.

Naturally, it was time for another expansion, this time back to France, where a new workshop would serve as a recruitment tool for craftsmen–in short supply and the key to the whole operation–while supplying the lucrative Eastern European market.

After hanging up the phone, Yoann Alloin, a down-on-his-luck leather worker, felt a new welling of pride. On the other end had been his old pal Romain, whom he had known back in his Hermès days.

Yoann had also been fired from Hermès for cashing in on voucher bags and like Romain, he had little loyalty left for the company he felt had treated him unfairly. So when his friend called and asked for help setting up a French workshop, Yoann jumped at the chance. Together, they could beat their former employer at its own game.

On Romain’s instructions, Yoann quickly got to work. With funds from Romain, in early 2011 he bought a house in Miribel, a northern suburb of Lyon on the banks of the Rhône river, which he started equipping with sewing machines and other supplies. Then came recruiting a team. It didn’t take long to find several of his former colleagues still employed at the Hermès’ Lyon workshop who agreed to work in their spare time. “It’s not just two, three years of work. You’ll have work for 10 years,” he promised the new recruits. In other words “as long as Hermès exists, there will be work for you.” Given how capricious the employer had seemed to some workers, this was a godsend.

Crucially, recruiting Hermès employees gave Yoann direct access to the company. Whenever they needed special tools, such as stamps or punches that were difficult or downright impossible to find elsewhere, he could simply get someone to steal one. “Yoann asked certain people employed at Hermès, including me, to provide him with what I would call ‘small supplies’ such as thread, dye, and reinforcements,” one ring member said.

As more people got involved, Alexei provided everyone with Estonian telephone chips to secure communications. Chollet-Ricard provided the materials through Daniel, and Yoann went back to cutting and prepping the leather as he had done for so many years at Hermès, except now he was in charge of an entire workshop – managing a team and overseeing everything from supplies to shipping the finished products to Paris or Hong Kong.

Soon they were making more money than they had ever dreamt of. Not only were Alexei’s Russian clients unable to tell the difference between the knockoffs and the real Hermès bags – so was Hermès. When presented to staff at the fashion house’s official stores in Paris, they were recognized as authentic. “They were fakes that Hermès accepted as real,” Alexei said. They would come to be known as “superfakes,” or what one member of the ring would call des vrais faux sacs Hermès – “real-fakes.”

The small band of counterfeiters was challenging the notion of what constituted an authentic piece of merchandise while expanding the field of who could own a prized fashion piece.

In their phone calls, the members of the ring spoke in code. They referred to each other using nicknames: Alexei was “Beluga,” Romain was “Tom” and Yoann was “N2”. They used vague terms to describe what they were doing. For example, the Hermès atelier was referred to simply as “work.” But when it came to disclosing their locations. “We can try to meet up in Lyon, we can try to meet up and you should bring me some money, ok?” Yoann said in one of his almost daily phone calls with Chollet-Ricard, who was on one of his visits to France. “I leave on the 30th,” he replied. “Not from Paris. I leave from Geneva.”

In an investigator’s office in Versailles, an officer smiled.

Jérôme Briard, the investigator, had been with the Versailles investigative police force for around four years. After working his way up from a local crime, he now led a team specializing in economic and financial crime. In many ways, this was a dream case for him: almost all investigations involved fraud and money laundering, but counterfeiting cases were a rare source of enjoyment, combining the cerebral challenge of a paper trail with good old-fashioned fieldwork. And this wasn’t just any plaintiff: it was a major Parisian fashion house looking to him to help combat an attack on its business. In France, this was akin to defending the country’s cultural heritage.

When Jérôme and his team discovered the extent of operations, they immediately began surveilling Daniel Khodara and his contacts, intercepting emails, texts, and phone calls. They began working with local authorities in Hong Kong and used intelligence services to track down Romain.

While they quickly found that Daniel’s declared income did not reflect his luxurious lifestyle, they ran into a brick wall. When they wiretapped his phone, they found nothing. His conversations revealed nothing about his crocodile leather purchases, though they had tracked the FedEx deliveries from Italy. The only possible explanation was that he and his associates were using alternative communication channels, and intercepting those would be challenging during an international investigation.

Luckily, they didn’t have to.

One day the jeweler, Jean-Louis Paulista, made a critical mistake. He couldn’t get hold of Daniel on his burner phone, so he called his regular phone number instead – using his own anonymous phone number. It was enough for the police to begin to trace the hidden network.

“Once you have a string, all you have to do is start pulling at it,” said Jérôme.

Soon enough, they were able to intercept Romain’s burner phone as well. But living in Hong Kong, he was more elusive than other cells in the network. He made regular trips to France, but never directly – flying to Belgium or Switzerland and driving across the border in a rental car.

Only by painstakingly piecing together his movements through phone conversations were the investigators ultimately able to anticipate his next moves. But they would also need time to identify his accomplices. In order to catch them in the act, they would have to be patient.

By the end of 2011, it had become clear that the Lyon workshop was far more efficient than the one in Hong Kong–this owing mainly to the unparalleled skill of the craftspeople. While demand in Asia was growing at a frenetic pace, Romain’s ability to supply his increasingly insistent Asian clients was limited – both materials and manual labor had to be imported from Europe. Meanwhile, Romain’s daughter was getting older. Under strain in Hong Kong, and confronting family pressure, Romain decided to move back to his home country, where he could centralize operations into a new, bigger workshop in the Lyon suburbs.

In January 2012, Romain sent Yoann 187.000 euros to purchase a new, bigger workshop in the town of Colombier-Saugnieu, strategically located right by the Lyon Saint-Exupéry Airport. The house, bought in Yoann’s sister-in-law’s name, comprised a ground floor with a vast garage, a workshop, an office, four bedrooms, and a game room upstairs.

Romain packed a shipping container with industrial equipment, leather, and furniture and sent it to France. Could he have conceived of the scale of this enterprise when he first started out? He had been a humble craftsmen after all, and now look at him – he was a tycoon, the head of an international enterprise doing millions of dollars of business. The transformation was astonishing; for an intelligent and ambitious man from humble beginnings, it’s hard not to think that Romain finally felt he was becoming the person he was meant to be.

The delivery would be slow, so the network would have to pause production for several months. “Things need to move as quickly as possible,” Romain urged Yoann over the phone. In a packed rented storage unit in the north of Paris they had accumulated enough stock to keep them afloat for a while, but Romain wanted the new workshop to function by the spring. “I’m going to stay for three weeks because we have a lot of work to do,” he told Yoann over the phone when they discussed his forthcoming trip to help set up the workshop. “Everything needs to be ready. Just to be clear: we need to be able to start at the end of April.”

When the police learned about Romain’s return to France, they changed their plans accordingly. Up until then, they had been gathering evidence in collaboration with the Hong Kong authorities for a joint operation, but now they would wait for Romain to return to France instead. The ring was in full expansion mode and striking right at the heart was important.

Romain’s success and the pride that would logically complement such a meteoric rise came with a growing feeling of anxiety. He began to worry that things could end badly. “I think it was getting too big for him,” Jérôme said. The leather craftsman had realized he couldn’t sustain his business forever. He needed a plan B.

In February, Romain transferred 128,000 euros to an Australian bank account and traveled to Tasmania with Yoann’s brother where they purchased 400 hectares of farmland. This would be his escape route, his ticket out so he could leave it all behind. Romain would move with his family first, and then Yoann would follow. They would start a permaculture farm and keep a low profile. This secluded corner of the world was just what they needed.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” Romain asked Yoann excitedly in one of their phone conversations, before a trip to visit the newly purchased plot on the Australian archipelago. “You need to come soon so you can see it with your own eyes.” But Yoann declined. Setting up the new workshop was taking up most of his time. Plus, he already had plans to go skiing with his cousin. “That’s a shame,” said Romain. “It would have been good for you”.

That Thursday in late January in the Paris suburbs, Romain stepped out of Alexei Kozyrev’s flat and into his German-made Opel parked outside. Jérôme and his team were waiting around the corner.

When Jérôme caught a glimpse of the man he had been investigating for months, it struck him how normal he looked. “He didn’t look like a criminal, he seemed quite young to me,” Jérôme said. Romain was wearing gray trousers and a bright blue sweater, making him conveniently conspicuous. “He wasn’t at all cautious, unlike other criminals on the run,” said Jérôme. “[Others do] things like going round a roundabout three times to make sure you’re not followed, that sort of thing. He was relatively easy to follow. He was more into doing business.”

The Opel made its way out of the city and continued onto the street where the Asian man and woman appeared, inspected the products, and handed Romain the cash.

The moment wasn’t ripe to move in on Romain. They needed to catch him with more goods to ensure he didn’t slip between their fingers.

On June 8th, a supplier of Romain’s was stopped by customs at the Mont-Blanc tunnel and declared 3,000 euros in cash, but in his luggage, customs officers found 42,350 euros worth of crocodile leather suitcases.

A week later, Romain crossed the border from Switzerland to France. That’s when Jérôme and other officers made their move. It was 6 a.m. when the police broke into the hotel room where he was staying in Lyon. Woken suddenly from a deep sleep, at first the leather craftsman thought he was being arrested for drug possession (he smoked cannabis). But he soon realized that the helmeted, heavily armed officers signaled something much worse.

Romain surrendered immediately. He felt defenseless. The business was surging but he had felt more and more out of control. He had his daughter and another child on the way at the time of his arrest. Somehow, as he told police officers that day, he felt relieved.

“I think what is happening to me is God’s will,” he said, at one point bursting into tears. “It’s certainly a blessing in disguise as far as I’m concerned. Without your intervention this morning I would never have had the courage to stop manufacturing Hermès bags. I had wanted to stop for a long time but it was impossible because I was bound by commitments and under moral pressure from my ‘clients’ and ‘suppliers’.” In his framing, Romain’s greatest counterfeit was turning himself into an apparent criminal, when he was in reality a scared pawn in over his head.

In a simultaneous operation in the Paris region, the police searched Alexei’s home and found sixteen Hermès bags, several luxury watches, and 45,000 euros in cash along with a banknote counting machine. In Daniel Khodara’s family villa in Asnières-sur-Seine, the police found 240,000 euros in luxury watches, hundreds of expensive bottles of wine in the cellar, and two Hermès gilding irons, as well as a hundred pink crocodile skins. Daniel, arrested in his home, was determined to put up a fight. The lawyer he hired was none other than Thierry Herzog, the lawyer of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Investigators quickly confirmed that the quality of the bags made by the criminal network was unprecedented. Hermès’s high standards and “one bag, one artisan” policy had been followed closely. There were slight differences, but some were in fact improvements. “Usually, some of the seams are done by hand and others are done with a sewing machine,” Jérôme explained. “But Romain didn’t have the full range of machines that may be available to Hermès artisans, so some of the seams that are usually done on a machine were hand-sewn.” Experts concluded that, in some aspects, the Birkins made by the criminal network had been made to an even higher standard than the authentic bags themselves.

After being held in pre-trial detention, Romain was granted temporary release. The case was so complex that the investigation would likely drag out for years. Though his passport had been confiscated, Romain fled France in order to avoid prosecution. He was on the lam, a fugitive from justice once more. He wouldn’t set foot in the country again for several years.

The streets of Paris were quiet, all restaurants and cafés shuttered due to the global pandemic, when the trial finally took place in November 2020 – over a decade after Romain and Daniel first met. The long list of defendants piled into one of the biggest courtrooms in Paris, one where another mammoth trial – the conviction of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attackers – had begun just two months earlier. After almost a decade of investigations, twenty-three members and accomplices of the ring, including nine former employees of Hermès, would be tried on charges related to counterfeiting handbags.

However, Romain, the “mastermind” of the entire operation, was absent from the courtroom. Through his lawyer, he attended the hearing via video link from Tasmania, where he was a fugitive from justice and now ran a hostel for backpackers. The pandemic had provided the perfect excuse to remain on the other side of the globe.

In his defense, Romain’s lawyer argued that the situation his client had found himself in had been created in part by Hermès’s policies. “Hermès pays its workers poorly because they monopolize this leather bags market,” he said. “Hermès is pursuing a policy of scarcity of bags by imposing [limits] on customers to acquire the bags. [Romain] has been a pawn in this business and has been manipulated.”

In February 2021 the Paris criminal court handed down its ruling. Romain and 23 others were charged with offenses including intellectual property infringement, forgery, criminal breach of trust, and organized gang smuggling. The court estimated around 400 bags had been produced in the workshops in Lyon and Hong Kong, and sold alongside 800 “personal voucher” bags provided by Hermès employees – a business Romain had expanded as his own empire grew. Romain hadn’t been very thorough with his accounting, but an examination of his bank accounts estimated the proceeds of counterfeiting offenses at more than 5.5 million euros, of which 2.4 million euros were his personal profits. Now aged 41, Romain was sentenced to 6 years in jail and fined 1.5 million euros. In the sentence, the judge issued an arrest warrant.

A month after the ruling, Romain was hiding in plain sight, much like the knockoff bags he once meticulously created. In a secluded part of Tasmania where he had been living for the past five years he was comfortably out of reach of the French authorities. A photo shows Romain sitting on a bench wearing a t-shirt, sweatpants, and a multi-colored checkered cap. He has a graying beard and his hands, clasped in front of him, are filthy from working on his dream permaculture project.

Over 10,000 miles away from France, Romain maintained he was not a fugitive and claimed he had been manipulated and exploited by Russian mobsters, but admitted that the money had gone to his head. At the height of his scheme, he had become the kind of person who demanded first-class treatment at five-star hotels. “I’m still in lots of shock today,” he maintained, reflecting on the whirlwind of the previous years.

Though he vowed to appeal the court’s decision, he echoed the feeling of relief that he had expressed in custody. After the huge amounts of money made him an “asshole”, Romain said the simple life in Tasmania had been good for him. “Today, I have to clean the toilet, I have to deal with very annoying customers sometimes. So it’s a good test to have in life that made me become someone better.”

In 2022, Romain was finally apprehended on a vacation to Cape Verde, an island nation in the central Atlantic Ocean. After his passport was seized, he was kept in a kind of limbo until he voluntarily surrendered to authorities. In a French court of appeal, his sentence was reduced to three years.

Even during his downfall, he couldn’t help reflecting on his success as a forger.

“They were good quality,” he said of his bags, a welling of pride beneath the understated appraisal of a true craftsman.

JULIA WEBSTER AYUSO is a Spanish-British journalist based in Paris. Her writing has appeared in Time, The Guardian, The New York Times and Monocle. Her reporting regularly takes her around France and Spain.

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