Illegal Cigs Flood NYC Thanks To Lax Postal Service, Lawsuit Says

NEW YORK — New York City accused the United States Postal Service Tuesday of flooding the state with millions of packs of illegal cigarettes shipped here from foreign countries.

The Postal Service does little to stop illicit shipments of smokes from China, Israel, Vietnam and elsewhere, costing the city millions of tax dollars, undermining public health and possibly fueling international organized crime, said city officials who filed a federal lawsuit against the mail agency along with the state of California.

"Cigarette smuggling doesn’t just break the law — it endangers the health of countless Americans and enriches terrorists and organized crime," Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said in a statement. "Yet despite all of this, our nation’s own postal service has ignored the practice and enabled one of the biggest killers in our country."

The complaint in Brooklyn federal court asks a judge to ban postal workers from delivering cigarette-filled packages and declare the Postal Service in violation of a decade-old anti-trafficking law.

Postal Service spokesperson David P. Coleman said the agency "does not comment on ongoing litigation."

The city's complaint cites a nine-day audit of an international mail facility at John F. Kennedy Airport that uncovered more than 100,000 cartons of cigarettes shipped to 48 states from other countries in 2018, with a majority coming from Vietnam.

More than 33,000 of those cartons bore New York addresses and all but a handful were bound for destinations in the five boroughs, according to the complaint.

At that pace, the city says the Postal Service may be delivering more than 500,000 cartons — or five million packs — of illegally shipped cigarettes to New York each year.

But the agency does barely anything to root out the shady shipments even though the 2010 Prevent All Cigarette Trafficking Act bars smokes from being sent through the U.S. mail, the lawsuit alleges.

The Postal Service doesn't bother to use a list of known cigarette shippers compiled by the Department of Justice and lets packages slip through even when they are labeled as containing cigarettes, the city says. A postal worker this spring delivered four cartons of Marlboro smokes to a city investigator from a seller that has been on the justice department list since July 2018, according to the complaint.

And packages that do get caught are simply returned to whoever sent them, allowing cigarette traders to just re-mail their shipments — a practice criticized by the Postal Service's inspector general, city officials say.

The mail agency's failures have dangerous implications, the city argues. Smoking kills 26,000 New Yorkers a year, and some cigarette shippers have been convicted of trafficking in untaxed cigarettes before, according to city officials.

"The conduct of the USPS deprives state and local governments of millions of dollars in tax revenue and thwarts the public health policies of those jurisdictions," the complaint reads.

The lawsuit is just the latest sign of trouble for the Big Apple's post offices. New Yorkers have compared their local stations to Hell and said they've seen mishandled mail and fights between postal workers. Customers at one Bushwick post office logged more than 1,800 service complaints in just six months last year, according to a February audit.