Dan's Papers - August 3, 2007

When you think about illegal counterfeits, you think about money, you think about music or DVDs and you think about handbags and watches on Canal Street. Very rarely, however, do you think about beach passes. But here in the Hamptons, things are just getting plain weird.

Everybody knows that if you want to head to the beach in Southampton, you need a resident or non-resident beach permit to park. If you don't get one and decide to park anyway, then a fine of $175 hits your windshield.

It is for this reason that parking stickers, especially for non-residents, are hard to come by. They sell out quickly and every summer the Towns and Villages of East Hampton and Southampton employ a force of traffic cops to ticket cars and collect fines. This year, at least in Southampton, an illegal racket has sprung up involving counterfeit beach stickers that fool traffic cops. This has revealed a darker side to the Hamptons beach scene that involves naive tourists being taken advantage of by clever scam artists.

Southampton Village Deputy Clerk Eileen Mascara was reportedly enjoying a nice day at Coopers Beach in Southampton when a beach attendant approached her with one of the counterfeit stickers, which Mascara believes was made using a simple computer scanner. She reviewed the sticker and found it to be a definite counterfeit, noticing that the color was off and that it did not have a perforated ridge.

When the owner of the car using the sticker was confronted, he swore that he thought it was legitimate, telling a story of how a man had approached him selling the sticker for $100, claiming that he was leaving for the rest of the summer and no longer needed it. The transaction was made and the man left feeling like he just won the lottery. Little did he know, he had been duped.

In the past, East Hampton has had counterfeit problems as well. There was a rash of robberies involving beach stickers being peeled off from windshields of convertibles and then being resold on the black market. East Hampton and Southampton both recognized the problem and solved it by creating stickers that change color once they are pulled off of a car and re-stuck, which has deterred the thefts.

However, the sought-after beach sticker is certainly a hot item, especially for the rich renters out here who rent homes for over $100,000 per month but can't get a resident beach permit because all the non-resident stickers have sold out and they are not technically residents.

Southampton Mayor Mark Epley has said that he is interested in developing a new sticker next year that will make it harder for counterfeiters to reproduce them. East Hampton may do the same.

After interviewing a parking attendant at Main Beach in East Hampton, who did not want to be identified, it had become clear that the stickers, for some people, have become more than just parking permits. For some, they are a symbol of prestige.

"I was approached by this guy in a Mercedes who was furious that he couldn't get into 'parking lot 1' at Main Beach. He told me he'd be willing to pay a thousand dollars to get a sticker. I started to laugh at the guy, telling him that he'd be better off just paying the parking tickets, but he was serious. He told me there was no way that he was going to drive around with just a 'regular' sticker."

There is no word yet on whether or not Southampton or East Hampton will do anything for the high-beach-sticker-rollers. Might not be a bad idea to create an extremely expensive, $50,000 "super" beach sticker, for the super rich, who can enjoy the added bonus of having a Gold Beach Sticker, the satisfaction of knowing that everybody else knows that you paid so much money for it and also the privilege to park anywhere, from Westhampton, to Montauk. You also can get the Super VIP Beach Sticker upgrade, maybe Platinum, which will allow you to park anywhere on the North Fork, too.