IF ALADDIN were an illicit street trader or a pornographer, his cave would look like this.

Lurking behind an anonymous but securely locked door in a council building somewhere in the borough are shelves of illegal items seized by Swindon Trading Standards.

Much of them represent the outermost twigs of a tree whose roots are organised crime and sometimes terrorism.

Pirated items may be cheap, but they harm legitimate companies - just ask former employees of EMI, who had to close their Swindon plant.

The chilly, harshly-lit store room with its stark metal fittings is part of the domain of Phil Thomas, 41, the council's head of commercial regulation, who is sometimes still referred to as Trading Standards Manager.

He said: "This is where we keep the items we seize and also evidence from investigations, such as testing whether shops will sell alcohol to underaged people."

Each item tells a story, and the stories range from grim to potentially tragic.

On one shelf, for example, is an Elmo figure, no doubt put together in some sweatshop to cash in on the regular worldwide crazes for the Sesame Street character. This Elmo figure is special, though. It features shoddy construction, cheap materials and a mouth that feels as if it's formed around a piece of solid, jagged metal. It's effectively a cuddly cosh. Other lowlights in this cavalcade of all things shoddy and squalid include folding metal chairs whose mechanism couldn't be more dangerous if it were specifically designed to amputate fingers.

There are also boxes of seized trainers that purport to be made by Nike but whose stitching looks as if it were done by rank amateurs in a darkened room - which it probably was. According to Phil, counterfeiters sometimes even break into closed factories and turn out pirated goods until they're caught and shut down.

Fimbles bedspreads and Simpsons socks add a cheery touch until one realises not only that they are pirated but also that there is therefore no guarantee that they comply with fire or chemical regulations.

Above all, there is pornography; bag upon carefully tagged bag of seized pornographic DVDs and magazines, often sourced from the Continent and sold through newspaper advertisements or the seedier end of the independent newsagent industry. Some of it may be fairly innocuous by the standards of hardcore pornography, but because it has never been rated by British censors, there is no way of telling whether it contains, for example, images of children Phil said of the porn: "We have almost a thousand items here. I don't know why there is so much in Swindon - perhaps it's because there are no licensed sex shops here." Whatever the illicit material, Phil is in no doubt that it can often be traced back to organised criminals, some of them allied to terrorism.

He said: "When you buy a counterfeit item, you can more or less guarantee that the person who made it was a victim of exploitation, perhaps coerced by the criminals in charge.

"Our evidence suggests that no matter what the item, the trail always leads back to organised crime."

That's why Phil and his team are intent on making Swindon so unpleasant for sellers and producers of illicit goods that they're put off coming here at all.