COUNTERFEITING HAS SOMETIMES BEEN CALLED the world’s second oldest profession. Its conceptual birth, predicated on the simple notion that people will accept what you give them if it looks and feels “real,” is as ancient as rocks in a rice sack, but when it comes to money, most numismatic historians agree that counterfeiting probably dates back to very shortly after the invention of money itself, sometime around the year 700 B.C. in the ancient kingdom of Lydia. Enterprising craftsmen quickly learned that few people bothered to weigh lead and copper coins coated with a thin veneer of gold or silver as long as they bore the king’s stamp. The archeological record tells us that from that moment on, in virtually every society making coins there were also people faking them.
From the beginning it was a crime of legacy. Doing it successfully required an intimate knowledge of not only how real money was made and defended, but how to replicate it—specialized knowledge that could be passed on only by a mentor. One of the oldest accounts of counterfeiting comes from the third century B.C., when a Greek named Diogenes was banished from the city of Sinope, on what is now the Turkish coast, for “adulterating in coinage.” As the city gate closed behind Diogenes, he trudged off toward the horizon with an accomplice, the old man who had taught him how to counterfeit. His name was Tresius, and he not only happened to be head of the local bank, but was also his father.
Diogenes would have been forgotten had he not gone on to become one of the greatest philosophers in Greek history. He gave us such pearls as “We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less,” “Man is the most intelligent of animals—and the most silly,” and “He has the most who is most content with the least.” Diogenes is considered the king of the Cynics—no surprise considering that prior to his reformation he spent a lot of time passing fake for real.
Diogenes and his father got off easy. Throughout most of human history, the typical punishment for counterfeiting has been death. Rome fed its counterfeiters to the lions of the Colosseum, while in various medieval European nations they were drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, or—in the Netherlands—boiled alive. In the early days of the United States, counterfeiters were hanged, and the crime was considered so heinous that the first American currency, the continental, even bore the ominous warning “ ’ Tis death to counterfeit.” Up until 1994, it was still a capital crime in Russia, and it remains so in Vietnam, China, and most of the Middle East.
Although the crime is nonviolent, it undermines the very basis of every economy—and therefore threatens governmental authority. One of the founding fathers of modern economics, the English-man Sir Thomas Gresham, best summarized the threat in what is known as Gresham’s Law: “When there is a legal tender currency, bad money drives good money out of circulation.” We’ve all heard that old philosophical query, “If all the money in the world were fake, what differentiates it from the real?” Without an agreed-upon and vigorously protected standard of “real” currency, modern trade would not exist. The heart of the world’s economy, which over the last hundred years has revolved around the American dollar, would suffer a terminal attack.
Such a fiduciary meltdown has come close to happening before. In the decades just after America won its independence, national mints did not exist. Each bank hired engravers to scratch bill designs onto copper plates, then printed however many notes they needed. Thousands of different kinds of bills were in circulation, and for counterfeiters it was a golden age. The only way people could tell a real note from a fake was by reading broadsheets, which printed pages of warnings describing false bills on a daily basis. Bills deemed credible one day could be banned the next, and the situation became so bad that by the end of the Civil War as many as half of all bills in America were counterfeit.
Up to its ears in war debt, and with only worthless paper to pay it off, the federal government decided to act. On the day of his assassination, Abraham Lincoln directed the secretary of the treasury to form an organization to hunt down counterfeiters and bring them to justice: the United States Secret Service. Initially staffed by Civil War vets and private detectives, the Service employed what were then revolutionary methods—undercover infiltration, heavy use of informants, and the playing of counterfeiters against each other to bring down large networks. At the same time, the Service harassed anyone who came too close to trampling on the sacred turf of U.S. currency design. In one instance, they confiscated the molds and cookies of a Philadelphia baker because he was selling cookies designed to look like an Indian-head penny, then threatened him with a fine and jail time if he baked them again. In another famous case, agents ripped a rug out of a department store window because it had been stitched to resemble a dollar bill.
The Service’s zealotry, along with the unification of all currency production under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in 1877, produced dramatic results. By 1903 the amount of counterfeit currency circulating had fallen to one dollar out of every hundred thousand—a phenomenal reduction. The Service was so effective that in 1901, following the assassination of President William McKin ley, Congress informally requested that they protect his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, and within a year presidential-protection duty became the other of half of what remains the Service’s joint mission. Throughout the twentieth century, improved law enforcement techniques and the Service’s expansion would cut into counterfeiting even more. Today, an infinitesimal three one-hundredths of one percent of the roughly seven billion bills circulating is counterfeit. At the same time, seventy-five percent of all counterfeit currency is confiscated before it hits the streets.
By the time Art entered da Vinci’s shop, in other words, counterfeiting had long been a dying art. Skilled practitioners like da Vinci who made a steady living at it were virtually extinct. He was the last of his line, a lone wolf offering to hand off what he knew to Art, who at seventeen could barely appreciate the gesture or understand the danger of the knowledge he was about to receive.
ART’S FIRST LESSON in the criminal craft of counterfeiting began when da Vinci placed a cassette tape into a boom box, and the velvet strains of an Italian opera swelled through the print shop.
“Oh, my God, can you please turn this crap off,” Art moaned.
“Crap is the stuff you listen to,” Pete told him. “This is beautiful music. It’s old, what we do here is old, so this is what we’ll listen to.”
As the first overtures filled the basement, they embarked on the process of platemaking, a skill that Art was vaguely familiar with from his tour of the Bridgeport News’s printer. The easiest way to think of a plate is as a stamp; it’s a thin, rectangular slab of metal—usually aluminum—that carries a raised image of whatever is to be printed. Chemically conditioned and wrapped around a spinning cylinder on an offset press, the plate first picks up water, then ink, with each revolution; as the two substances repel each other, the ink clings to the raised portion of the plate, then transfers its image onto a second roller that is usually made of rubber. This second, or “offset,” roller in turn transfers the ink onto paper. When an offset press is rolling at full speed, it can produce hundreds of images per minute. Almost every printed item you read, including this book, is derived from a plate and an offset press. Invented in 1843 by a New Yorker named Richard March Hoe, the process is responsible for more wars, revolutions, bureaucratic forms, pornography, economic booms and busts, and minds both educated and subverted than any other invention on earth.
Art watched as da Vinci pulled out three crisp hundred-dollar bills from an envelope and mounted them in front of a process camera—an accordion-like device designed for capturing flat images.
“Take a look,” da Vinci said, offering Art the viewfinder. The bill, magnified and illuminated by studio lights, like a painting, filled the entire field of view. The detail was incredible: Franklin’s hair looked like rolling surf, while the lines on his coat resembled plowed fields coursing gently over hillsides. Based on a 1778 portrait by the French artist Joseph-Si
ffred Duplessis, Franklin’s face appeared serene and slightly amused.
After they photographed the bill fronts three times and the backs once, they developed the negatives in a closet that da Vinci had converted to a darkroom, then brought them over to the light table. He inspected them with a loupe, then masked out the serial numbers and seal on one front, leaving nothing but the serial numbers and the seal on the others.
The next step involved utilizing one of the more magical devices in da Vinci’s print shop: an arc-light burner. About the size of a refrigerator, it used high-intensity light to burn the negatives onto the metal plate. Like a modern copying machine that prints on metal instead of paper, the light passes freely through the clear parts of the negative and burns away a thin layer of the plate beneath, leaving only the lines of the negative intact and raised—a stamp carved by light. Once they burned four plates, they scrubbed them clean in a chemical wash, until all that remained on their surfaces were intricate, raised images of all the components of a hundred-dollar bill.
The plates took the better part of two days, and Art was steadily awed by da Vinci’s precision and attention to detail. He emphasized precise measurements and timing, warning Art that if he burned the plates too long the bills would come out too dark; burn them too briefly and they’d come out light. He explained the reason behind everything he did.
However formidable da Vinci’s skill at platemaking was, it was nothing compared with what Art witnessed over the next four days, as da Vinci schooled him in the art of mixing inks and running the press. “The difference between a bill that passes and one that draws attention can sometimes come down to drops of ink,” he told Art. “Unless you constantly watch your colors, a whole print run can be ruined.”
Williams observed as da Vinci mixed gray for the bill front, then armed the paper intake of his four-color press with a pale green, linen-based paper. Art would later learn that the paper had come from one of Chicago’s many printing houses, and that da Vinci had bought it straight from a connection at the loading dock, no questions asked. Like the paper genuine currency is printed on, it was thin and durable, and another feature that made it distinct was that it contained tiny fibers that simulated the red and blue silk security threads that have been woven into U.S. currency since 1869.
Once da Vinci had the paper ready, he attached the plate to the offset’s cylinder and fired up the press. As the machine rumbled to life, Pete poured his ink into the trough, engaged his cylinders, and let the press roll. Once he had finished with the bill fronts, they cleaned the press, switched the plates, and mixed their next colors: mint green for the back, and stoplight green for the seal and serial numbers. In this way they “built up” the bills, adding different visual elements with each print run.
“The smell of the ink became addictive,” remembers Art. “Watching him take the ink out and throw it on the palette, it was amazing how quick he was. Just like that, he’d snap it on and mix it.” Counterfeiters say that the act of creating money can evoke an intensely pleasurable, almost sexual, rush. Williams felt its full force for the first time watching the finished sheets spill from the press. “Orgasm is a good comparison, but there really aren’t any words for the feeling,” he says. “And it never went away from me. Every time was as powerful as that first time.”
On the final print run, sheets of mint-condition hundred-dollar bills emerged from da Vinci’s press, like Christmas cookies from an oven. In all, Art and Pete’s first run together came to about a hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit. As Art cut the bills and stacked them in neat ten-thousand-dollar piles, he felt an overwhelming urge to take some. There are always extra bills after a print run, so when Pete wasn’t looking he slipped a few into his pocket, despite the promise he had made to his mentor.
Later the same day, he visited a local gas station, where he asked the cashier for a pack of Kools and handed him one of da Vinci’s notes. Instinctively, he apologized for not having a smaller bill, and half expected security gates and sirens to activate the moment the attendant took the bill.
Nothing happened.
The cashier gave him back ninety-six dollars in real money, and he left the gas station as free as he had entered. But every bit as real as the change in his pocket was the buzzing through his brain as he made his way back to the projects.
“When I saw him take the money and give me back the change, I felt a huge sense of power, more power than I had ever felt in my life,” he recalls. “As a young kid from the South Side, that wasn’t something I was used to. I was used to the opposite feeling. And I was instantly addicted.”
DA VINCI NEVER CAUGHT ON that Williams had pocketed some of the bogus bills. True to his word, later that week Pete handed Art seven thousand dollars in real money. It was more cash than Art had ever seen, much less possessed, and it had an instant, opiate effect on the sense of struggle he’d been feeling since he was twelve. He gave some of the money to Karen for the baby, telling her that he was now making good money “working construction” with da Vinci. Then he proceeded to blow most of the rest on a used black Grand Prix. Overnight, he had the nicest car in the projects, and had no worries about saving any money; he knew that soon they would be making more.
By the time da Vinci called Williams in for their second print run two months later, he was broke and had forgotten almost everything he’d learned. Or, more accurately, he had barely assimilated anything to begin with. “That first time he showed me, I was in awe, and I don’t think I even paid attention to a word Pete said, my heart was racing so fast. But the second time I was a like a hawk. I knew I had to learn this.”
This time da Vinci allowed Art to do much of the work himself while he stood silently over his shoulder, supervising. He’d watch closely as Art shot negatives and burned plates, offering tips and quizzing him on the process. As Art became proficient in the technical aspects of the craft, he began grilling da Vinci on some of the broader aspects of the crime. One of the first things he wanted to know was what other useful items they could counterfeit. Pete explained that you could also fake bearer bonds, checks, titles of ownership, food and postage stamps, posters to sell at the county fair—almost everything of value sooner or later comes down to paper and ink. Da Vinci had dabbled in all sorts of items over the years, but he considered most of them a waste of time.
“There’s nothing better to print than money,” he said. “Everybody wants cash. A guy selling drugs is selling it to get cash. A guy stealing jewels is stealing jewels to get cash. We don’t have to do anything but print it.”
The Secret Service was a frequent topic of conversation. Pete had tremendous respect for the Service, almost to the point where he considered other law enforcement entities minor nuisances. One morning as they were driving to the shop, they spotted two Chicago PD cruisers prowling through the neighborhood. Pete piloted the Caddy and parked in his regular spot like they weren’t even there.
“Aren’t you worried?” Art asked.
“Not about the cops I can see,” Pete told him. “I’m worried about the ones I don’t see. When you don’t see them, that’s when you have a problem.”
Pete taught Art what he knew about the Service’s infamously sneaky methods and tactics. As the original undercover agents, they pride themselves on infiltration. They are also infamously ruthless when it comes to using divide-and-conquer tactics to break up counterfeiting rings. The Service’s annals brim with cases in which they’ve turned family members against each other. Once they catch someone passing counterfeit, they will threaten and pressure them and their families in an effort to turn them into informants against the maker. In recent decades their best weapons have revolved around their surveillance abilities. They can infiltrate counterfeit rings remotely, wiring up informants, phones, and computers to collect evidence from afar. Since it is the same force that protects the president of the United States, it is well funded and possesses the most cutting-edge technology, including an electron microscope capable of ana
lyzing bill components on a molecular level. In a broad sense, the Service’s greatest strength is that it enjoys the benefit of an unambiguous mission.
“They only have two jobs,” Pete explained. “Protect the president and protect the currency. And they protect the president pretty well, don’t they? Well, they do the same with the money.”
No matter how hard Art pressed, there were questions that da Vinci refused to answer. How and where to pass counterfeit money in the marketplace was a subject that Art brought up so frequently that it became a running joke, as Art tried different ways of getting the “old man” to reveal his secrets. “What’s the most you’ve ever passed?” he’d ask, or “Is it better to hit a small store or a place like Macy’s?” But da Vinci never bit. “Passing, to him, was a very low-level way of operating,” says Art. “He’d get annoyed at me for even asking, and say ‘C’mon, Arty, you know that’s not what we do. You’ll learn that in time, but you need to be patient.’ He was always telling me to be patient.”
The biggest mystery of all to Art was how da Vinci sold his money. How did he find his clients? How should a deal go down? What was the most he’d ever printed? Da Vinci surrendered only the most rudimentary details. His main clients were not from the United States, but overseas—somewhere in Europe. He wouldn’t reveal how the money got there or who was involved, but he did tell Art that he charged thirty to thirty-five cents on the dollar—the top rate—and he decreased his rates for amounts over one hundred thousand dollars. At the same time, he was extremely reluctant to produce batches over a hundred grand, and did so only if he was satisfied with the way a client intended to distribute the bills.
“Always find out where the money is going,” he explained, “because if too much winds up in one place, you’ll be in trouble. Counterfeit spreads like a virus once it hits an area, with bills popping up everywhere, in banks, shops, bars, people’s pockets. It moves outward like an explosion, occupying a bigger and bigger space. If your space gets too large, you’ll attract way too much attention. That’s when the Secret Service puts your case on the top of the pile.”
The Art of Making Money Page 6