Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 1, 1960

Reasonable Facsimile Rex Lardner

Forgers and counterfeiters, as a class, are the most versatile of crooks and very likely the most persistent. While their creative skills differ — some relying on the gullibility of the public and others grimly trying to baffle the experts — they are an audacious, generally conscientious lot, proud of their artistic calling.

Some are quite whimsical. A check forger in California obtained cash for a check he signed “I. Nogota.” Other signatures similarly honored have been U. R. Stung and N. O. Funds. Still another practitioner of what is called white-collar larceny received money for a check drawn on his account in the East Bank of the Mississippi.

Despite care, some make slips. A short, toothless New York paper-money counterfeiter named Edward Mueller spelled the name of the first President wrong on his one-dollar bills. He spelled it WAHSINGTON. It should have been a tipoff to the recipient that he was getting Brand X money, but the Secret Service observes sadly that few people peer closely at a one-dollar bill.

A few count on the blind enthusiasm of hobbyists. Letters from Cleopatra to Mark Antony and from Socrates to Euclid have been sold to collectors of such historical treasures, considered the more valuable, perhaps, because they were written in French. An enterprising salesman of Buffalo Bill pictures — like those formerly sold at Wild West shows — shot them up to five times their worth by ingeniously signing Buffalo Bill’s name on them, using a ballpoint pen.

The dissimulation practiced by these rascals, driven by some irrepressible urge to challenge credulity, extends to nearly every field of human endeavor — art, archaeology, the sciences, literature, philately, autograph collecting, show business, gambling, and commerce. Whatever man hath wrought, going far back into the recesses of time, another man has sought to imitate — for self-satisfaction, out of resentment or frustration, or to earn money.

Throughout history people have been duped by phony statues, “undiscovered” plays and poems by famous authors, spurious Mona Lisas, fake rare coins, false wills, doctored documents, reed-filled mummies, bogus antiques bored by counterfeit worms, fraudulent first editions, tapestries, and old bones. And scores of other products: objets d’art, fossils, collectors’ items, and legal instruments.

The balance today is weighted less toward stone axes and lace than toward forged sweepstakes tickets, race-track tickets, liquor stamps, and orchestra seats for hit musicals, but the art has not died out. As befits the present age, characterized by our preoccupation with advertising, automobiles, and commerce unsullied by the use of cash, today’s booming forgeries are in the fields of trademark reproduction, auto licenses, and personal checks.

It is an oddity of human nature that while pickpockets arouse our disdain and muggers our fury, we are quite tolerant of most persons engaged in criminal fraud, forgery, and counterfeiting.

Perhaps it is because they are intellectual crimes, proving, in the area of shrewdness anyway, the superiority of man over the apes. Perhaps it is because the wily perpetrators of these offenses appear to be loners, valiantly pitting their wits against experts, bureaucrats, and other entrenched specialists whose dignity it is pleasant, now and again, to see punctured.

Another reason might be that duplicity of one sort or another is practiced in many legitimate business operations, in politics, diplomacy, the drama, and poker. Forgery, in its various guises, becomes merely a formalized and more dangerous projection of the art of deceit.

In the case of counterfeiting money, moreover, it is likely that most of us suffer from pangs of conscience and can identify, to a degree, with that familiar of the funny-money manufacturer, the passer. Having got stuck with a phony fifty-cent piece or five-dollar bill, we are roguishly tempted to sting someone else with it. This is preferable, certainly, to turning it in to the police, as the law demands, and a) accepting the tacit label of sucker and b) losing the value of the money.

For the successful forger of paintings, such as the late Hans van Megeeren, who in the 1940’s drew and scientifically aged “Vermeers,” we feel not admiration but awe. Here was a much-scorned artist, a tiny man with the knowledge and skill to make complete idiots out of the haughty art experts! In fact, although Van Megeeren confessed the forgeries and outlined in detail how and where he committed them, some critics keep insisting that Vermeer must have painted some of the Van Megeerens. There can be no higher tribute to a forger.

From a moral standpoint, wry appreciation of the talents of a Van Megeeren is understandable. For who is hurt? No damage is done except to the notion of infallibility of the critics and to the silk-lined pocket-book of the purchaser. On the other hand, the damage done by a man who gets his inspiration from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, or its equivalent, can be monumental. Not only the shopkeeper, inn keeper, and gas-station owner suffer; the economy of an entire nation can be destroyed by the widespread circulation of counterfeit money.

Sturdy Venetian banks were staggered back on their heels in 1470 by the tactics of Duke Gallazeo Sforza of Milan, who made handsome counterfeits of the money of Venice during his war against that city. The idea has been adopted by many warring factions since — by Napoleon against the English, by Pitt against the French. It has been tried in time of peace — the most notable attempt being that of an Austrian prince named Ludwig Windischgraetz. The prince, who had political ambitions in Hungary and a grudge against France, planned in 1923 to print one hundred million dollars’ worth of 1,000-franc notes for a double purpose — to finance a Hungarian putsch and to destroy France’s financial structure. The counterfeits were clumsy, however, the scheme fell through, and the prince, arrested by Hungarian police, was sentenced to four years at hard labor.

Sometimes a quick solution to the budget problem can be more damaging to a country’s economy than a tricky enemy. Nero, Henry VIII, and Frederick the Great ruined the financial structures of their respective countries by issuing debased currency. It was legal and possibly necessary counterfeiting but no less disastrous. Potatoes replaced money.

Since counterfeiting has long been the prerogative of rulers — Polycrates of Samos and Queen Elizabeth also indulged — most of them have taken a dim view of competition by amateurs. The earliest counterfeiters, who clipped coins and made new ones from the shavings, had their ears clipped when caught. King Canute decreed that their hands should be cut off. The Romans deprived counterfeiters of their citizenship and then removed their ears and noses. Later, these steps not considered sufficiently discouraging, their ears, noses, hands, and feet were cut off and what was left was served to hungry lions. One presumes they were hungry. During the Renaissance punishment was equally severe. The counterfeiter’s hands and feet were removed, his eyes were gouged out, and he was drawn, quartered, and put together again so he could be burned at the stake. Counterfeiting remained a flourishing profession, but there were few second-offenders.

In the American colonies in the 1600’s, because cash money was scarce, wampum was used as currency. At first the Indians fooled the settlers with phony wampum, but soon the wily white man turned the tables. Counterfeit wampum made of glass beads was secretly made in England and shipped to America. For a while it fooled the Indians; then wampum currency collapsed.

Counterfeiters of bills of credit — which replaced wampum — were punished, when caught, by being forced to sit in the pillory for an hour, losing an ear, and spending a year in jail. In the pattern of these things, the penalty was not tough enough. So it was jumped to a public whipping, loss of both ears, and being nailed to the pillory. But this did not stop the collapse of currency based on bills of credit.

During the Revolution, in order to create a financial panic among the rebels, the British Government flooded America with fake Continental dollars. In New York Lord Howe advertised sales of counterfeit Continentals for “persons going to the other colonies.” Soon American counterfeiters refused to counterfeit the worthless notes (there is good in everything) and Congress solved the problem by recalling $20,000,000 in Continental currency and destroying it.

Taking a leaf from Howe, Napoleon, and Prince Ludwig, whose operations he studied closely, Adolf Hitler in 1940 launched the biggest and most carefully planned counterfeiting enterprise in history. It was called Operation Bernhard; its original purpose was to destroy the Bank of England.

The immediate supervisor of the project, reporting directly to Heinrich Himmler, was a German Secret Service major, Friedrich Walter Bernhard Kruger, formerly a textile machine engineer. The plan was to print a billion dollars’ worth of British pound notes of various denominations and dump most of them by plane over the British Isles. Most Britishers, it was hoped, would go on a spending orgy, bringing about the collapse of the currency.

The project was carried out with great thoroughness. British banknote paper, made of white linen, could not be obtained in quantity, so linen was imported from Turkey, dirtied by rubbing it on oily machines, and then laundered. An operation was set up in a fenced-off, closely guarded area of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Oranienburg. From concentration camps all over Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland specialists were collected, shipped to Sachsenhausen, and pressed into service. Among them were dentists, engineers, engravers, stereotypists, a bank clerk, a printer, and a professional counterfeiter named Solomon Smolianoff, whose value to the enterprise was inestimable.

After a printing shop and photo and engraving sections were set up, the project got rolling in 1943. Watermarks were introduced into the linen, sheets were split in two, then cut in half, the text, denomination, and vignette of Britannia were printed, and finally the serial numbers were added. Forty per cent of the notes were of five-pound denomination; ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pound notes each made up another 20 per cent. On rare occasions 100-, 500-, and 1,000-pound notes were run off.

After meticulous comparison with genuine currency, the notes were divided into four classes: The best were to be used in neutral countries and taken by spies into enemy countries; the next best were to be used for paying off collaborators; the third class was to be dumped over England, and the fourth class, made up of the worst notes, was junked.

Early attempts at distribution met with a snag. Walter Funk, Minister of Economics, forbade the operation in countries occupied by Germany lest it upset currencies he was trying to stabilize. The drop over England was postponed as other uses were found for the money. It was handy for buying up arms parachuted by the Allies to Serb, Croat, and Italian partisans. Information about the whereabouts of Mussolini’s hideout, leading to his abduction from the hands of the Allies by Colonel Skorzeny, was paid for in counterfeit British notes. Phony money was the reward earned by the famous Albanian spy, Eliaza Bazna, valet to the British Ambassador to Turkey. Some of the money, to bolster the Nazi economy, was exchanged for gold in Italy and for francs in Switzerland.

The Bank of England learned of the enterprise in April, 1943, and launched countermeasures. It stopped the issue of notes of ten pounds and higher and began exchanging new ones for those already issued. The new ones had a tricky electrical safeguard — a narrow ribbon of metallic thread in the paper which conducted a particular pattern of electricity under special conditions known only to the Bank of England.

Because of complications arising on the military fronts, Operation Bernhard never reached its ultimate goal, though, thanks to Smolianoff, the counterfeits themselves were close to perfect. A total of $600,000,000 worth of British banknotes were made, $10,000,000 of which got into circulation. The effect on the Bank of England, despite the best of intentions, was troublesome but far from disastrous.

In 1944 Himmler gave Kruger a rush order to counterfeit American paper money. But time ran out before more than twenty $100 bills were finished and okayed by Himmler. The panic occasioned by Allied advances on all fronts drove the Nazis to destroy all plates and wads of spurious British money in outdoor incinerators. More bundles of notes were sunk in lakes and rivers in Austria. Kruger vanished for ten years and turned up as a storekeeper just outside of Hanover.

If there is another major conflict, it is expected that, along with the forging of passports, identity and ration cards, and military documents, the currency of enemy nations will be counterfeited on a vast scale. It is an accepted ruse of war.

Agents of the United States Secret Service, one of whose major jobs it is to nail the counterfeiter, regard him a great deal less tolerantly than the public. Apart from his effect on the monetary system, he is indirectly a recruiter of criminals. The Secret Service ranks him in the company of the kidnaper and dope peddler.

A worth-while counterfeiting operation in America today involves various specialists. A money man lays out about three thousand (genuine) dollars for equipment — photoengraving machinery, a single-color press, etching and routing machines. After a batch of money has been made, the money man sells it to a wholesaler for about eight cents on the dollar. The wholesaler sells it to retailers for twenty cents on the dollar. Passers buy it for thirty-five cents on the dollar.

Passers are the most vulnerable link in the entire operation. Many of them are known to police and Secret Service agents. They are the petty crooks whom shopkeepers will finger as the shover of a particular phony bill.

So the passer depends on his wife or sweetheart to do some of the work — the psychology being that a chivalrous bartender will not inspect a bill received from a lady as closely as that from a man. Should she be nabbed, if she has a clean record, she can indignantly claim that she is the dupe of some crook, and who can deny it?

But when a passer is far away from his loved ones, he must rely on strangers for help. A common procedure is for him to wander up to an idle young man with an alert look, offer him a cigarette, and chat awhile. Then, explaining he got stuck with a bogus banknote, he asks the young man — called a lobby guy in counterfeiting circles — to try to buy something with it. Should the lobby guy succeed, he is promised a great deal of change for his errand. If he gets nabbed, he is a first offender, can claim to be a dupe, and is relatively safe. But he is not so safe as the passer, who, at the first sign of suspicion on the part of the recipient of the money, darts to another corner of town. However, it is often a fine opportunity for a young man with an honest face and a charming manner to get a foothold in crime.

The paper-money creator himself, on whose skill the success of passers and their tools largely depend, has the ego, generally, of a top-flight artist. Extremely few counterfeiters are women; they are mainly small, uncommunicative men who think themselves far superior to coin counterfeiters — those shoestring operators whose margin of profit is so tiny they must do their own passing with a pocket full of change.

Whether counterfeiters are of high or low caste in the great scheme of things, they have furnished more bold, wily, and capricious oddballs than any other branch of crime.

A Russian gang in 1912 circulated half-ruble notes which were excellent reproductions of the Czar’s highly inflated currency, except that on the bottom of each note was the wry message, “Our money is no worse than yours.” Emanuel Ninger, a New Jerseyite who traced paper money on fine bond paper after it was soaked in coffee, was arrested when one of his fifties got wet from lying on a bar. He claimed to police that he was not legally a counterfeiter because he left the phrase “Bureau of Printing and Engraving” off his hand-drawn notes. Marcus Crahan solved the problem of getting nabbed with the curly — always embarrassing for a counterfeiter — by pointing to an ad he repeatedly put in the paper. It said he had found a bundle of money which the owner could claim on proper identification. The Secret Service was skeptical and he eventually got fifteen years.

A Louisiana justice of the peace in 1908 set up a counterfeiting plant in a room near his court. When culprits paid fines and got change, the change they got was counterfeit. A personable Midwesterner of the nineteenth century, Thomas Peter McCartney, lectured under the name of Professor Joseph Woods. His subject was the art of detecting counterfeits. But he was prudent enough not to reveal how to distinguish the counterfeits McCartney was putting out; he talked only about his competitors. A Milanese counterfeiter of American tens made a self-conscious commentary on the quality of his merchandise when he left out the first L in the third word of the phrase, “Redeemable in Lawful Money.”

Coiner Edward Berglund, who was enchanted by slot machines, fed them his own fifty-cent pieces. When he was caught, he insisted that what he was doing was legal because he had printed the word “slug” on every one of them. Forrest Starling, of Perry, Iowa, minted phony fifty-centers, using a homemade die and putting more silver into his coins than the United States Mint puts into its fifty-centers. Bold as brass, he passed some of them in stores in Leavenworth before a bank clerk noticed that the reeding (the grooved outer edge) was deeper than the Government’s. Secret Service agents made inquiries and arrested him. When asked why he made his reeding so deep, he haughtily replied they were his coins and that was the way he wanted them.

Bogus-money men, in the United States at least, are growing less colorful and less successful. Since 1863, when one third of the money in circulation was counterfeit (a situation brought about because of the huge number of state and “wildcat” banks), the amount of phony money in circulation has been chopped down to an infinitesimal proportion. This has been mainly because of the work of the Secret Service, established in 1865. Of the $30,000,000,000 in circulation today, only one one thousandth of one per cent is counterfeit. In the fiscal year 1959 agents of the Service — dogged shadowers and ingratiating mixers with crooks — captured nineteen plants for the manufacture of fake paper money. The total value of money seized was $1,923,536; only $260,329 of it got into circulation. Of $6,766.32 in phony coins, $6,359.07 got into circulation, but the Secret Service does not regard the coiner as a menace.

The record for the rounding up of a counterfeiting ring and the seizure of its equipment is eight hours. A few years ago, a grocer in Pittsburgh received a phony five-dollar bill and happened to notice that the woman who gave it to him got into a car with New Jersey plates. Remembering the license number, the grocer passed it along to Secret Service men, who checked it with authorities in Trenton. It developed that the car owner lived in Centreville. A few hours later an agent was on his way there, accompanied by a New Jersey state trooper. When they arrived at the house, the two pounded on the door but failed to wake anyone, so the agent went around back. He glimpsed a man in pajamas who was flourishing a shotgun. Busting in, the agent snatched it from him, kicked down a wall and found a set of plates, and turned the man over to the trooper.

Then he waited for the lady to return. She came in the car, along with a man. The agent blew a hole in the front tire, yanked the door open, and braked the car. It was filled with minor purchases bought with the phony money the afternoon before. Two trunks filled with counterfeit were located in the attic and two more plates were found hidden in the rafters. The three, comprising the entire gang, were taken into custody and the case was wrapped up. The Secret Service man, who had been sick, went back to bed.

There are fashions in forgery and counterfeiting just as there are in dresses and hats. Supply follows demand. Ancient Romans bought ancient Greek sculptures and coins that were forged. The Middle Ages, eschewing art, specialized in the counterfeiting of relics of saints and martyrs. During the Renaissance classical sculpture was admired; it naturally followed that it was forged. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries picture faking was the rage, while in the eighteenth, emphasis shifted to romantically inspired literary works, such as James Mac-Pherson’s “translations” of the poems of Ossian, a legendary third-century bard. Thomas Chatterton wrote a “play by Shakespeare” — Vortigem — which was produced in 1796 but was unfortunately howled off the stage. The golden age for antique forgery, as well as forged works of art of all types, was the nineteenth century. Expert criticism was rare and scientific detection methods were still in their infancy.

Great names have lent themselves to forgery. Michelangelo at the age of twenty-one sculpted a marble Cupid which he buried in the ground. Soon after it was exhumed and sold to a collector as an antique. Many great artists of the past had pupils copy their paintings as part of their training. A particularly good job was rewarded by the master’s affixing his signature to it. Rembrandt and Corot often signed pictures on which they had painted only a few strokes. Van Dyck painted, at most, eighty canvases, but 2,000 pictures have been attributed to him. In music, as a struggling violinist, Fritz Kreisler signed other composers’ names to his violin pieces so his repertory would not be drastically limited.

The beginning of the twentieth century is notable for the Lincoln forgeries of Joseph Cosey, the stamp forgeries of Jean de Sperati, and the famous Piltdown skull fraud of a highly respected English solicitor and fossil collector, Charles Dawson.

The middle of the twentieth century is notable for a fantastic rise in check forgeries and a booming new industry — the forging of trade names.

Check forging is the fastest-growing crime in America, with the amateurs outnumbering the pros. It is a problem for supermarkets, department stores, and independent grocery stores as much as banks. One fifth of check forgers are women.

One reason for its popularity is that 90 per cent of all business transactions are carried out by check. Another is that check forgers are so enchanted by the ease with which they can buy things and acquire cash that they are hard put to reform. One check forger, thrown into jail for a clumsy forgery, whiled away several years practicing his handwriting. When he came out he was a master. Another, after serving time for forgery, turned Square John, gave lectures, and became a sheriff’s deputy. Then he ran wild and wrote $3,500 worth of bum checks.

An even more ambitious forger, who had arthritis so bad he could hardly write, stole mail from building lobbies and then altered the names of payees on checks he found in pilfered letters. He changed the name Apple and Co. on a check to Appleton R. Coxbetner. Then he took out a fishing license in that name, used it as identification, and the bank clerk cashed the check. He clipped banks for nearly $25,000 this way.

One method of cutting down on the practice is the use by depositors of checks especially treated so that, when ink eradicator touches them, they break out in a rash of Void-void-void. Another is the installation of cameras at tellers’ cages to record photographically the face of the check casher, his check, and his means of identification. If the check casher refuses to let his picture be taken, the bank has every right to refuse to honor his check.

But equally as tempting as check forgery to make a quick buck these days is the sale of cheap, inferior products bearing the counterfeit labels of well-known brands. Almost every nationally advertised trademark has suffered abuse as a result of this new racket — Leica cameras, BVD’s, Victor records, Chanel perfume, Good Humor ice cream, Revlon nail polish, Singer sewing machines, Bendix-Westinghouse air brakes, and so on.

It is estimated that half a billion dollars’ worth of bogus auto parts are sold annually, all bearing the names of respectable firms. When the parts break down or fail to work, it’s the company whose label is on the products that loses a customer and may gain a lawsuit.

At Christmastime a few years ago Chicago was flooded with 200,000 watches purporting to be Bulovas. “Bulov” was printed on the dial face and the number seventeen appeared beneath the name. The seventeen was interpreted to mean the number of jewels in the works, but each watch was sixteen short. The watches were worth three dollars and sold for twenty-six.

Naturally the manufacturers of honest merchandise who have spent years earning reputations for integrity, and millions on acquainting the public with the superiority of their products, are not too pleased when their trademark is swiped and affixed to crumbling goods. They sell fewer products because of the competition and they lose good will when customers find themselves stung with a shoddy product under a nationally known label.

Some companies have gotten injunctions against the offenders, but the profits are so huge that the culprits merely laughed at the court orders. Getting evidence against brand-name counterfeiters that will stand up in court is highly expensive, time-consuming, and difficult, entailing the hiring of an army of private investigators. In addition, state laws about the practice are extremely hazy, and there is no federal law declaring that this type of forgery is a crime, unless misrepresented goods are sold through the mails.

The Bulova Watch Company, thoroughly aroused, spent bushels of money to break up the Chicago watch-counterfeiting ring. When the trial was over, the ringleader got ten days in jail and his confederates got suspended sentences. Bad perfume comes in good bottles, untrustworthy brakes are put into autos, and people buy burned-out TV tubes. They are all counterfeit, and not much can be done about it.

It kind of makes you long for the days of good old King Canute.