(This is the first of a series of three articles. Read parts two and three.)

Counterfeiting is a prehistoric form of gainful skulduggery. The idea of money was conceived somewhere on the other side of antiquity, and so was the idea of counterfeit money. The idea of money is older than the idea of counterfeit money, but older, perhaps, by no more than a few minutes. There is evidence of the use of both the genuine article and the counterfeit article in the earliest recorded civilizations, and it has been established that primitive tribes had both good money and bad money before there were any civilizations to record. It seems that immediately after certain people realized that they could easily make tokens to represent cumbersome property, such as collections of animal skins and stores of foodstuffs, certain other people awoke to the fact that they could just as easily make tokens to represent the tokens that represented the cumbersome property. The two ideas are so closely related that they are practically twins, and, like the products of the ideas, they are hard to tell apart. If it were not for counterfeit money, the story of money might be simply beautiful. As it is, the pattern formed by the fateful entwinement of money and counterfeit money is intricately grotesque.

Among all the rogues in history, no class has been more persistent than counterfeiters, and only thieves have been more numerous. No penalty for the crime has ever been devised that had any conclusive effect on the obstinacy of counterfeiters or on the popularity of counterfeiting. Civilized people with money they hope is valuable have always possessed a fierce abhorrence of money they know is worthless, and their treatment of counterfeiters has come close to being savage. Until comparatively recent times, by thinking up and carrying out punishments for counterfeiters, civilized people went as far as they are likely to go in that direction. Some of the earliest counterfeiters laboriously clipped coins around the edges and passed the clipped coins on to their fellow-citizens. Then they manufactured counterfeit coins, using the valuable metal they had clipped to make a thin coating for them. To discourage this kind of thing, some of the earliest sound-money men laboriously clipped counterfeiters around the edges, beginning with their ears and going on from there. During the formative period of the Roman Empire, the ears of counterfeiters were cut off and the counterfeiters were also deprived of their citizenship rights. Later on, the noses of Roman counterfeiters were cut off, along with their ears and their citizenship rights. By the time the Roman civilization reached its apex, the hands, feet, noses, ears, and citizenship rights of counterfeiters were clipped away one after another, and the same counterfeiters were then forthrightly castrated. What was left of them was thrown into an arena full of hungry lions. Unclipped and uneaten counterfeiters do not seem to have been deterred by the threat of these penalties.

As the Roman civilization declined, counterfeiting became increasingly popular and was taken up by people in all walks of Roman life. Following a course that had been experimented with in earlier civilizations, counterfeiting was carried on by many respectable individuals and eventually by the State itself. Senators, lawyers, physicians, merchants, and empire builders from the best Roman families were caught counterfeiting. Emperors who believed in a sound currency unhesitatingly fed these leading citizens to the lions, after they had been deprived of their citizenship rights and otherwise clipped. After Nero became emperor, he found the idea of counterfeiting inviting and, in his imperial position, was carried away by the wonderful simplicity of it. The bizarre design formed by the mixture of money and counterfeit money reached a kind of decadent perfection under Nero. Using the government mints, he brought about a synthesis of the two opposing ideas. He turned out worthless leaden replicas of good silver coins in such great quantities that the Roman monetary system collapsed and many civilized Europeans went back to the barter system.

With minor variations, this preposterous cycle has been repeated many times since the fall of the Roman Empire. During the Renaissance, after a counterfeiter had been thoroughly clipped, his eyes were gouged out and he was then drawn, quartered, reassembled, and burned at the stake. Monarchs grew accustomed to having some of their most trusted courtiers and some of their most respected civic and religious leaders brought before them as convicted counterfeiters. On the whole, they punished these almost as severely as they punished common counterfeiters, showing only occasional flashes of leniency. When, for example, the Abbot of Messenden was caught making and passing counterfeit coins, King Edward III stipulated that he be hanged and drawn but, in view of his calling, not clipped or quartered. Henry VIII, like Nero, went in for counterfeiting as the head of the state, and so debased his currency that it collapsed. Various kings of France ruined their currencies in the same way. Through the ages, counterfeit money has caused the downfall of one monetary system after another, with the result that nations have periodically given up the idea of money and have gone back to the barter system. Civilized people have nevertheless been inclined to think of money as a civilized idea and have been amazed whenever they have discovered that uncivilized people had money. Tacitus records the fact that the barbarous Goths and even the undeveloped, loose-lipped Franks had monetary systems, although they lived in wooden huts and didn’t have slaves. Tacitus writes about this in the tone of a dumfounded historian. The Pilgrims who landed in New England thought money would be something new to the Indians. When they found that the half-naked, red-skinned aborigines, using their primitive heads, had conceived and developed the idea of money, and seemed to be devoted to it, they were flabbergasted and, according to some memoirs, aggrieved.

The tribulations of the early white settlers in New England were multiplied by the fact that while certain Indians had been engaged in establishing a monetary system based on wampum, certain other Indians had been engaged in hacking at that monetary system by making counterfeit wampum. The Pilgrims were accustomed to biting coins and ringing them vigorously on cobblestones to make sure they weren’t counterfeit. The Indians were accustomed to spitting on strings of blue wampum and rubbing the shell beads vigorously to make sure that they were the hearts of genuine quahog clamshells and weren’t just pieces of cheap white sea shells that had been dyed blue with the juice of wild huckleberries by Indian counterfeiters. In the beginning, the Pilgrims didn’t know how to detect counterfeit wampum and the Indians didn’t know how to detect counterfeit coins. In spite of their privileged upbringing, the Pilgrims were at a disadvantage. Either because they hadn’t had much money or because they had thought they wouldn’t need it in a place like America, they had brought very little of it with them. There was a shortage of both genuine and counterfeit coins in early Colonial times, whereas there was an abundance of both genuine and counterfeit wampum. Wampum was therefore enthusiastically adopted by the Pilgrims as the medium of exchange. The Pilgrims soon found themselves stuck with fathoms of counterfeit wampum that rascally Indians had passed on them. When the Pilgrims tried to pass it back, even the most ignorant Indian would look at it, spit on it, rub it, drop it on the ground, fold his arms, and shake his head. In time, the Pilgrims and other early colonists learned to spit on wampum and rub it, in order to make sure that it was the real quahog. In a flurry of naïveté, they passed a sheaf of anti-counterfeit-wampum laws.

Following the Roman pattern, the legal penalties for Colonial counterfeiters were at first mild. In 1647, for example, the General Court of Elections in Their Majesties’ Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations ordered that “if the Indians shall offer to putt away upon exchange or barter their false peag string beads [wampum] for good, and warrant it to be so, and it be found otherwise, it shall be confiscated to the Public Treasury.” This measure appears to have put the savage red men in their place, but it wasn’t long before some of the frailer white men began making counterfeit wampum, on a scale that Indian counterfeiters had never envisioned. The first glass beads presented to the Indians of New England were designed to look not like glass beads but like wampum, and they were accepted as wampum by both undiscerning Indians and undiscerning palefaces. In the beginning, the white counterfeiters got this counterfeit wampum from England, where it was made in undercover factories. Later, they established undercover glass-wampum factories over here. What penalties were meted out to these counterfeiters is not known, but it is a matter of historical record that the chaos they created caused the collapse of the wampum currency.

By 1690, paper money, in the form of bills of credit, was being used in place of wampum. In the same year, counterfeit bills of credit were being used in place of genuine bills of credit. The use of money and the counterfeiting of it retained most of their traditionally weird aspects. The first recorded trial of counterfeiters on this continent took place in Rhode Island in 1704. Among those convicted of knowingly passing counterfeit bills of credit was Peregrine White, Jr., a son of the Peregrine White who was born aboard the Mayflower on its first trip over and is generally called “the first native white American.” Young Peregrine told where he had got the bad paper, pleaded guilty, testified for the prosecution, and got off with a fine and only three months in jail. Of the others, who were found guilty of printing, as well as passing, the fake bills of credit, one was sentenced to “sit in the pillory for one hour on a lecture day, and then and there have one ear cut off [and] to suffer twelve months’ imprisonment.” Counterfeiting in America had, by these primeval steps, reached the clipping stage. The penalty for it was swiftly raised to two ears per counterfeiter, and heavier prison terms were imposed, along with longer stretches in the pillory. Counterfeiting increased. Soon Colonial counterfeiters were publicly whipped after both ears had been cut off and they were then nailed to the pillory instead of being allowed to shift around while sitting in it. By this time there were many women counterfeiters. Some of them were grandmothers of the daughters of the American Revolution. They, too, were whipped, but instead of their ears’ being clipped, their heads were shaved. Still later, Colonial counterfeiters, no matter who or what, were hanged. Counterfeiting became even more popular. The currency based on bills of credit collapsed.

In 1772, Colonel Philip Schuyler made a speech, before the General Assembly of the Province of New York, in which he proposed that “paper money be backed with the devices of an all-seeing eye in the clouds, a cart and a coffin, three felons on a gallows, a weeping father and mother and several small children, a burning pit, human figures poured into it by fiends, and a label with the words ‘Let the Counterfeiter Rot.’ “ The Assembly decided that it would be too expensive to put all that on the back of a piece of paper money. It did authorize money with “ ’Tis Death to the Counterfeit” boldly printed on the back. Counterfeiters found it easy to reproduce this simple phrase, and light-heartedly did so. The new currency soon collapsed. Counterfeiting caused the disintegration of various other paper currencies, both before and after the American Revolution. During the Revolution, the British government used its own printing presses for counterfeiting and flooded America with spurious Continental dollars. Its intention was to create a financial panic, which, it was hoped, would stop the Revolution. The most memorable result of its effort was the expression “not worth a Continental.”

Counterfeiting is still going on in this country, but it is no longer as profitable or as popular as it used to be. It is not widely regarded as a practice that will cause the collapse of the present American monetary system. Contemporary counterfeiters, when they are caught, are usually sent to federal penitentiaries, where only their hair is clipped. One reason for the decline of counterfeiting in the United States is that it is now extremely difficult and fairly expensive to make bad American money that looks and feels anything like good American money. Another reason is that it is just about impossible for an ordinary counterfeiter to stay in business very long without being caught by the United States Secret Service.

The Secret Service is responsible for protecting the nation’s Presidents from assassins and the nation’s currency from counterfeiters. It is made up of conscientious and overworked men who carry out their duties quietly, anonymously, and with an efficiency that approaches omniscience. Since the Secret Service began taking care of Presidents, in 1901, no President has been assassinated, and in the fiscal year 1948 only $137,318 out of the $27,902,-858,000 of American money in circulation was discovered to be counterfeit. The Secret Service is the all-seeing eye in the clouds that Colonel Schuyler wistfully dreamed of in pre-Revolutionary days. In 1948, Secret Service men seized $2,948,437 in counterfeit money before the counterfeiters who made it were able to put it into circulation.

The most sought-after counterfeiter there has ever been in this country was one called Old Eight Eighty by Secret Service men. Between 1938 and 1948, he was known to the Secret Service only by the bills he passed. Their name for him was derived from the number of the official file that was kept on him at Secret Service Headquarters, in Washington—No. 880. He was not an ordinary counterfeiter. He was a counterfeiter of one-dollar bills. When a man is a counterfeiter, the temptation to make a whole lot of money, and to make it fast, is more nearly irresistible and seemingly more easily gratified than it is in any other line of work, honest or dishonest. Counterfeiters are greedy men when they take up counterfeiting or else become greedy men soon afterward. Old Eight Eighty’s lack of greed was unique and indicated a restraint on his part that bordered on asceticism. He turned out only one-dollar bills and he passed no more than forty or fifty of them a month.

When Old Eight Eighty passed his first counterfeit dollar bill, at a cigar store on Broadway near 102nd Street, in November, 1938, the proprietor—a busy man, who ran the store without assistants—didn’t look at the bill or feel it carefully when he accepted it. That afternoon, he took it to the neighborhood bank, as part of his day’s deposit. A teller detected it. He deducted one dollar from the cigar-store proprietor’s deposit slip and told him the law required that the bank turn a bad bill over to the Secret Service. In keeping with the efficiency of this branch of the Treasury Department, a Secret Service man questioned the proprietor of the cigar store the very next day. The proprietor said that he had no idea who had slipped him the counterfeit bill. Although he was frequently interrupted by customers, he received from the Secret Service man a full course of instruction in the detection of counterfeit bills and was told to call the traffic cop on the corner if anybody tried to pass another one on him. Old Eight Eighty’s dollar bill was sent to the Secret Service Headquarters, where it was given a routine going over by some students of counterfeit money in the Secret Service laboratory in the Treasury Building and then sent on to the technical laboratory at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing for a full analysis.

Before it can wear out, all United States currency that is not destroyed or hoarded eventually is turned in to the Treasury. Counterfeit money is usually detected by individuals or banks and turned over to the Secret Service before it reaches that stage. The Secret Service laboratory has a file on every series of counterfeit bills that has ever come to its attention. Most of these files are marked “Closed,” which means that the counterfeiter who made the plates from which the bills were printed is in a federal penitentiary, or, having served his sentence, is being checked up on from time to time by the Secret Service, or is known to have stopped making counterfeit money, or is known to be dead. The files marked “Open” contain the products of counterfeiters who are still active and for whom the Secret Service is looking. The men in the laboratory can tell one counterfeiter’s work from another’s almost as surely as fingerprint experts can tell one fingerprint from another.

Practically all counterfeit paper money these days is produced by a photoengraving process. The counterfeiter takes photographs of both sides of a genuine bill, makes engravings from them, and from the engravings prints his counterfeit money. Genuine money is printed from handmade steel engravings. These engravings are by first-class artists. There are today only five or six artists in this country who can draw with an engraver’s tool on a piece of steel a portrait that is as warm and lifelike as the portrait of George Washington that appears on dollar bills, or the portrait of Abraham Lincoln on five-dollar bills, or those of other great Americans on larger bills. In these portraits, the hair and/or whiskers look real, the faces possess verisimilitude, and the eyes have the highlights and shadows of open, living, human eyes. The artists who draw these portraits and the craftsmen who produce the intricate designs elsewhere on the bills make an honest living working for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Counterfeiters’ attempts to copy the portraits and decorations on modern United States currency by working freehand with an engraver’s tool on a piece of steel have invariably resulted in counterfeit bills that are easier to detect than those made by the photoengraving process.

In the entire period since a national currency was introduced, in 1863, only one counterfeiter has turned up who was a good enough artist to copy a genuine bill with any success by the freehand method, but he didn’t try to do it with an engraver’s tool. He worked with a camel’s-hair brush on paper, drawing a single hundred-dollar bill at a time. His name was Emanuel Ninger. He was known to the Secret Service men as Jim the Penman until he was caught by them, in 1896. His method was to place a genuine hundred-dollar bill under a piece of glass and put a strong light beneath it. He would then trace the outlines of the portrait and other designs on a piece of paper of the right size. Then, with magnificent draftsmanship, he would copy the portrait and the designs, using only his camel’s-hair brush and his own green and black inks. Like the artists who work for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, he was a genius in his way, and his counterfeit bills were works of art in their way. They were so nearly perfect that banks accepted them. Jim the Penman’s first counterfeit bill went through many hands and was detected as a counterfeit only when it was examined by the Secret Service after it had been turned in at the Sub-Treasury in New Orleans. The Secret Service looked for Jim the Penman for many years and caught up with him, at last, in Jersey City. Secret Service men followed him around for a few days and then arrested him in the act of getting one of his hundred-dollar bills changed in a New York bank. His camel’s-hair brush and his paper and ink were confiscated, and he was sent to a federal penitentiary. He made only a modest living by passing his works of art. He could have earned much more than that by helping the Bureau of Engraving and Printing make genuine money, but there was, as he explained, something about counterfeiting that appealed to him.

Counterfeiters have found that the portraits, as well as the subtle shadings of the borders and other features of United States currency, lose much of their clarity and liveness in the photoengraving process. In order to produce even a fair plate, a counterfeiter must first make a photograph of the bill and retouch it by hand, strengthening as best he can the fine lines that would otherwise be lost when the engraving is made. Striving for an unattainable perfection, the counterfeiter then usually tries to etch in on the plate some of the lines and shadings that didn’t, in spite of the retouching, come through clearly. This freehand work makes the finished counterfeit bill look a trifle more nearly genuine, but to the men who work in the Secret Service laboratory it also gives each series of counterfeit bills a distinctive quality. This helps them in their efforts to tell counterfeiters apart and, in time, to catch them.

When Old Eight Eighty’s first counterfeit dollar bill was examined at the Secret Service laboratory, it was found to be unlike any other counterfeit bill, of any denomination, in the files. There was no open file of dollar bills, because in the late nineteen-thirties no counterfeiter besides Old Eight Eighty considered it worth while to make a business of turning out dollar bills. Even in the closed files, which go back to the earliest days of counterfeiting in the United States, there weren’t many cases of counterfeit dollar bills. A new “open” file was set up. At first, the counterfeiter was known among Secret Service men as Eight Eighty, but in a few years his case achieved the distinction of being the oldest of the open cases in the Secret Service files, and it was then that they began calling him Old Eight Eighty. During the ten years they looked for Old Eight Eighty, they arrested and convicted thirteen hundred and eighty-five other persons on counterfeiting charges and seized $3,458,235 in counterfeit money before it got into circulation. The hardest man they ever tried to catch was Old Eight Eighty.

The lengths to which counterfeiters have gone in trying to outwit the modern American monetary system is exceeded only by the lengths to which the Secret Service has gone in unmasking modern American counterfeiters. In their time, Secret Service men have caught residents of New York’s Chinatown who bored tiny holes in the edges of gold pieces, dug out most of the gold inside, and refilled the hollowed coins with cement or mud. They have caught counterfeiters who minted, in portable mints they carried around in their automobiles, fairly good-looking pewter fifty-cent pieces. They have caught counterfeiters who shaved Lincoln’s portrait off the fronts of genuine five-dollar bills without damaging the backs of the bills, replaced it with a conveniently proportioned likeness of a New York judge that had appeared on some campaign leaflets, and, after raising the numerals and lettering, passed the bills in the jurist’s own neighborhood as twenty-dollar bills. Secret Service men have posed as counterfeiters, and as wholesale buyers of counterfeit money, and have by other hazardous means broken up ring after ring of mass-production counterfeiters with influential underworld connections. They once put two especially persistent counterfeiters behind prison bars and afterward found that they were going right on counterfeiting behind the bars.

Most of the counterfeiters the Secret Service men have caught, or have ever heard of, were extraordinarily clever craftsmen. Old Eight Eighty was so inept that his counterfeit one-dollar bills were laughable if they were even casually looked at or felt. His clumsily retouched portrait of Washington was murky and deathlike. His border work and his numerals and lettering were botched. The paper he used was an inexpensive bond paper that can be bought at any stationery store. Old Eight Eighty kept passing the things, though, and he passed them at what the Secret Service considered a hideously humble rate. None of his fellow citizens ever looked at or felt his dollar bills when he passed them. They were, after all, only dollar bills. When people discovered that they had been stuck with them, they were, it seems, taught a lesson only to the extent that the loss of a dollar ever teaches the average American a lesson. Long before the Secret Service men caught up with Old Eight Eighty, in the spring of 1948, and arrested him in the kitchen of his sunny, top-floor tenement flat near Broadway and Ninety-sixth Street, he was, besides being known to them as Old Eight Eighty, generally recognized by them as the most exasperating counterfeiter of all time, and the least greedy. His name was Edward Mueller. He was well over seventy by then—a mild, cheerful looking old fellow, with bright-blue eyes, a fringe of snowy hair over his ears, a wispy white mustache, and a toothless grin that all Secret Service men who ever saw him found unforgettable. ♦