Essays
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Counterfeiting
Counterfeiting has a noble history. I mean that literally. More monarchs -as well as later, less honest dictatorships such as democracies- have debased their own currency in secret and in public, than any conceivable number of illegitimate moneymakers. It is an ancient science; yes, almost as ancient as money, which was invented in the West by Croesus of Lydia in 700 B.C.. And it has always been poised on the cutting edge of the technology available at the time. Counterfeiting implements had been discovered by the Romans in Egyptian ruins dating back to the time of Julius Caesar. The Dorian Greeks knew it well. Solon, the Lawgiver, decreed death for the counterfeiter; although, less than a century later, Polycrates, Tyrant of Samos, kept himself busy minting gold-covered lead coins.
No less an intellectual than Diogenes of Sinope, noted for his apparent devotion to abstemious poverty, -he made a point out of living in a bathtub-was forced to take refuge in Athens in order to escape a charge of counterfeiting in his home city. Athens was never the same afterward, either.
"Hello, I'm Alexander, 'the Great'."
"You don't say. I'm Diogenes, 'the Cynic'."
Constantine, another "Great," decreed in the early Fourth Century A.D., that counterfeiters should be burned alive, and later the Normans called for blinding and castration as the only worthy punishment.
In 1990, over sixty-five million dollars face-value of counterfeit U.S. money was confiscated. Most of that was seized in bulk through successful investigations, and never passed through the system. Fifties and one-hundred dollar bills are the big favorites because, although they tend to be scrutinized more than twenties by John Q. Public, they generate some serious change. Passing twenties is too much like hard work, and tens are impossible. There are still enough older bills in circulation that the newer anti-counterfeit techniques have not significantly made a difference in detection or apprehension.
The United States uses very little color in printing our rather boring currency. When he comes into the possession of foreign money, it tends to look like play money to the average American citizen. The color is used not only to make alien dough more attractive, but also to make it more difficult to counterfeit. Multi-color presses were unknown or quite uncommon for most of the history of paper money. The U.S. Department of the Treasury, and the chartered banks that preceded them, have traditionally relied more on complicated shading lines that were difficult to reproduce either by hand or machine.
When Ben Franklin was given the job of printing money, he used the veins on a leaf in order to develop an inimitable pattern, one that couldn't be reproduced by mechanical means. Of course, a counterfeiter could have used another, similar leaf to reproduce a pattern, just as Franklin did; however, since no two leaves are ever exactly identical, neither would their patterns be identical to those of the official plates.
For the same reason, in the days when chartered banks were allowed to print our money, each bill had to be signed personally by an authorized party. In 1861, when a standardized national currency was instituted, that custom was carried over; even though it must have been evident that the three appointed officials empowered to personally sign each note couldn't possibly sign all of the notes issued in the United States.
By early 1862, the required signatures were allowed by law to be imprinted mechanically, and a Treasury seal was devised to increase public confidence in bills that were not personally signed.
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There have been several counterfeiters in American history unique enough to the non-specialist to write about here.
Emanuel Ninger was a German immigrant who, like myself, lived in Northern New Jersey. His tenure was for fourteen years, ending just before the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Like me again, he was retired, or so he claimed. A frequent visitor to New York City, he periodically managed to sell his miniature Impressionist line drawings there. Art critics of the world, arise! There were none such in the annals of Art, they say.
Yes and no.
Ninger's contributions to Impressionism were in the form of hand-drawn copies, in pen and ink, of twenty and fifty dollar bills penned on ordinary bond paper manufactured by Crane and Co., of Dalton, Massachusetts. That worthy company manufactured then and still does, I believe, the premium paper with colored threads upon which our national currency is printed. He stained the paper with weak coffee to get the correct "patina," and added simulated red and blue threads with ink.
Mr. Ninger may have been a forger, par excellence; still, he retained vestiges of honor.
All of his bills lacked the legally empowering message, "Act of March 3, 1863," and the putative origin of the bill, "Engraved and printed at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing." Rather truthful for a counterfeiter, wouldn't you say?
When closely examined with a glass, other differences between his output and that of Goliath's, were obvious. There was no way that Ninger could reproduce, by hand, all of the fancy lines that were engraved in the government's printing plates. They were inscribed by highly accurate repeating lathes, that had been invented for the specific purpose of foiling counterfeiters.
Instead, taking a leaf from the latest page of European Art trends, Ninger would "suggest" the fine lathe work with an impressionistic rendering.
His art and his draftsmanship were incredible. The product fooled everyone, including bankers. Fifty dollars, even twenty dollars were incredible sums for the time. Even the Treasury was astounded. They had difficulty discriminating between his bills and real bills themselves, without resorting to magnified examination by Departmental experts.
Ninger was finally caught through some unforeseen problem with his ink supply.
The last bill that he passed had been to a bartender, and he had no problem in getting his change for the fifty. After the counterfeiter had left the bar, the bartender had accidentally laid the bill in a wet spot on the bar. For some reason, perhaps because of a high alcohol content, the moisture caused a little of the ink to come off on his fingers. It was just enough to make him suspicious; although some ink can be rubbed off a real bill, by the way. An assistant was sent scurrying after Ninger and, with the aid of the police, the master counterfeiter was apprehended.
Emanuel Ninger received a relatively light sentence, six years imprisonment and a one-dollar fine, of which he served four years and two months. There's no word on whether he paid the dollar. If he did, it was probably well inspected by the recipient in the unlikely hope that the bill was an original "Ninger."
This leniency was undoubtedly due to the many letters and newspaper articles, clamoring for clemency, written by Ninger's admiring public. He seemed to embody the very spirit of American ingenuity wedded to the essence of Old World craftsmanship; qualities that seemed to be passing from the scene too quickly even then.
His was the archetype of the victimless crime.
Only the well-to-do could afford to change a twenty or a fifty-dollar bill. When a Ninger counterfeit was discovered, the "victim" was more likely to frame and display the evidence proudly in his place of business than he was to complain about it. Indeed, in Ninger's working lifetime, his bills were often bought and sold, as acknowledged counterfeits, for more than their nominal value. After being released, Ninger sold his farm in New Jersey and seemed to disappear. The purchaser apparently went crazy hunting for hoards of either counterfeit money, or perhaps buried proceeds, from Ninger's life of white-collar crime.
During the same period that Ninger was perfecting his free-hand, two engravers and a cigar-maker were to carry the ancient science to new heights of mechanical perfection. The only one of the trio worth mentioning was a certain Baldwin S. Brendell. He wasn't the mastermind of the conspiracy, but he certainly was a bottomless fount of technical ingenuity.
Their one-hundred dollar silver certificates were so well engraved that, four or more months after being passed, when five of them were turned into the Treasury for having a Treasury seal that was off-color, the Department started checking into their production records in order to have the offending government press adjusted more carefully. It was some time before they recognized the bills as counterfeit, and only then because the paper seemed a little too thick.
For the first time since the Revolutionary War, a monetary issue had to be recalled by the United States.
Brendell and Company had only passed a first batch of ninety-seven bills, printing blank dollars that had been split, bleached and reglued, just to see how easily they were accepted. That's how good bad can be. If they had waited until the cigar-maker had delivered suitable paper, possibly another month, the counterfeits might not have been discovered until it was too late to apprehend them. Their plan called for ten million dollars worth to be passed through the banking system, and converted to bonds and other securities.
Baldwin Brendell, et al., were caught only because of the quality of their work.
Realizing the enormity of the economic consequences if those over-achievers were not apprehended, the Secret Service assembled a huge task force to investigate the lives of every engraver in the United States who was capable of such excellence. Brendell and his fellow engraver, Arthur Taylor, had made the unforgivable error of spending some of their ill-gotten gains, to decorate their wife and mother respectively.
I promised that Brendell would be worth mentioning and, so far at least, he's notable but not necessarily fascinating. The really fun part comes after they were arrested and thrown, together, into a nine by six foot prison cell to await trial.
Counterfeiters have long had a successful history in America of trading undiscovered printing plates to the prosecution for reduction and even remission of sentences. Unfortunately for Brendell and Taylor, their relative inexperience in crime had resulted in no such buried treasure; the Feds had captured all of the goods with them.
You're going to find this hard to believe, even though it's historical fact. With a couple of metal plates and implements small enough to be smuggled into the prison by visitors, often using common cleaning chemicals from the prison kitchens, the two inmates split a real twenty dollar bill into halves, soaked them in oil, and placed them on home-made, chemically treated plates. The fresh twenty, as well, had been smuggled in by family. Using sunlight through their barred cell window they photoengraved the plates and used small tools to dress those plates up. New dollar bills, that had also been given to them by visitors, were bleached in a prison-brewed solution.
Everything was set except for a press.
In order to have something valuable to trade to the government for leniency, Brendell had to make bills that were good enough to be accepted, bad enough to be discovered, and being passed through the financial community even while they were in jail. Then the law would be positively slavering to acquire their plates. It was the printing press that was holding everything up. The prisoner's relatives were willing to help them, but had neither the expertise nor the equipment to accomplish the required printing of the counterfeit.
Predictably, it was Brendell who thought of the way to do it.
He wrote to his father, knowing that gentleman would not aid him in any dishonesty, that he had reformed and was working on a new invention, a clothes iron for shirt-sleeve cuffs. He explained that he would need a model built to get a patent, which he would then sell to pay his legal fees, and perhaps, to make restitution.
The resulting iron, bearing a remarkable resemblance to a miniature stripped-down printing press, was smuggled into prison by Brendell's brother, on a routine visit. It posed as a box of cigars and weighed less than four pounds, reportedly.
So, for a short time the counterfeiting continued, carried out under a blanket, by prison candlelight. The excellent product, the plates and the press were later smuggled out, and some of the bills were passed by Harry Taylor, brother to Arthur.
Everything went as planned, for a while.
The Secret Service was interested, the U.S. Attorney may have been instructed to trade whatever it took to get those plates. There was one small detail, though. One little thing. The serial number on the bill that they copied hadn't been issued until after the two had been imprisoned. The Feds wouldn't believe that their co-operative prisoners actually knew where the plates were buried, because it was thought that there was no way that they could have manufactured them, given the time-frame. Brendell and Taylor couldn't prove that they knew where the plates were, without giving away their location, and they would be foolish to do that without making a deal with the Secret Service and the U.S. Attorney first.
After a week of discouragement and haggling, the two finally gave up, and admitted how and when the plates were manufactured, and where they were buried. There had been no deal; they were just too tired to keep their stories straight. Baldwin Brendell and Arthur Taylor received seven-year sentences, which they served fully.
On release, they both applied -although I think that it was Brendell's idea- to the Secret Service for a written recommendation as to their qualifications as master engravers.
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