5 Successful Counterfeiters

Counterfeiting currency successfully takes serious skills, and some consider counterfeiting an art. Josh and Chuck recount the stories of five artful counterfeiters and their successful careers in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
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(00:44):
to meeting dot com slash stuff. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
This is Stuff you Should Know. He to Live and
Die in. Yes, Chuck just did a little Um, I
don't even know. That's foreshadowing. I am really off my
game today, So you're not, Yeah, yeah, I am? Uh

(01:07):
what Chuck brought up? See listen, listen to me what
Chuck brought up um to live in? I want to
get through this sentence what Chuck brought up to live in?
Diane l a for is because we're talking about counterfeiting today,
and that's the best counterfeit movie in history. It is.
It is, and we've talked about it before, but I
think it's worth talking about again. Like you just did.

(01:29):
It's great, Thank you, You're welcome. Moving on, So, Chuck, counterfeiting,
as you may or may not know, is a dying crime,
a lost art. It really is. And actually this is
one of those old school types of criminal activity that, um,
people who are good at it have the respect of
law enforcement. I was reading an article about this bust

(01:54):
of some counterfeiting ring and it amounted just some guy
with an inkjet printer who was printing off you know, terrible,
terrible currency on fiber paper, right, and um, this secret
service guy, who's like a twenty two year vet was
just shook his head and discussed and he's like, it's
a dying art. Like you just you don't see good

(02:15):
paper any longer. Yeah, it's definitely a lost art. And um,
I kind of I know this sounds goofy, but I
kind of like the idea of since it doesn't have
that much anymore, I can say this of counterfeiting like
instead of a thief, anyone can throw a wind a
chair through a window and go like break into a
cash register at night. But to think like I'll print money,
that's so believable that you can pass it. Yeah, it's

(02:37):
like it was artistry for sure. It is. And um,
when researching this article, there was a common theme among
these great counterfeitters, these five most successful counterfeitters. Uh that
they all were just they had tremendous guts. They were
they tried to break out of jail at every turn. Um.

(02:58):
And they were just really admirable criminals. Yeah, and must
of them wrote books about it, which is interesting. It's well,
it's a good way to make some money afterwards. You
don't write a book about my life as a as
a flat screen TV thief, No, And if you do,
no one reads it. It's self published. So Chuck, let's
get into this all right, all right, Now we're gonna
talk about some of these successful counterfeiters, and we should

(03:20):
also add a caveat here. Successful doesn't mean that they
never got caught, we don't. We don't know about those
counterfeit exactly right. The ones who got caught but still
had these tremendous careers are the ones we're going to
talk about. And we're gonna do it chronologically, buddy, Starting
with a guy named Stephen Burrows Steve. He was born

(03:41):
in New Hampshire, Josh in the seventeen hundreds, late sept
mid seventeen hundreds, and uh was raised throughout the United States.
And I think that you have one of the best
sendences you've ever written in this article, which one from
an early age. He showed distinct signs of a cute chicanery.
What did you read that like, Anthony Hopkins? Oh that

(04:02):
was Anthony Hopkins. Yeah, oh, he said, why did I Yeah,
that wasn't supposed to be anything. That is my news,
real voice. That was good, thank you? And he was
He was a little mischievous guy all his life, it
sounds like, apparently gained a reputation as the worst boy
in town. At a very young age. Um, he stole
a bunch of watermelons from a local farmer, and he

(04:24):
joined the search party to find the thief that chause
he's smart and I think at age fourteen he ran away, um,
joined the merchant navy, ended up basically being the de
facto ship doctor. Well, he deserted, that's right. He went
to the army, and the army deserted the army, then
went to college, bailed on college, and then became like

(04:46):
a de facto doctor on the boat, which led him
to say, you know what, I could probably get away
posing his stuff. His father was a clergyman, so he
decided that he was going to pose as the leader
of a church, which he did successful least first six months,
led the congregation like mass everything. Um. And he probably

(05:07):
could have done that indefinitely because you know, people aren't
that suspicious of preachers usually. Um. But he got busted
passing some counterfeit money in Concorde, right Springfield, close enough, Yes,
And then he was sent to jail. And then he thought,
I bet a good way to escape from jail would
be to set the jail on fire. Yeah, and it worked.

(05:29):
He successfully escaped. Yeah, he fled to Canada actually, and um,
he I think he did. He get caught again. Well,
that's where he led. The most serious counterfeiting ring was
when he went to Canada, right. So he was in Canada, um,
and he led this ring for years and then suddenly
he just decided to reform himself. He gave up crime,

(05:49):
started supporting himself by tutoring wealthy Canadian children or the
children of wealthy Canadians. I should say. Yes, he founded
a library and that what he said. Yeah, he became
kind of like got um cultural benefactor up there. Even
though people were aware of who he was, they still
respected him because the stuff he did, um, it was

(06:10):
just so respectable. They're like, he printed some funny bills.
He built us a library. Yeah, he built a library.
And he died in eighteen forty. But before that he
wrote a book, like you said, a lot of them do,
called Memoirs of my Own Life. That's the best memoir
title in memoir history, Memoirs of my Own Life. So
it's still in print. Apparently I haven't read it. I

(06:33):
haven't either. Well. Moving on. Number four is drum roll
the Lavender Hill Mob, which I found out was a
movie from nineteen fifty one with Alec Guinness. We try
researching them. I know that's all you see is the movie,
but it's unrelated, not related at all. Instead, the Lavender

(06:55):
Hill Mob actually are a fairly recent origin. They were
um upper in in the nineties in Great Britain around
Lavender Hill. I would imagine they were founded by this
guy named Stephen Jury. And this guy was awesome. He
was what they call an old school rogue and that's
a quote. And uh another guy named Kenneth Mainstone who's

(07:17):
a retired printer, and Jury recruited Mainstone to come up
with some counterfeiting plates, right right, and they did very successfully.
And by the way, Jury is widely credited as establishing
the knockoff perfume market. Yeah. I found he um actually
bribed a perfumer to get recipes and by the time

(07:40):
it was all said and done, had bottled five million
phony Chanelle number five. That a factory in Acapulco making
stuff if you love Georgio or if you like Georgio,
you love La Lah and like the little spray Arissault kid. Yeah. Yeah,
And when it was the last time you were cologne.
Oh it's been a long time. Yeah, I work alone.

(08:02):
When I was like seventeen, I think was the last time.
That's it's about it for me. You know. It's funny.
When I lived in you my Arizona. All those dudes
work alone. Yeah, because everybody's sweaty out there. Well, I
don't know, there's just kind of this there's a different
culture and they're like, you don't work alone, and they're
like because they have like Gill in there here. Okay,
I know the culture you're speaking, the Jersey short type
of thing. Yeah, okay, So the Leavener Hill mob, right,

(08:24):
they were very successful. They printed about fifty million pounds
worth of fake notes, and not pounds by weight, but
pound by you know, the currency currency. They also sold
fake stamps, which I thought was sort of ingenious. It is,
but at the same time, it's like, look, you just
made fifty million pounds of fake currency, and and one
way to get rid of um, counterfeit money is not

(08:46):
to just passive, but you can actually sell it for
you know, pennies on the dollar to people who know
that it's counterfeit or you're going to go past with themselves.
But um, even for pennies on the dollar, it's still
many millions of pounds, and these guys are making stamps
on the side. Yeah, it was a little i'd Apparently

(09:06):
the first bills didn't work out, so great though. You
hear about that that the Queen of England looked like
she had a beard, and so that maybe that's why
they were making stamps until they perfected the note making,
which they did because they fooled UV detectors. They got
so good at it. Yeah, and actually they got good
enough that the um the Bank of England actually changed

(09:27):
their design for their twenty pound note because of the
Lavender Bob's activities and success. Pretty awesome, it is. And
he wrote a book Joy did before he died. Just
died a couple of years ago, didn't he two thousand
six He had center two titles. The first one was
called Funny Money Decent. The second one was great. Second

(09:48):
one was called loads of Money. And that's one word,
loads of loads of Money, the true story of the
world's lawest ever counterfeiting ring Colin and there is. Well, yeah,
it kind of classes up your book when you have
a colon in there, loads of Money. We should write
a movie about that guy. Alright, chuck onto the Nazis. Yeah,

(10:11):
I didn't know this. Most people think of the Nazis
as like the worst fascist state to ever emerge in
the history of humanity, not the worst state. Ever, not
first worst because Mussolini wasn't all that successful. Um, you know,
they they directly murdered ten million marginalized people, um, including Jews,

(10:38):
Roman Catholics, homosexuals and others. They invaded Poland and France
and other countries. But they also ran arguably the most
successful counterfeiting ring in the history of humanity. There were
a lot of in the history of humanities with Nazis,
almost all of them were horrible. Actually, all of them

(11:00):
were horrible. This is the least horrible thing they've ever done, probably,
but it was going to pan out pretty bad in
the end. Yeah. They made about six hundred and fifty
million pound notes, which would be about seven billion bucks today, right,
which was about of the currency in circulation in Great
Britain at the time. And their brilliant idea was to

(11:22):
fly over England and drop cash money from planes. They
actually figured out and this was called Operation Bernard after Bernard,
who was an s S officer who's in charge of
this operation. The head of the operation named the operation
after himself. Basically, what they did was they went around
and figured out what nearly dead people in their camps

(11:43):
used to be printers in the time before the war,
and they identified them and drafted them to work in
what was called the Devil's Workshop, which is like a
secret printing press or printing office. And uh, what is
it you you you speak to Irman? What camp? Uh?
Saskatchewan now? Uh Shauschenhausen. Nice chuck. So they had some

(12:08):
guys there, all assembled to crack the English currency and
and they did successfully, leading to the six fifty million
pound notes. Yeah, and they well they didn't drop her
from the plane though they laundered it use some of
that money to like import things. And this isn't factually
backed up, but there is a rumor that they actually

(12:30):
used that money to pay for the rescue of Mussolini.
Did they really? Yeah, well, they apparently made a bunch
of cats. They gave the money to a German businessman
who served as a front form to launder it, and
he bought anything of value that he could get his
hands on with this money. And apparently it wasn't a
secret like Uh. England had known since like nineteen thirty

(12:50):
nine that this was going on, and they tried to
close their borders to income and currency, but it didn't
really work. They finally cracked the American hundred dollar bill.
Just as their camp was liberated and they they the
Nazis and these guys were coming. So they took all
the printing prayer by these guys, the Allies. They took
the printing stuff and threw it in the lakes, blew

(13:13):
stuff up with explosives. I don't know why they were
trying to cover this aspect of the Holocaust up, you know, um,
and they were about to execute everybody who was involved,
and the Allies showed up and save the day. Yeah,
And I think we should point out the idea but
behind all of this was to undermine the economies of
England and the United States, or do not point that out,

(13:36):
which is that's a pretty important part. That was the plan.
They weren't just like, oh, we'll get English money and
didn't would buy things because you know, if you have
a sudden influx of cash, a lot of cash on
the on the market leads to inflation. Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Uh.
There was a BBC TV show Josh about this in
called Private Shorts. And then one of the Jewish um

(14:00):
prisoners forced to do this was named Adolf Burger, and
he later wrote a book, and that book was turned
into a movie that won Best Foreign Language Film in
two thousand eight. H The Counterfeiters in English, don't ask me,
it was in German. Let's check it out. Yeah, moving on, Chuck,
Moving on to number two. Charles Ulric. Yes, not related

(14:23):
to Robert Urick as far as I know, because there's
two different names. Now. This guy was another um, kind
of dashing counterfeitter, filled with daring do and he was
also a ladies man, actually do. I couldn't help There's
no other better way to describe it. A cute chicanery. Yeah,

(14:44):
he was a ladies man, right, Yeah, it actually led
to his downfall, right. He was a polygamist, uh, and
he wasn't shy about it. He was like Bill Paxston
for goodness, say right. And this was in the eighteen
sixties in New York. He and like most of these
uh counter fitters, he was a gifted engraver of plates. Right.
So the local mob figures out that this guy is

(15:05):
a gifted engraver of plates, and the corral um to
try to get him in well working for them, and
he does, and he ends up getting in trouble and
ends up forming his own mob, his own gang, and
with all the women included. Right. Um, he finally gets
caught in eighteen sixty eight and stands trial. He was
in Cincinnati, and he got twelve years in the federal

(15:27):
pokey uh and by his own estimation, he printed about
eighty thousand dollars worth of um phony bills a lot
of deb back then, which is equal to about one
point three million in two thousand eight dollars. Right, but
what was his downfall, Chuck, I said, women, but specifically
what well like you said, he was a just sort
of a blatant polygamous, made no bones about it, and

(15:51):
he engaged, moved all around, engaged in relationships and never
broke off the old ones. Eventually he moved his wife
and to live with he and his girlfriend and a
third woman, and one of them finally said, you know what,
I'm gonna turn you in, jerk. Actually all of them
turned on him, but interesting, and they turned him in.
And that's that's where the Cincinnati trial came from. Before that,

(16:13):
he had been um incarcerated, and in the grand tradition
of counterfeiters, he broke out and actually led the cops
on a chase across the Niagara River. Like right at
the falls and made it across actually into Canada and
escaped and he was like, who's that lady in the
barrel as he was going, And if that's not daring do,

(16:35):
I don't know what that's daring do? My friend, that's
a cute chickenary. Can you really like that? That's just great?
All right? The last one, buddy, And this guy's pretty familiar. Yeah,
everyone's probably heard of Frank a Big Nail because the
Stevie Spielberg movie Catch Me if you Can, Yeah, Tommy Hanks.
It was made at a time when Spielberg unwittingly had

(16:58):
a fake or a stolen Rockefeller in his collection. Yeah,
I love this movie. Did you like it? I liked
it too. It was just I don't know. It was
it when spielberget kind of put out some stinkers and
everything was so serious, and then he just kind of
did a fun, entertaining heist movie, right, And it's one
of those movies you can lay on the couch and watch,
like for the fiftieth time on like a Sunday. Did

(17:19):
they never show it on TV? Yeah? That was I
think it ran on like T and T for a
while because I saw it. Yeah, I love this movie. Um.
Leo DiCaprio obviously played Frank and a funny story. When
abcnail found out DiCaprio is going to portray him, he
was worried because he didn't know if Leonardo DiCaprio would
be able to be smooth enough to play him accurately.

(17:42):
He's like the smoothest dude on the planet. He is smooth.
He's like, oh, Leo, no, I don't think this guy cares.
I don't think he thinks. Leo DiCaprio holds a candle
to goodness me, you can land Gazelle. And then also
can Tom Brady. Well look at him, dude, stud quarterback. Yeah,
but I mean chiseled out of stone. He's a quarterback.

(18:06):
Shut up, all right. Uh. He did most of his
work and his teens and twenties, which is the remarkable
thing about his story. And he was a check forger, yes,
as anybody who's seen the movie can tell you. Uh.
And actually, between the ages of sixteen and twenty one,
he cash more than two point five million dollars in
fake checks in all fifty states and twenty six countries. Yeah. Yeah,

(18:28):
that's some serious work. And He was also a confidence
man because he would not only write fake checks, but
he would masquerade as as you saw in the film,
like an airline pilot or a doctor or an attorney professor.
I think he did at one point and fooled everybody. Yeah,
and he just forged whatever documents he needed to prove
that he had the education or training or resume or

(18:51):
whatever and get hired, which made him a good comment,
which made him chuck smooth. He said, catch me if
you can. Few things here, Josh, that are similar and
different from real life and in the movie, because they
always beef it up a little bit in the movies.
He did actually um pose as a federal agent when

(19:11):
they busted in on him and kind of snuck out
the back door. Said keep looking. Yeah, he ordered the
fens who were looking for him to keep looking. He
said he was like a treasury agent or something. Absolutely
and yeah, and he was their first. Um he actually
did escape from a moving plane taxing on the runway.
That's pretty seriously, that's awesome. That really happened. However, in

(19:32):
real life he never saw his father again after he
left home, and uh, he he had a real problem
with his parents. Divorced. I mean, like more so than
any kid I've ever heard. Like, he would fantasize about
meeting his parents again and then being proud of him,
and then getting back together because they were proud of
his exploits weird. It's kind of like Ralphie dreaming that

(19:55):
he was going to go blind from having to eat
soap for swearing. You remember it was so poisoning. Uh.
He was one of four kids, and in the movie,
I think he was an only child. Um Hannity the
character hand Ratty, the character hand Ratty, Tom Hanks character. Yeah,
it was actually got named Joe Shay. They changed his name. Yeah,

(20:17):
I don't know why because they said in the original
script it was Joe Shay and I could never find
any reason why they changed it to hand Ready. Did
they say anything about Captain America? Did he use the
Captain America alias? No, I didn't notice. Uh. He was
in the film actually as one of the French policemen
that nabbed him. Yeah, he had a cameo, yeah, because
he did a stint in the French jail, French prison,

(20:43):
French prison. He uh is actually married married a woman
as soon as he went straight. He married a woman,
still married to her today. It's got three sons, and
one of his sons is a federal agent. And he
did remain friends with Tom Hanks or not, but yeah,

(21:03):
and he does, uh, he does consulting on like identity
fraud and you know, bank security and stuff like that. Right. Yeah,
everyone on your list wrote a book except for number
two Charles or yeah, well in the Nazis Yeah, but
the other the guy wrote actually one of the guys involved,
Charles Ulrich was just too too involved with the ladies.
I guess waste time write in a book. You should

(21:24):
write a book about that, Chuck. Do you want to
finish this? Finish? You want to wrap this turkey up exactly?
This episode of stuff you should know is brought to
you by go to Meeting, the affordable way to meet
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Is it go to meeting dot com slash stuff. Okay,

(21:44):
So if you want to see some pictures about the
guys that we were just talking about, one I couldn't find,
so I used a picture of Dartmouth College. It is
the best I could come up with, and I apologize
for that. Sorry. You can type in counterfeitters CEO you
A T E R F E I T E R
S in the handy search part how stuff works dot Com,

(22:06):
which leads us to the listener mail Thank the Lord, Josh,
I'm gonna call this sinister, Eats wrote in Yeah, we
got a bunch of them. We did schooled another out
there being all weird. Uh this is uh three quickies.
I edited them down, guys um first ones from Jonathan.

(22:30):
When I hear spoken words, I see the written forms
of the words in my visual field. I see them
much the same way I see a memory. They don't
scroll across my visual field like a stock ticker, whether
they appear in flashes and seemingly random positions and sizes.
I see the words most clearly when I'm deeply focused
on the content of speech, like at a lecture or
when I'm listening to lyricize music. I often see even

(22:53):
see words when I'm dreaming. As for the color, the
best I can do is say that they are a
generic Sands seraph aunt white, filled with black boarders. And
he's a researcher at you see San Diego, he said,
perhaps I should just ask Professor um Ramakan drawn next time,
he's sitting across from me at Perk's Cafe, and that's like, dude,

(23:14):
if you see that, Yeah, I'm glad that we could
bring these two together. It's like the mom with her
son who went off to college. That's right. So that's
from Jonathan. Here's the second one from Ben. When I
was eight or nine years old, my best friend moved
to another town that summer. After not hearing from him
in a while, I decided to give him a call.
Once I walked home from another friend's house. A couple
of seconds later, my right wrist suddenly had an intense

(23:37):
pain and throbbing for no apparent reason. I I sed
my wrist. It made it feel better, and when I
got home, I was still very confused why I happened.
I called my best friend to tell him about this
weird thing, only to discover that he was also in pain,
waiting for his mom to get him to the hospital.
Seems See and his brother were playing Indiana Jones and
the Escape from the Closing Garage Door when he landed

(23:58):
the wrong way and busted his right wrist. I'm a
pretty logical guy, but that is really creepy, and a
true is that the work of neurons or a minor
psychic event, who knows, who knows? And this last one
is from Jordan and New Zealand. He's at Kiwi. Would
love New Zealand. I associate all numbers and letters with colors,

(24:18):
and my mother and I also used to argue at
times about what color a letter is, just like Navoco. Yeah,
and they didn't know that they were sinnisty. It's state
awesome police though, what a bad show that was. I
thought it might also interest you to know that I
experienced music as a projection of colors. I can only
explain it as a sort of mixture of fireworks and

(24:40):
a fountain cool. Uh, stream of water shoots in the air,
changes colors in the shape and relation to the music.
Allowed beat is annoying because it's like a pulse ripple
in the pond. It distracts and muddies the other tones.
Although it's sometimes annoying, I find music distracting. Uh, it
can get distracting, and I still find it very difficult
to focus on a kind versation that there's too much

(25:01):
background noise or music. But now it can actually mute
partially mute colors. So I can concentrate on music. While
I still see no colors, I do see the explosions,
so like a classical piano pieces, really intense, he says.
He still sees Oh, I'm sorry. He still sees colors
and explosions even though he's muted it, but he's lessened

(25:22):
it to the point where he can actually listen to
music and not go crazy. Goodness, I'm having an off
day two. Um wait, what do you mean too? If
I'm talking to someone in music is playing in the background,
I can focus on the speaker much easier than I
was previously able, thanks to his new muting ability. So
it's from Jordan and New Zealand's and we heard from

(25:43):
other Synis seats and I just couldn't get them all
in the air. So thanks. We heard from one guy
who was like, wait, I thought everybody saw the date
physically wrap around them, right. Yeah, this is pretty cool. Yeah.
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(26:03):
called website on Facebook. Yeah, do those things? An email
about anything at all? Right, Chuck, I've got nothing, so
just send us an email. Will You That Stuff? Podcast
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(26:24):
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