The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter by Jason Kersten

Author:Jason Kersten
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Counterfeits and Counterfeiting, Art, Social Science, True Crime, Fiction, Criminals & Outlaws, Personal Memoirs, Williams, Counterfeiters, Biography & Autobiography, General, Biography, Criminology
ISBN: 1592404464
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

WITH THE PEN AND OVI PROBLEMS SOLVED, Art took on the New Note’s most daunting challenge: the watermark. Ever since he’d first seen it that day at Barnes & Noble he’d known that replicating it would be his biggest battle, one that he was by no means convinced he could win. “The watermark had nothing to do with printing or inks,” he explains, “it was something out of my skill set, not something I was comfortable with. So I put it off as I looked at other parts of the bill, but it nagged me the whole time because I knew I’d have to deal with it, and there was no clear way around it.”

The irony was that the watermark was the least innovative part of the bill—Old World technology that was virtually unchanged since the thirteenth century. Created during the papermaking process by a wire mesh device called a “dandy roll,” a watermark is simply an area of low density in the paper’s substrate that allows transmitted light to pass through. Because the watermarking process takes place when the paper pulp is wet, the mark itself is literally built into the bill and impossible to duplicate by printing.

One method by which counterfeiters were attempting to defeat the watermark was by taking new ten-dollar bills, bleaching them, then reprinting them as hundreds. This had the advantage of preserving not only the original paper, but also the watermark and the security strip, and as long as people saw both they usually accepted them—even if they were the wrong ones for that denomination. Later on, after the new five-dollar bill was issued, “bleaching” became even more economical, but it still involved altering large amounts of real currency. For this reason its practitioners were usually large criminal groups, many of them from South America, where drug cash is abundant. Art simply didn’t have the capital to buy up thousands of ten-dollar bills and bleach them. More to the point, a bleached bill would never pass muster on that one vendor who actually knew his money. Art wanted a bill that would defeat that guy, or as he put it, “a bill that would go all the way to the bank.”

At first Art dabbled with the idea of making his own paper. He dissolved some newsprint until it became an oatmeal-like pulp, pressed it onto a screen, and ran a homemade dandy roll across it, then baked it in Natalie’s oven. Although the end result was indeed homemade paper with a watermark, the amount of work it had taken made it self-evident that he’d never be able to produce it in the quantities or quality he needed. He also tried soaking existing paper samples in water and various other softening solutions before stamping them, but the result was always the same: flaky, deteriorated paper that would never pass. After a dozen dead-end attempts, he was at a complete loss and on the verge of giving up. He says that the answer finally came to him in a dream.

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