The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [22]
“Yes.”
“All right, but there are some rules,” da Vinci continued, and began a list that would grow longer than Art ever imagined.
The first rule was that Art could tell no one, not even relatives. “Once people realize what you do they will ask you for money,” Pete explained. “If you refuse to give it to them, they will hate you. If you give it to them, they will get caught and probably turn you in.”
The second rule was to never spend counterfeit money in the area where he lived. For reasons that Art would learn later, every counterfeit bill inevitably triggers an alarm, whether it’s in the hands of a grocery store clerk or a sophisticated bank counting machine. And once counterfeit bills are identified, they can be fingerprinted, forensically analyzed, and plotted and traced on a map that the authorities—namely the United States Secret Service—will use to close the geographical noose until it tightens around the counterfeiter’s neck.
The third rule was the most general and the most important. “Never be greedy,” da Vinci said. “If you’re cautious, you can have a good life. But if you print too much, you will be caught.”
Art swore to follow all the rules.
“Do you have any questions?” da Vinci asked him.
“How much do I get to keep?”
“You don’t get to keep any,” Pete said. “That’s not how this works. Passing counterfeit is a whole different ball game from making it, and if you got caught your mother would murder me. Every time we print, I’ll pay you seven thousand dollars in real money. Does that sound good?”
“Yeah.” It was more money that Art had ever made in his life.
“Any other questions?”
“What happens to the money after we make it?”
“It will go to clients.”
“Who?”
“That’s none of your business, and you’ll never know. That’s for your own good, Arty. Another rule is that you never reveal who your clients are.”
Da Vinci gave Art no more instruction that first day. After spending less than twenty minutes in the shop, he stood up and said that it was time to go. Just before they left, he spoke two final words.
“He told me to ‘get ready’ with that little devil smile he had,” remembers Art. “I was so fucking anxious, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night long thinking that I was gonna make some money.”
COUNTERFEITING HAS SOMETIMES BEEN CALLED the world’s second oldest profession. Its conceptual birth, predicated on the simple notion that people will accept what you give them if it looks and feels “real,” is as ancient as rocks in a rice sack, but when it comes to money, most numismatic historians agree that counterfeiting probably dates back to very shortly after the invention of money itself, sometime around the year 700 B.C. in the ancient kingdom of Lydia. Enterprising craftsmen quickly learned that few people bothered to weigh lead and copper coins coated with a thin veneer of gold or silver as long as they bore the king’s stamp. The archeological record tells us that from that moment on, in virtually every society making coins there were also people faking them.
From the beginning it was a crime of legacy. Doing it successfully required an intimate knowledge of not only how real money was made and defended, but how to replicate it—specialized knowledge that could be passed on only by a mentor. One of the oldest accounts of counterfeiting comes from the third century B.C., when a Greek named Diogenes was banished from the city of Sinope, on what is now the Turkish coast, for “adulterating in coinage.” As the city gate closed behind Diogenes, he trudged off toward the horizon with an accomplice, the old man who had taught him how to counterfeit.