Lives of Crime | 3. Making Money

was like American dream shit. My marriage was happy for a long time. I was working like sixty seventy hour weeks at this sign company, and you know, we had a newborn baby at home, so I wasn't getting hardly any sleep, feeding the baby every two hours. So I got a call from the owner asking if I could work on Saturday to do these service calls. I hardly slept the night before, like at all, and so I went into work at like eight am. I was by myself. I was driving a bucket truck. I was so tired.

I was like slapping my face trying to stay awake, turning the radio on, rolling the windows down, you know what I mean. I remember I'd like just kind of close my eyes for a second, and then i'd hear the little reflectors hit the tire, and I'd wake up and go back on the road and smoke a cigarette to stay up, and then you know, I'd close my eyes for a second. But then my tire went off into this little embankment. So I woke up again and

jerked the wheel. But because that front right tire went down into the embankment just a little bit, when I jerked the wheel, it just turned and flipped, so like the bucket truck flipped like six times. While it was flipping, my head shattered the window. So I just kind of came to in this upside down bucket truck. You know, my whole shirt was just red from blood, and they found ballasts like hundreds of yards from the truck. It

was just everything flew out. So the owner of that sign company knew I was on drugs, but he kind of just looked the other way because, like, I was a good worker, but after I wrecked the truck, he felt obligated to just fire me. Rent was due, our lease was up in a couple months. I was a functioning addict. We didn't have a lot of money, didn't have enough to even pay rent. So me and my wife had the conversation like, you know, what are we

gonna do? How are we gonna make this work? And I was at a point to where I was literally planning a bank robbery. I was looking online for real flesh silicone masks, realistic masks that looked like an old man, and like, like I was really like about to rob a bank. I thought about that for a while, but I was just like skeptical. I was like, man, I've got kids. The FBI is gonna kick in my fucking door if I got gone you know, with swat teams

and stuff. Then it was just straight to counterfeiting. It was like, well, no, once I thought about that, I was like, yeah, what am I thinking? Counterfeiting is the way to go. I was all in with it. I was always honest with my wife, and I remember telling her I'm going to start counterfeiting, and I don't think she thought I was serious. You know, we were in a desperate situation, so she was kind of just like

jokingly like go for it, and I was serious. So I was like all right, but in the back of her mind thinking like, oh, well, we have to figure something else out. It wasn't until a couple of weeks later that I printed out my first like a first twenty dollar bill, and she saw it and was like shocked at how real it looked. Then I think she kind of realized, like, oh shit, this looks good. I've

always had this obsessive, compulsive attention to detail. Like I decided I wanted to learn guitar when I was twelve years old, and I literally sat in my bedroom for eight hours a day every day for years until I could sweep arpeggios and play any unaccompanied jazz song. I wanted, and basically, as a teenager, I was one of the few kids that could buy beer because I was printing

fake IDs. They weren't really sophisticated or anything like. I literally started by just printing them, scanning my ID, changing some numbers, and printing it on a piece of paper and then just sticking the piece of paper into like the clear sleeve of my wallet. All my friends, of course wanted them, so then I'd start selling them to my friends for like fifty bucks apiece. But that kind of like made me realize, like, well, shit, you can

forge things and you know, be successful at it. And then I read the book The Art of Making Money about Art Williams, who printed millions, and in that book it roughly explains how he did it. And that's you know, after I read that book, then it was like I

wanted to try try to print money. Then. I mean I was just using basic printers, you know, like my parents' printer that they had, and you know they were they'd be gone for you know, eight hours a day or whatever, so you know, you just go into the little den with the computer and printer and print them out. It really wasn't like this huge money maker, but as a nineteen year old kid, every couple of weeks i'd make two hundred bucks. At first, I didn't really want my

wife involved. She knew what was going on, but I kind of try to keep her away from everything. I wanted to insulate her. But eventually she became my partner in crime. You know. It kind of morphed into a Bunnie and Clyde type relationship. I knew I needed to find thin paper to sandwich two sheets together, and that was the main challenge. I read that you could coat the paper with matt nail polish, clear nail polish, like a top coat, and that would prevent the counterfeit pens

from reacting to the paper. So I knew a way to beat the counterfeit pens. But I needed just paper that was thin enough to put two pieces together. And I found like tracing paper, tried like the wrapper to toilet paper. I found rice paper and vellum paper, and I just stumbled across Bible paper. It was perfect. It was thin enough, it was opaque enough. I hit it with a black light and it glowed a dull purple,

just like money. So when I found this Bible paper, it was like a fucking light bulb that just went over my head. I knew this was like, I was like, this is fucking perfect. I was just like fucking esthetic. Like I knew. I was like, this is it? Like this is it. I looked online to try to buy Bible paper in bulk. The wholesalers that I found sell it in giant reams to like publishing companies that produce Bibles, and I was a little nervous to order a palette

of Bible paper. In Knoxville, Tennessee. My wife was contacting churches and getting donations of boxes of bibles. Guy thought the best way to stay anonymous was just like I've just started going to bookstores and finding Bibles and just taking the blank pages out of them. There's usually one or two pages in the front that are just blank, and then there's usually like two three, four blank pages

in the back. You know, I'd go to bookstores and basically just go stand in the aisle and pretend like I'm reading the Bible and pick up one find the blank pages, kind of rip out the four blank pages in the back and put them in the pocket, and grab another one and just kind of rip them all out. We went to every bookstore in Knoxville until there was no more Bible paper. We went to all the bookstores

in Chattanooga. We went down to Atlanta and all the little cities in between Knoxville and Atlanta, and up to Cleveland, Ohio. By the time I was actively counterfeiting, we started staying at a hotels. We'd try to get like handicap accessible rooms because they had like a really big bathroom, and I would kind of set up shop in the bathroom, you know. I'd run a power cord from like the little power outlet by the sink and have a laptop

and two or three printers. There was always one Bible in the nightstand, so every new hotel room might take the two or three blank pages out of the Bible because it was right there. And eventually we were in a hotel and there wasn't a Bible in the nightstand. We called a front desk and said it was not a Bible in the nightstand, and she said, oh, we'll send one up. Then this may that guy at the hotel knocked on our hotel room door and gave us

a Bible. So I basically was like, hey, you have more of these Bibles, and he was like, yeah, there's boxes in the maintenance closet. We have them upon request. So I basically was like, listen, I'll give you one hundred dollars if you can give me all these boxes of bibles. So he brought us like three boxes full of bibles, and we went through, took all the blank pages out of all of them, and then gave him back. He was confused, like why the fuck did they want

these three boxes of bibles? For two hours and then they gave him back, But I gave him one hundred dollars, so he didn't care. When I first started, I was working on him for thirty minutes, but eventually I got it down to where I could make one hundred dollar bill in probably five minutes. I would constantly edit the images and photoshop and sharpen them, and they just got

better and better as time went on. Basically, like scanners and printers recognized the image of one hundred dollars bill and by recognizing that it knows that it's currency and

it won't let you print it or scan it. So in order to get the digital images, I would simply take a photo of them, get a new crisp hundred dollars bill, lay it on a flat on the table, take a high resolution camera and just snap a photo, and then you can upload that photo and crop around it to take out the background and edit the image.

I'd print the background color and then i'd put it back in the printer and print the green Treasury seals and serial numbers, and then put it back in the printer and print all the black hork And that was the front of the bill, and I would take the reverse side and just lightly missed on some gorilla glue spray, and I'd line it up just right and then squeegem together.

And then after that I would spray on a thick coat of matt lacquer spray, which that would coat the paper so the counterfeit pens wouldn't turn black because the counterfeit pens basically are iodine ink, and the iodine in the ink reacts to starch in paper. So if I sprayed the bills with a Matte lacquer spray, it would coat the paper, so the ink in the pens couldn't react to the starch in the paper because it's not

touching it because it's coated with Matt Lacquer. You get the muscle memory of just the right amount of missing on, you know, because if you spray too much gorilla glue, it'll be too thick. Just one little that that's enough. When I first was able to make a one hundred dollars bill, I thought, you know, this is it. I'm gonna be rich for the rest of my life, like money will longer be a problem ever again, you know. And at this point I wasn't considering that, you know,

I get caught. You know, you don't really think you're gonna get caught until they kicked your door in. The first bill that I broke myself in a store was at a taco bell across from the Knoxville Airport. I was definitely super nervous going into it. I kind of broke this bill out of desperation. It was probably just before midnight. It was late. I parked my car a couple businesses down and I walked into this taco bell ordered a couple soft tacos. And it turns out that

the cashier was the manager. And this manager basically just took the bill, held it up, looked for a strip in a watermark, and she put it in the register and gave me my change. I walked a couple blocks back to my car, and I just threw the tacos the bushes. I kind of thought, this is going to be easier than I thought. I knew that I was onto something. I was living at a hotels, so we

needed visa cards to pay for the hotel rooms. So I started buying prepaid visa cards, and I realized that there's like a three dollar fee attached to a prepaid visa card, So to get one hundred dollars prepaid visa card, it would be one hundred and three dollars. So I would give them two kind of fie hundred dollar bills and I not get the one hundred dollars prepaid visa card and ninety seven dollars change. So that kind of

doubled my income. And most big chain stores have multiple registers, so you know, me and my wife would go into one store and buy prepaid visa cards, but we'd go to multiple registers, so we could leave a Walmart with, you know, one thousand dollars just by going to different registers. And when your job is breaking one hundred dollar bills, Walmarts and stuff like that. Of course, my kids got pretty much whatever they wanted. And if they say, oh, can I have this toy, It's like, sure, I'll make

fifty bucks off of getting you that toy. I would go to my children and specifically say what do you want, because I need to buy stuff. I mean, yeah, anything they wanted. I was eager to get them because that's how I made my money. I remember having Christmas in a hotel room and we had so many toys. It filled up like the whole floor of the hotel room with presents. And you know, we had a Christmas tree in the hotel room, so the kids had a great time,

you know what I mean. At this point, I was used to cashiers only marking the bills with the counterfeit detection pen. And like I said, my bills I sprayed with lacquer, so the pens were no problem. But the first time I went to break a bill out of CBS, the cashier pulled out the counterfeit pen marked it. It marked properly, but then she turned the pen around and shined a black light on my bill and the strip didn't glow red. So it was a real close call for me. I was like I thought, I was begin

to get caught. So at that point I knew I needed to somehow make the strip glow red. Then I found these invisible ink UV pens online. They're basically marketed towards little girl's diaries, so the girl can write in her diary with this invisible ink pen, so no one can read her diary. So I googled that I found

them in red ink. You know, I ordered them, and after I glued my bills together, I would take a ruler and put it over the strip and just draw a line with this invisible ink UV pen so when you shine the black light on it, they it appeared to glow red, just like a real bill. I'd normally wake up at about nine am and print for about

three hours, usually make a couple thousand. At least by noon I had a couple thousand dollars in fake hundreds, and then you know, you spend the rest of the day just kind of breaking them, going to different stores. Some days, some heroin dealers I knew would put in an order for like ten thousand dollars, So some days I'd just print all day to give them ten thousand. They'd give me like twenty five hundred for the ten thousand, and I'd probably print a couple thousand for myself to

break as well. A big part of it was buying heroin from dealers with counterfeit money. This one dealer I was buying like an eight ball of heroin off of him every day for like a month straight. We'd go up to Cleveland together. He'd re up and I'd drive around Cleveland, breaking bills and getting Bible paper and doing the whole routine. He went up to Cleveland without me, and he got arrested while he was up there. A

day or two goes by and he calls me. I figured the FEDS were listening to that conversation, but I also said I wasn't a drug dealer, but I didn't expect anything to come of it. I was in a hotel room at the time of that phone call, and about thirty minutes later, I hear a knock on the door of the hotel room, and I kind of peek out the window of the hotel and I see the corner of a Knox County sheriff. So at that point, fucked fucked. I threw about ten thousand roughly into the

toilet and flushed it. Took another probably five ten thousand threw it in the toilet, but when I went to flush it the second time, just kind of bl bl blah blooh. If water was shut off at this point, there's a bunch of counterfeit money just floating in it or like stuck to the rim of this toilet. I heard people yell, multiple people yelling through the door knocks, kind a sheriff Us Secret Service, and then they just started kicking it in. But the hotel room door was

like reinforced with steel. It was like a thick metal door. They just you know, boom boom boom, over and over again. There was nothing I could do. There was nowhere I could go. So I did a line of heroin and lit a cigarette and just sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette while they were kicking the door. When they offered me that deal to not charge my wife, I always planned on taking it, whether the deal was good whoorbad, Like I wouldn't have let my wife go

to prison. We went to a meeting with my lawyer and the Secret Service was really like impressed, and they wanted me to explain to them how I did everything, and he's like, we want you to make a training video for Secret Service agents as a part of cooperation. As soon as I walk into the room, there's like lights and tripod with cameramen. There was like a sound guy that put mic on me. I was like shocked at first. I'm like, oh shit. They had all the

evidence that they seized from my hotel room. They had my computer and my printers and a suitcase I had with all these different pens and sprays, so they had everything I needed to make money. He kind of was just like go and I'm like, what do you mean? Go, Like, what do you want me to do? And he's like, make two counterfeit bills, explain every step of the process. They kept saying, who taught you? I mean, I really just caught myself, you know, I mean trial and error.

The Secret Service. They kept saying, this will really help train Secret Service agents. You know, I spent a lot of time and effort into really perfecting this recipe. And the Secret Service what they said like they were super excited to meet me. So I guess in a way it made me feel.

editor Dan Bobkoff. Our sound designer is Bianca Salinas. Assistant producer Eric Axelrod. Special thanks to the inimitable Fisher Stevens, the Glamorous Ria Julian and our agents at WM e Evan Crasseik, Marissa Hurwitz, Ben Davis. Lives of Crime is a production of Orbit Media in association with Signal Company Number One. Follow us at orbit Media FM, on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube