The Art of Making Money (18 page)

Never one to aim low, Art had her start by calling Crane & Co., the Massachusetts-based paper company that’s been supplying the Treasury Department since 1879. Other than its seventy-five to twenty-five percent linen and cotton formula, the precise technique Crane uses to create U.S. banknote paper—the most durable in the world—is a closely guarded national secret. When she asked a sales rep if they had anything available to the public that “approximated the wonderful feel and look of their currency paper” the response was a curt and resounding “No.” But there are hundreds of other paper companies in North America. Using false identities, she called in dozens of samples, then tested them with the Dri Mark pen. Weeks of disappointment followed as sample after sample marked black. She grew increasingly exasperated as Art, convinced that a ready-made paper was out there, constantly badgered her to try more companies. “He acted like it was my fault we weren’t finding the paper,” she says, “I wasn’t calling the right companies or looking in the right places.” And then one day, after listening to Art complain once again that she wasn’t producing results, she finally snapped.

“What else do you want me try?” she said as she stood in the kitchen with the pen in her hand. “Maybe these paper towels will work.” She marked the towels viciously. “Nope, black. How about toilet paper? Or wait, here’s a cereal box.” She began running around the room, angrily marking everything she saw. “Aha, here’s a phone book. The same phone book I’ve been using to call fucking paper companies. Haven’t tried
this,
” she said acidly, and stroked the pen all the way across one of the white pages. That’s when both of their jaws dropped.

The ink marked bright yellow.

They gaped at each other in disbelief, then started marking again and again to make sure it wasn’t some fluke of chemistry. When it came back yellow every time, they realized that the answer to the Dri Mark pen had, after all, been literally in the phone book: directory paper. They did a little victory dance, then Natalie found the name of the printer in the front of the book. She then called the printing house and asked them where they purchased their paper. The name they gave her was Abitibi Consolidated, and Natalie quickly learned on the Internet that Abitibi was the largest producer of newsprint in the world. Based in Montreal, it was an $8-billion-a-year operation, with mills, recycling centers, and offices in more than eighty countries. The company was such a monster that when she called the main office in Canada and asked for some samples of various thicknesses, they all but laughed at her. “Uh, we don’t deal in
sheets,
” a sales-department representative smugly told her. “We deal in the kinds of quantities if you were, say, a city.” But Natalie was able to get the names of a few printing-house clients in Texas. One of them was only twenty miles away in Arlington. She hurriedly called the printer and requested samples. That’s when they hit the first of many brick walls.

Paper thickness is measured by what’s called “basis weight”—the amount that five hundred sheets weigh, according to standardized types and sizes. United States currency paper has a basis weight of about thirty-five pounds, but the thickest the directory paper came in was twenty-four pounds—far too thin. They called other companies that produced directory paper, but the sizes were all comparably thin.

They were crestfallen, but since Art had already figured out several workable barriers to the Dri Mark ink, they were still very much in business. Setting the Abitibi paper samples aside, they eagerly moved on to the bill itself.

 

 

 

THE OPTICALLY VARIABLE INK—OVI for short—was one of the most technologically advanced security features of the New Note. It appears on the denomination mark on the lower right-hand side of every bill above five dollars. Hold the bill in front of your face, turning it slowly, and the ink will “color-shift” from black to a glittery brass to metallic green, depending on the angle. The ink, produced by a company based in Santa Rosa, California, called Flex Products, is patented technology.

Art assumed it was unobtainable. The best he hoped for was an approximation—a glittery, metallic ink that provided the twinkling illusion of shift, just enough to keep the ruse going. While there was no shortage of glittery inks, none of them were convincing enough, and he once again settled into an uncompromising hunt. By now Art’s eyes were constantly sucking in the shades and colors of his surroundings, his mind parsing them for correlative possibilities. He hoped that if he just kept looking he’d see the ink—or at least a material that mimicked the color-shift effect—somewhere in the world around him.

One day while he was walking through a parking lot in Dallas, he spotted a limited edition 1996 Mustang Cobra. The car itself was enough to inspire Art, a ’Stang connoisseur, to take closer look, but as he approached the vehicle something else caught his eye.

The Mustang’s color shifted, from purple-black to deep blue.

“I kept walking back and forth, watching the color change, and forgot all about the car,” he says. “Hell, I knew right away if I could get ahold of that paint I could buy my own Cobra! That motherfucker was shifting color, just like the denomination mark.”

Within an hour he was ringing auto-body shops and getting the lowdown on Ford’s paint. What he subsequently discovered blew his mind. He learned that the paint contained a patented pigment called ChromaFlair, and although the ’96 Cobra was the first production vehicle to feature it, custom shops had been using it for several years. ChromaFlair came in five different color shifts and was even available in spray-paint form, but the most startling thing about the pigment was its manufacturer: Flex Products, Inc.—the same company that supplied secure color-shifting ink to the BEP and window shading for NASA. Flex had gone ahead and marketed its technology to the private sector, meaning that citizens could legally obtain the same technology behind one of the New Note’s most lauded security features.

And as a private citizen, Art went about obtaining it. Although the green-to-black pigment was exclusive to the B EP, he easily bought a green-to-silver paint that beautifully replicated the true shift. “It was even better because it had a little bit of flash,” he says, “and flash was what people expected when they looked for the shift.” Unfortunately, the ChromaFlair couldn’t be run through an offset press or an ink-jet printer because it was paint, but Art devised a novel solution. He scanned the denomination marks on both the hundred- and five-dollar bills, then touched them up with Photoshop and rearranged the numbers so they read “1005.” He then went to the most ubiquitous printing source on the planet—Kinko’s.

“I’m a small businessman and I need to make an address stamp for my stationery,” he told the clerk, explaining that he liked the font on U.S. currency because “it represents success.” Could Kinko’s convert his 1005 scan into a rubber stamp?

“No problem,” the clerk told him. Of all the proprietary components in U.S. currency, it turns out that the most obvious element—the very style of lettering—is the least controlled. Companies like Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft possess exclusive rights to their fonts, but the most valuable font of all, that of the U.S. dollar, is public property.

Two days later Art picked up his stamp at Kinko’s. He sliced off the 5 with an X-Acto knife, dipped the remaining 100 section into the automotive paint, then applied it to a sheet of newsprint. Once the paint dried, he took the sheet outside to study it under natural light.

As he turned it again and again, he marveled at what he saw. The paint shifted seamlessly from green to silver, like electric skin on some exotic, iridescent beetle.

 

 

 

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.

“My mind had become like a computer program that runs during sleep mode. Even when I wasn’t thinking about counterfeiting, I was. It was constantly there.”

“He woke me up,” Natalie remembers. “He actually said, ‘I got it,’ like I was supposed to know what he was talking about. I was like, ‘Good for you, you got it. Tell me about it tomorrow.’ ”

In his dream, Art had seen two pieces of paper, like slices of bread on a sandwich. Nestled between them was a thin square of paper bearing Franklin’s portrait, so thin that it didn’t alter the feel or look of the bill, but thick enough so that it was visible under transmitted light. The next morning he had Natalie run out and buy the thinnest tracing paper she could find, then penciled an image of Franklin on it. That was the sandwich’s meat, and Natalie had already found the bread three months earlier: the Abitibi directory paper. It had been too thin to replicate currency paper, but Art had never considered that two sheets pasted together would almost perfectly duplicate the thickness of genuine currency. After cutting out the image of Franklin he’d penciled onto the tracing paper, he dug up the samples from Abitibi, then laid the portrait between them and held the sheets in front of a light.

“The moment we saw it we knew we’d done it,” he says. “It was just
there
. It sent chills up my spine. It was beyond anything I’d ever done. Even that first crappy drawing on tracing paper looked real. It scared me. That was something way beyond what Pete had taught me. He never did anything like that. That was me, my own innovation.”

The beauty of the “twin sheet” solution to the watermark was that it also solved the problem of the security strip: Minicounterfeits of both could be slipped between sheets bearing the front and back images of the bill, which Art could then glue together and solidify using a select group of over-the-counter sprays. Once he realized this, he went out and bought red UV ink for his ink-jet printer (amazingly, that is an over-the-counter product too), then printed his own security strips on the same tracing paper he used for the watermark.

The final security feature of the New Note—the microprinting—turned out to be the easiest to defeat. Just as Treasury had miscalculated how fast reprographic technology would progress back in ’89, by 1999 the ink-jets and software were good enough to render a convincing replica in the right hands. Those hands turned out to be Natalie’s; she spent days working over scans in Photoshop until they shone like the real thing to all but the most trained eye. Even then, Art insisted that they still use an offset press for the seals and to color the background of the bill. “I don’t care how good the technology gets. There are things an offset press can do that a computer never will. If I thought a computer could do those things better, I would have used it. But for me it wasn’t about easy, I was obsessed. The funny thing was that there was this point when it wasn’t about profit anymore. It was about the art, seeing if I could do it.”

When the prototype of their New Note was finished—a good four months after Art had gotten out of prison—he and Natalie bought a digital scale. They’d been so caught up with how the bill looked that they’d never considered weight during their research process, and were now happy enough with the results that they didn’t really care. But Art, as always, was curious, so they laid it on the scale. Their bill weighed exactly one gram. Precisely the weight of all genuine U.S. currency.

8

“EVERYBODY WILL WANT”

Despite all the grumping here about unresponsive
government; and despite the tut-tutting abroad about
American hegemonism and cultural decay—the eager
acceptance of the new U.S. C-note proves that people
everywhere have faith in the stability that flows from
freedom in the United States of America.