Free The Art of Making Money by Jason Kersten

the twentieth century, improved law enforcement techniques and the Service’s expansion would cut into counterfeiting even more. Today, an infinitesimal three one-hundredths of one percent of the roughly seven billion bills circulating is counterfeit. At the same time, seventy-five percent of all counterfeit currency is confiscated before it hits the streets.
    By the time Art entered da Vinci’s shop, in other words, counterfeiting had long been a dying art. Skilled practitioners like da Vinci who made a steady living at it were virtually extinct. He was the last of his line, a lone wolf offering to hand off what he knew to Art, who at seventeen could barely appreciate the gesture or understand the danger of the knowledge he was about to receive.
     
     
     
    ART’S FIRST LESSON in the criminal craft of counterfeiting began when da Vinci placed a cassette tape into a boom box, and the velvet strains of an Italian opera swelled through the print shop.
    “Oh, my God, can you please turn this crap off,” Art moaned.
    “Crap is the stuff you listen to,” Pete told him. “This is beautiful music. It’s old, what we do here is old, so this is what we’ll listen to.”
    As the first overtures filled the basement, they embarked on the process of platemaking, a skill that Art was vaguely familiar with from his tour of the Bridgeport News ’s printer. The easiest way to think of a plate is as a stamp; it’s a thin, rectangular slab of metal—usually aluminum—that carries a raised image of whatever is to be printed. Chemically conditioned and wrapped around a spinning cylinder on an offset press, the plate first picks up water, then ink, with each revolution; as the two substances repel each other, the ink clings to the raised portion of the plate, then transfers its image onto a second roller that is usually made of rubber. This second, or “offset,” roller in turn transfers the ink onto paper. When an offset press is rolling at full speed, it can produce hundreds of images per minute. Almost every printed item you read, including this book, is derived from a plate and an offset press. Invented in 1843 by a New Yorker named Richard March Hoe, the process is responsible for more wars, revolutions, bureaucratic forms, pornography, economic booms and busts, and minds both educated and subverted than any other invention on earth.
    Art watched as da Vinci pulled out three crisp hundred-dollar bills from an envelope and mounted them in front of a process camera—an accordion-like device designed for capturing flat images.
    “Take a look,” da Vinci said, offering Art the viewfinder. The bill, magnified and illuminated by studio lights, like a painting, filled the entire field of view. The detail was incredible: Franklin’s hair looked like rolling surf, while the lines on his coat resembled plowed fields coursing gently over hillsides. Based on a 1778 portrait by the French artist Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, Franklin’s face appeared serene and slightly amused.
    After they photographed the bill fronts three times and the backs once, they developed the negatives in a closet that da Vinci had converted to a darkroom, then brought them over to the light table. He inspected them with a loupe, then masked out the serial numbers and seal on one front, leaving nothing but the serial numbers and the seal on the others.
    The next step involved utilizing one of the more magical devices in da Vinci’s print shop: an arc-light burner. About the size of a refrigerator, it used high-intensity light to burn the negatives onto the metal plate. Like a modern copying machine that prints on metal instead of paper, the light passes freely through the clear parts of the negative and burns away a thin layer of the plate beneath, leaving only the lines of the negative intact and raised—a stamp carved by light. Once they burned four plates, they scrubbed them clean in a chemical wash, until all that remained on their surfaces were intricate,