Free A Counterfeiter's Paradise by Ben Tarnoff Page A

people had touched the paper printed from his plates. If robbery worked in a straight line—a thief stealing something from a shopkeeper—then counterfeiting was a set of concentric circles radiating from a single center. A plate that Sullivan engraved in Dover could be used by printers in several different colonies to manufacture fake bills; passers then put the notes into circulation, where they would continue to defraud people until they were identified and destroyed. Faced with such an elaborate criminal web, it’s no surprise that colonial officials weren’t up to the task. Like most Americans,they lived in small communities where people knew one another by name and interacted on a daily basis. In a society that still revolved around face-to-face relationships, counterfeiting presented a unique threat. Unlike a shopkeeper robbed by a thief, someone cheated with counterfeit money couldn’t confront the real perpetrator, the engraver who had set everything in motion. All the mark could do was to identify whoever passed him the note, and that individual could either be another victim, oblivious to the fact that the bill was fake, or the lowest minion in a counterfeiting venture.
    Counterfeiting thrived on anonymity. It reflected colonial America’s broader gradual movement toward a more impersonal world, where people who didn’t know each other personally could exchange goods in a common marketplace. A seller didn’t need to know a buyer’s name, history, or reputation to do business: if his money was good—if the notes carried the right symbols in the right places—that was enough. The man who mimicked these symbols could rob people without ever putting a hand on them, dispersing his counterfeits through a chain of proxies.
    Anyone who wanted to take down a counterfeiting ring would have to start with a passer and work his way up the ladder. This would be difficult, tedious work, and it took someone as motivated as Robert Clarke to get the job done. He had to gather enough evidence for warrants and convictions, persuade the authorities to help, and capture the culprits. Doing all this within one colony was difficult enough; across several jurisdictions, it was even harder. It didn’t help that governments kept trying to dodge responsibility. When the governor of Rhode Island proposed that the colony’s legislature offer to pay all costs for apprehending and prosecuting members of the Boyces’ Oblong gang, the assemblymen refused, declaring that the expenses should be borne by the government of the colony where the crime was committed.
    The governor had good reason to urge the legislators to take action. Rhode Island currency was the Boyces’ specialty, despite the fact that theOblong lay more than a hundred miles west of Rhode Island. But a colony’s currency didn’t just circulate within its own territory; it fed into a regional money market that extended over multiple colonies. Paper money was originally intended only for residents of the same colony, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, currencies in New England mingled freely as trade expanded. Money from another colony was usually discounted, except in the cities, where it often preserved its full value. This greatly expanded the opportunities for counterfeiting. It also made the legal situation even murkier. Officials didn’t know for sure if a counterfeiter could be prosecuted in one colony for forging the currency of another. In their correspondence about the Boyces, Governor Law of Connecticut explained the predicament to Governor Clinton of New York. “Our chief Justices are in doubt whether ye Matters of fact comitted in your Govt can be tryd here,” Law wrote, “so crave your Advice whether they shall be sent for Tryal in your Courts.” Extraditing moneymakers to the right jurisdiction was always an option, but the authorities were understandably reluctant to devote their meager law enforcement resources to taking on someone