Free A Counterfeiter's Paradise by Ben Tarnoff Page B

else’s problem.
    The growing interconnectedness of the American economy meant that no colony could make policy on its own, not even one as populous and powerful as Massachusetts. Under the direction of Thomas Hutchinson, the colony had spent a year retiring its notes. From March 1750 to March 1751, Hutchinson and the other members of the exchange committee sat in the upper room of Boston’s Old State House, exchanging colonists’ ragged, soiled old bills for silver and copper coins. But eliminating paper currency proved to be trickier than Hutchinson expected. There weren’t enough precious metals to redeem all the bills, so the treasury had to issue people new notes to use as provisional currency until they could be fully compensated in coin. In addition, many people simply refused to redeem their paper money, continuing to use the notes among themselves; more than a year and a half after the end of the redemption period,almost £132,000 worth of the old bills remained outstanding. And the money that Hutchinson successfully withdrew from circulation was soon replaced, as notes from neighboring colonies poured in. Foreign paper posed such a threat to Hutchinson’s plan that the legislature passed a law requiring anyone elected to office in Massachusetts to swear under oath that he hadn’t traded in other colonies’ bills.
    What Hutchinson realized, and what counterfeiters already knew, was that individual colonies needed to act in concert to get anything done. If one colony tried to print less currency or eliminate paper altogether, the notes of another would start flooding in, as people tried to satisfy the demand for paper credit. As long as colonial governments were inca-pable of coordinating policy and colonists wanted cheap cash, counterfeiting would continue to flourish. Benjamin Franklin captured the problem with his famous “Join, or Die” cartoon that showed the colonies as cut-up pieces of a snake that would die if they didn’t come together. Franklin drew the snake in 1754, on the eve of the French and Indian War, to urge Americans to unite in the face of the threat. Franklin’s vision wasn’t just useful for fighting the war that had broken out on the border; it was also the only way to combat a formidable internal enemy, the counterfeiters who inhabited the ungovernable gaps in America’s loosely strung lattice of colonial authority.
    THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF COLONIAL economies wasn’t lost on Sullivan, who, during his four years as head of the Dover Money Club, was constantly on the move. He didn’t stay holed up at his hideout in the hills; he traveled throughout the Northeast, funneling his bills into a wide range of local markets. The counterfeiter’s strategy was simple. First he boarded at someone’s house, preferably somewhere rural and remote. There he acquired engraving and printing tools—copperplates, ink, and paper—enlisted locals to help, and churned out fake currency. He kept some ofthe notes for himself and used the rest to pay everyone off before continuing on his way. As he moved from one place to the next, he left behind engraved plates that his contacts continued to use to print currency long after he was gone. Those who got caught surrendered Sullivan’s name or one of his known aliases to the authorities, who slowly pieced together the scope of the counterfeiter’s enterprise from the scattered testimony of his operatives.
    In the summer of 1753, Jedediah Cady, a Connecticut native in his late twenties, housed Sullivan and a few others at his secluded home in Killingly. Like Dover, Killingly was ideally located to be a counterfeiting haven: it occupied the northeastern corner of Connecticut, not far from the border with Massachusetts and Rhode Island. From Killingly, a criminal could move contraband into three different colonies. Cady helped Sullivan make a pile of Rhode Island money, and when they finished, the counterfeiter paid Cady with £400 in fake bills. Cady buried