Finally, when he was fairly certain that the cops weren’t onto him, Frank says he called another friend of his who showed up with scanners and radio wands to check the shipment for bugs. The crew opened the truck. On five wooden pallets sat the future of Frank’s criminal enterprise. It was paper of a special kind, made with the same rare cotton-and-linen recipe used for printing American currency. It also bore watermarked images of Andrew Jackson’s face and security strips reading USA TWENTY in minuscule type. The paper was the essential ingredient for fabricating high-grade counterfeit bills that the Canadian police would later describe as “basically undetectable” from the real thing. As soon as the security sweep pronounced the shipment clean, Frank welled up with optimism. “There was no way to stop me from there. I knew I was rich”, Frank recalled. “It was the best day of my life.” Frank now had what he needed to print hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of fake US currency—and to soon become the most prolific counterfeiter in the history of the trade.
…The recipe for the rag paper US notes are printed on is deceptively simple—75% cotton and 25% linen—a distinctive composition every American unconsciously knows by feel. Simple though it may be, the recipe is also so widely known that dialing a paper mill and asking for a batch of 75/25 is a speedy way to get raided by the Secret Service (which was created expressly to bust counterfeiters—POTUS tending came later). And even if you could somehow chef up a few reams of the cotton-linen blend, you’d still need to add to it a whole host of security elements: the watermark—the translucent face of Jackson, Franklin, et al—which appears when you hold the bill up to the light; the security strip; the tiny red and blue fibers embedded throughout the paper; and so on.
…In the fall of 2008, Frank says he began reaching out to paper mills across Europe and Asia under the alias Thomas Moore, an employee of The Letter Shop, a fictitious Quebec stationery concern. He purported to have a special client who wanted some special paper manufactured. What kind of paper? Well, rag paper with cotton, maybe some linen thrown in there. “Cotton and linen? Like, for currency?” suspicious papermakers would often respond, and Thomas Moore would be heard from no more.
But Frank had faith that somewhere—maybe in Poland, Slovakia, or Bulgaria—his avatar could flush out a papermaker stupid or crooked enough to make his recipe. In January 2009, he says, his search ended at the Artoz paper company headquartered in Lenzburg, Switzerland. By now, Frank had adopted the nom de plume Jackson Maxwell, of the Keystone Investment and Trading Company, a securities firm whose letterhead, suspiciously, bore no street address.
In correspondence included in court documents that Frank shared with me, Maxwell told his mark that Keystone was looking to print bond certificates on secure rag paper—customized with one or two security measures designed to, um, foil counterfeiters. Frank says that after Artoz accepted the basics of his bond-brokerage story, he tweaked and refined his order over many months, nudging one felonious tidbit after another onto the papermaker’s plate. He got them to add linen to the recipe. He asked them to mix in chemicals to thwart security pens and black-light tests. He persuaded them to sew in a security strip reading, in near microscopic print, USA TWENTY. (“I told them it was, you know, for a $20 bond.”) Artoz, he says, also agreed to imprint his paper with a watermark, an image etched into a cylindrical printing drum and pressed into the paper while the pulp is still wet. To get the equipment Artoz would need to do this, Frank paid $21,114.54$15,0002009, routed under a surrogate’s name through a Swiss bank account, to a company in Düren, Germany, that manufactured a drum etched with the likenesses of Andrew Jackson’s face. How did he manage that, exactly? “It was easy”, said Frank. “To you, he’s Andrew Jackson. To some guy in Germany, who the fuck is it? Some guy’s face. He doesn’t know.”