A Counterfeiter's Paradise (3 page)

They carried Sullivan off to jail, but the silversmith didn’t intend to stay long. Once inside the prison, he passed a message to his partner John Fairservice, who agreed to secure his freedom in exchange for a plate for making counterfeit currency—not Massachusetts money, Fairservice specified, but New Hampshire. Since Sullivan’s tools had been seized, he would have to make the plate from scratch. He would need a few things: a New Hampshire note to work from, a sheet of copper, and a small metalworking chisel. Fortunately, jails in colonial America were poorly guarded, making it easy for Sullivan to smuggle in whatever he needed. He could bribe a warden to pass packages for him or enlist one of the jail’s many debtors, who were allowed to leave the prison grounds whenever they liked as long as they returned at night. Once Sullivan had obtained the materials, he set to work.

New Hampshire’s forty-shilling note was printed on a rectangular piece of paper, and the text read from top to bottom, like a page out of a book. The bill was adorned with a large royal seal and various images: columns of acanthus leaves wreathed its borders, scrolls coiled and unfurled across the page, a pine tree stood at the center. The note’s designers had introduced these flourishes to dissuade counterfeiters, who couldn’t reproduce such elaborate designs without real technical skills. These details had another, more abstract purpose: they gave the bill a certain gravity, so as to reassure people that an inked slip of paper equaled a certain quantity of silver or gold. Aside from discouraging forgers, the intricate handiwork helped bolster people’s confidence in the colony’s currency.

To make the plate, Sullivan had to engrave everything backward. It was tedious, painstaking work. Each curlicued letter and drooping leaf had to be carved into the copper as a mirror image, so that when the plate was inked and run through a printing press, the resulting bill would look right. He etched the front of the note on one side of the copper sheet and the back on the other. The finished product must have looked peculiar, but anyone who glimpsed it sitting in Sullivan’s cell—a brown pane inscribed with delicately executed, illegible glyphs—would have known what it was for.

Satisfied with the silversmith’s services, Fairservice paid his bail, and Sullivan walked free for the time being. Fairservice stashed the plate at the bottom of a sled in a barn on Bull Wharf, one of the piers on the south side of town, and started printing counterfeit notes, hanging the newly inked forgeries from a string to let them dry in the wind along the waterfront. When the bills were crisp, he assembled them and headed off to make the sale. Across from the wharf stood a tavern named the Bull, where sailors and sloop masters passing through Boston ate, drank, and traded stories from abroad. These were Fairservice’s ideal customers: itinerant men of dubious morals who could be persuaded to purchase counterfeit New Hampshire money, particularly after they had been softened up with a few tumblers of rum. Instead of selling his forgeries for a fixed fee, Fairservice lent the bills
on consignment: the patron would keep one-half of the profits made from spending the counterfeits and remit the other half to Fairservice. Perhaps for this reason, the enterprise never really took off. In 1767, after twelve years of marriage, Fairservice’s wife, Mary, filed for divorce. She claimed that her husband was financially irresponsible, abusive, and unfaithful; the most damaging of her many charges was that he had conducted “criminal conversation with a Negro Woman Slave in the family.” Mary got the divorce.

In the meantime, Sullivan stood trial in the fall of 1750. He pleaded not guilty, but there was enough incriminating evidence found in his house to persuade the jury to convict the silversmith of “wickedly falsely & deceiptfully” forging Massachusetts bills with an intent to pass them off as genuine. On Thursday, September 13, Sullivan was led to the square below the imposing Georgian facade of what is now known as the Old State House and locked into the pillory. He spent two hours with his head and arms fastened between two pieces of wood and his back painfully bent while Bostonians passed on their daily business or paused to get a glimpse of the criminal. The more entertaining spectacle came later, when a sore Sullivan was removed from the wooden frame, tied to a nearby post, and whipped twenty times, his naked back reddening with each blow. Sullivan wasn’t the only convict punished that Thursday; on the same day, one man received more than twice as many stripes for stealing. But those who remembered watching the little-known silversmith lashed would later recall the scene when they read reports of a notorious moneymaker named Owen Sullivan in the newspaper. No one could have known it at the time, but in the shadow of the Old State House, the greatest counterfeiter in colonial America had made his criminal debut.

BEING A COUNTERFEITER IN
a city was never a good idea. There were always neighbors listening, whether to your drunk wife or to the rumbling of the printing press. Counterfeiting also produced refuse like test prints
and bad bills that needed to be disposed of without attracting attention. Most difficult of all, counterfeiting generated wealth that was hard to conceal in a densely populated environment. In a town like Boston, crowded with fifteen thousand inhabitants when Sullivan lived there, neighbors knew a lot about one another, including their trade and income. If the silversmith down the street started living above his means, people would notice. By colonial standards, Sullivan was forging a lot of money. When he was first arrested, the authorities found three hundred shillings in counterfeit Massachusetts notes on him. In Boston in 1749, three hundred shillings could buy you about six bushels of wheat at wholesale prices, enough to feed a family for months. In his barn on Bull Wharf, John Fairservice printed more than twice that in a single day, producing 680 shillings in paper bills. Counterfeiting cash in such large quantities posed a problem. Spending it was risky, particularly among people who had reason to doubt you earned it honestly.

The solution was to let others pass it for you, either by selling them the counterfeits in batches or, like Fairservice, lending the notes on consignment. At the top of the counterfeiting scheme was the engraver: someone like Sullivan, whose metalworking skills determined the success of the whole undertaking. Next came the printer, preferably someone who knew how to operate a press and could obtain the right ink and paper. At the bottom were the passers, who exchanged the fake bills for real money, thus generating the profit that fueled the venture.

This system had a couple of advantages. It protected the heart of the operation—the engraver—by transferring most of the risk to easily replaceable unskilled workers: the passers, who could be arrested whenever they spent the counterfeits. It also meant that one engraver could rapidly recruit a large, decentralized network of accomplices. A single plate was enough to build a diffuse criminal organization consisting of several printers, countless passers, and everyone in between. In reality, the distinction between the different roles wasn’t always clearly defined; while
primarily an engraver, Sullivan often helped print and pass his forged notes. But his basic business model—the engraver as the vital center of an expanding web of collaborators—remained intact. Without it, he could never have gone from a solitary silversmith to the boss of a major counterfeiting ring.

Sullivan’s arrest in Boston in the summer of 1749 marked the beginning of a remarkable criminal career that would span seven years. It was evident early on that Sullivan was more than just a gifted engraver. He also possessed an extraordinary talent for getting others to trust him, a flair for persuasion that helped endear him to the public, recruit partners in crime, and convince the authorities to lighten his punishments. While Sullivan was a skilled forger of notes, his greatest counterfeit was the confidence he inspired in others, from the accomplices who trusted him to produce undetectable fakes to the colonists who believed his bills were authentic. Sullivan had an entrepreneurial streak, a trait that placed him firmly within the commercial culture of his day. Just as the North End vendors exploited Boston’s prominence as a port to maximize their returns, he capitalized on the conditions in colonial America that made his venture particularly ripe: the colonies’ reliance on paper money, a general craving for cheap currency, and lax law enforcement. In the years following his arrest in Boston, he would distribute his wares throughout the Northeast, peddling strips of paper that cost him little to produce, netting profits that he either spent or reinvested in an enterprise that helped him become the most successful counterfeiter in colonial history.

SULLIVAN COULDN’T HAVE PICKED
a more momentous year to become a counterfeiter. Seventeen forty-nine was a turning point in the financial history of Massachusetts, a time when the disputes that had been simmering throughout the colony’s fifty-nine-year experiment with paper money ignited into a ferocious public debate. Massachusetts had begun printing
paper notes in 1690 after an unsuccessful effort to conquer the nearby French colony of Quebec. The government expected to fund the expe-dition with plunder, but when the soldiers returned empty-handed and close to mutiny, the colonial legislature quickly issued bills to pay them off. The notes, whose value was secured by future taxes, proved to be a useful medium of exchange, so the legislators continued to print them. Their decision would change the American colonies forever. As the first society in the Western world to establish a public paper currency, Massachusetts became the battleground for a particularly intense struggle over the finer points of economic policy—a struggle fought not just by the elites and the experts but by the vast majority of the population.

On May 1, 1749, a few months before Sullivan’s arrest, the rooftop of a magnificent town house in the North End burst into flame. A crowd of lower-class spectators gathered nearby to watch the fire consume the upper half of the building and, rather than running for help, started yelling, “Let it burn!” But someone must have alerted the authorities, because firefighters soon arrived to extinguish the blaze, and to the mob’s dismay, the house was saved. The next day, the
Boston Gazette
printed a report blaming the fire on a defective chimney flue. But given the anger evident in the streets, arson seemed like a distinct possibility.

The house belonged to Thomas Hutchinson, the scion of a prominent Boston family and the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. The son of a wealthy merchant, Hutchinson had been precocious from an early age: he entered Harvard at twelve, graduated at sixteen, and joined the Massachusetts legislature at twenty-six after launching a successful business career. He was also an outspoken opponent of paper money, and early in 1749 had ushered a controversial bill through the legislature requiring that Massachusetts retire all of its paper currency by March 1751. Hutchinson, like most members of his social class, favored a “hard” currency based on silver and gold. This made him unpopular among the colony’s tradesmen and laborers, who relied heavily on paper
money in their daily commerce. The thought that it would be taken away by one of the richest men in Boston enraged them.

Wealthy Bostonians had clear reasons for wanting money to be made of precious metals. Since many of them were involved in international trade, they needed a universally accepted currency whose value wouldn’t fluctuate with inflation in order to do business with their overseas partners. They also tended to be creditors, which made them particularly vulnerable to depreciations of the colony’s money. A ten-shilling note could have considerably more purchasing power when it was lent than the same amount a few years later. When the debt was paid, the lender had to sustain the loss of however much value had evaporated.

This state of affairs benefited the debtors, who could essentially get away with paying less. But that wasn’t the only reason that Hutchinson’s plan provoked such panic among the middle and lower classes, from whose ranks most debtors were drawn. If you made your living trading goods or services in local markets, you depended on paper money. Paper provided people with a shared medium of exchange: it gave the colony’s silversmiths, brewers, and printers a way to sell their merchandise and buy what they needed to expand their business. Replacing paper with precious metals would have curbed this commerce, as coin was scarce and what little existed was held by Boston’s financial elite. Paper’s proponents didn’t object to a metallic currency on philosophical grounds. Their concerns were practical: coin was concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. Moving to a metallic currency would effectively hand control of the money supply to men like Hutchinson.

It’s possible that Hutchinson’s attempt at currency reform was motivated purely by economic self-interest; the crowd that collected opposite his house to cheer while it burned undoubtedly thought so. But to be fair, he had a strong case against paper. Paper was a blessing and a curse: it may have lubricated local markets, but only at the cost of making the economy more mercurial. Ever since Massachusetts started printing its
bills of credit in 1690, the currency had been steadily declining in value. As more and more bills came off the colonial presses, the legislature began postponing the notes’ retirement. The result was depreciation.

In 1744, a conflict called King George’s War broke out between British and French colonists in the Northeast, and the financial situation became even worse. Under the enthusiastic leadership of Governor William Shirley, Massachusetts spearheaded a successful effort to capture the French fortress of Louisbourg on Île Royale, later known as Cape Breton Island, in present-day Nova Scotia. In order to pay for the expedition, the legislature printed large quantities of money. Between June 1744 and June 1748, nineteen new paper issues appeared, and in roughly the same period, the cost of silver in Massachusetts paper money nearly doubled. The steep inflation didn’t just hurt creditors; everyone suffered when the colonial currency lost almost half its value in the space of four years.