A Counterfeiter's Paradise (8 page)

Sullivan also put together a gang to help produce and dispense his forgeries, a criminal crew that would come to be known as the Dover Money Club. Most of these men wore a brand mark on their cheeks or had their ears cropped, and they displayed these disfigurements proudly, as the insignia of their outlaw brotherhood. One of them was Joseph Boyce, an attractive, well-built convict with short black hair. On his hand was a scar in the shape of the letter T, imprinted by a constable’s iron several years before for thieving. Originally from Salem, Massachusetts, he and his son, Joseph Jr., had spent the last decade churning out fake bills of various colonies as a father-son counterfeiting team. They were an accomplished pair of moneymakers and had been in the business much longer than Sullivan.

Without the Boyces, Sullivan would probably never have found out about the Oblong; they had been there as early as 1742, counterfeiting currency with a group of accomplices in the rugged wetlands along the New York–Connecticut border. In fact, their undertaking was so successful that within a few years they had aroused the alarm of the governors
of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, who exchanged agitated letters about the moneymakers. In early 1745, Jonathan Law, the governor of Connecticut, wrote Governor George Clinton of New York to complain: “the place where this Wickedness is supposed to be carryd on is the Oblong,” Law declared, “and it is possible that great Quantities of it are handed about by a confederated Gang.” In April, William Shirley, the governor of Massachusetts, urged his counterparts in Connecticut and New York to do everything in their power to capture and convict members of the band. “The Heads of this Confederacy have been bold and daring in their Villanies and have practised the same hitherto with so much success, that it will be next to impossible to Suppress this great Mischief without Suppressing them,” he warned.

Despite their tough talk, the governors did little to stop the Boyces. The job was left to the initiative of a private citizen, a native of Uxbridge, Massachusetts, named Robert Clarke, who first encountered the gang when one of its members swindled him. After discovering he had been cheated, Clarke confronted the criminals, who tried pacifying him by offering him large quantities of forged bills. According to an affidavit filed by Clarke in the spring of 1745, the counterfeiters “Endeavour’d to make him one of their party,” hoping to secure his services as a passer. He feigned interest and drew himself deeper into the ring in order to collect evidence that could be used against the moneymakers.

Clarke would end up giving the authorities a detailed picture of the Oblong crew’s operations: they forged the notes of multiple colonies and enlisted passers, whom they dispatched to distant locations to buy horses, cattle, and other goods that could either be used or resold for genuine money. Clarke swiped two of the gang’s plates—one for printing Rhode Island currency, and another unfinished panel for making New York money—along with some printing implements, and resolved to turn the incriminating items over to the authorities. When law officials from New York refused to help, he found a magistrate in Connecticut who agreed to
bring the criminals in. Clarke managed to lure the young Boyce and his coconspirator Hurlbut across the border into Connecticut, where they were seized and carried off to the New Haven jail. Hurlbut ratted out his confederates, fingering no fewer than twenty-two of them. While Clarke’s efforts succeeded in dispersing the Oblong gang, many of them remained at large, including Boyce and Hurlbut, who escaped from the New Haven jailhouse shortly after their arrest.

A STUDENT OF COUNTERFEITING
could learn a lot from the Boyces. The most important lesson was that local governments had a hard time enforcing the law. Nothing resembling a professional police force existed: instead, ordinary colonists were elected or appointed to be sheriff, constable, or justice of the peace. Arresting criminals was only one of their duties; they spent much of their time on more mundane work, like inspecting taverns for drunks, chasing runaway pigs, and fixing potholes in the road. When it came to bringing down a counterfeiting gang tucked away in a remote corner of the countryside, the lawmen simply didn’t have the manpower or the money to do the job.

Moneymaking was also more complicated than most crimes. Simple offenses like larceny involved a culprit and a victim, but a counterfeiter’s impact was more diffuse. An engraver like Sullivan didn’t have to meet his marks to swindle them, and he would never know how many 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 the
Oblong 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 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 of
the 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 most of the notes underground and gave the rest to a local Indian to pass, with the understanding that they would split the profits. Cady couldn’t have been very discreet in his dealings, because by November, he had been picked up on counterfeiting charges. He admitted his guilt and revealed Sullivan’s role in the venture, although by then the engraver had returned to the safety of the Oblong. Cady’s ears were cropped and his cheeks branded with the letter C, for “Counterfeiter.”

Cady’s case wasn’t unique. The same scenario repeated itself in many different villages and towns: a man was arrested for spending bad bills, and under examination, confessed that Sullivan had recently visited the area. So many of the people taken into custody admitted a connection to Sullivan that the authorities assumed that every counterfeiting case originated with the Oblong moneymaker. When a farmer from Massachusetts named Joseph Munroe was caught passing forged money in Newport, his captors asked him if he knew Sullivan, to which Munroe cryptically replied that he had “heard tell of such a man.” At his interrogation the next day, Munroe
revealed that he met Sullivan six weeks before in the forest near his home in Swansea, Bristol County, and received fifty-five notes from the engraver. Some of these he spent, and some he placed in a small sugar box that he hid in a nearby hedge. In the same hedge, Munroe confessed, Sullivan had concealed another sugar box with about a hundred counterfeit bills inside, its lid sealed shut with pitch.

Stashing bills at a secret site made sense, since carrying the notes on your person or keeping them in your house was dangerous. Passers of false currency wanted to minimize risk whenever possible: as the most exposed part of a counterfeiting ring, they lived in constant fear of being arrested. When Sullivan surfaced in the woods near their houses and asked for their help, the temptation must have been overpowering. It would have been hard to resist the lure of making money, the delicious sense of satisfaction as they became richer than their neighbors in a matter of minutes or hours. But once the engraver departed and the passers faced the prospect of spending the counterfeit bills, anxiety set in. There would be no shortage of tense moments, like watching the tavern keeper’s face as he squints to examine the note just handed to him—maybe it’s a higher denomination than he’s used to seeing, or he’s had problems with fake money before. Perhaps he read an article in the newspaper about how to detect forged bills, like the ones printed in the
New-York Gazette
and the
New-York Mercury
, and he knows exactly what to look for: a stroke that’s too thin or too crooked, an unusually large space between certain letters. Waiting for him to make up his mind couldn’t have been easy, but without these everyday acts of daring, Sullivan’s notes would never have circulated.