CRIME: The Last Batch

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Few men ever looked less like a master criminal than Hugo Hedin. He was a tall, stooped man with a mournful, bloodhound face and a shambling walk. He wore nondescript clothes, and had no friends. He talked hesitantly, with a Swedish accent. His lungs were weak and so was his stomach; he had a hypochondriac's love of pills. He spent a great deal of time in honest toil—he was a carpenter, a bricklayer, a plasterer, an upholsterer and a camera mechanic. He was also very poor.

But Old Hugo had a rare talent—he could make wonderful $5 bills. Said Secret Service Supervising Agent Harry Anheier: "I have never seen anyone who could rival him. His greens were wonderful."

Splitting the Bill. Most counterfeiters learn their trade from other counterfeiters. Hugo taught himself—in the St. Louis public library. He began his studies in 1922, when he was 29. He had come to the U.S. from Sweden in 1909, had drifted from one odd job to another, had spent a year in a tuberculosis sanitarium, and was down & out. Hour after hour, day after day, he sat in the reading room, poring over books on photography, engraving and the history and manufacture of money.

When he began actual operations two years later, Hugo took an artist's pains with his work. He soaked a real $5 bill in water and then—in a maddeningly delicate operation—split it in two. He oiled the halves until they were transparent, laid them on wax tablets covered with photosensitive jelly, and exposed them to light. After that, he brushed the two tablets with fine graphite, suspended them in a copper sulphate solution with pieces of pure copper and made master plates by electrolysis.

This was only the beginning. He eliminated tiny imperfections with hand engraving tools. He mixed his own inks. He made his own paper by stewing up cigarette paper with bits of colored thread, stirring the mess with an egg beater, sizing it (to keep the product from crumbling when it dried) and finally rolling it out by hand. He printed his money with a press made from an old clothes wringer.

Pin Money. The results were startling. His serial number (which was printed on separately and had closed instead of open 45) was the only easily identifiable imperfection. Many counterfeiters soak their money in coffee and crumple it, to make it look older and its discrepancies harder to detect. Hugo's money looked—and felt—so much like the real thing that he always passed it in new, crisp, unwrinkled bills.

When his first batch was made, he began a strange and lonely life. He set out across country, riding in buses or day coaches and passing only enough of his money to keep himself eating in cheap restaurants, and sleeping in cheap rooming houses. He never made more than $5,000 of phony money at one batch, and the trips to spend it always lasted months.

He was caught just once, in Detroit in 1927, and did three years in Leavenworth. When he got out he gave himself a new name—Paul Hansen—and went straight for seven long, hard years before he went back to counterfeiting. Then he made up a new batch of his wonderful $5 bills. They began appearing in Chicago in 1938; after only one look, the Secret Service knew who was making them.