True Crime by J.C. Sullivan
There are only two crimes considered so serious they are mentioned in the United States constitution. One is treason. The other crime is counterfeiting. Although it’s better known for its role protecting the president, the Secret Service was in fact founded by the US Treasury in 1865 to combat currency counterfeiting.
Counterfeit bills make up less than 0.1 percent of the cash in circulation at any time, but this represents upwards of one billion dollars. And counterfeiting’s impact on businesses can be significant, since losses incurred by accepting counterfeit currency are typically not covered by insurance.
Any list of greatest American counterfeiters would have to include Albert Edward Talton. He was born and raised in southern California. Before his counterfeiting career Talton was in and out of jail much of his life. In 2001 he was convicted of bank fraud and sentenced to five years.
In June 2004 he was released from prison, eventually finding work at a body shop in Inglewood, California. A few months later his boss showed him a fake $50 bill someone had passed at the garage. Talton studied the bill and decided, “I could do better than that.”
When Talton started his counterfeiting career, he had no experience in counterfeiting, graphic design or printing. He did not even own a computer. His first counterfeiting attempts were made with a Hewlett-Packard all-in-one inkjet printer/scanner/copier purchased for less than $150. These early efforts came out too fuzzy to be convincing.
Talton quickly solved that problem by cleaning up the original image on a computer. But a far more challenging problem remained.
The paper used in printing genuine American paper currency has a unique security feature. The paper gives the bills a yellow glow when marked with a detection pen. Normal paper does not yield the desired yellow response. Despite Talton’s best efforts, all the bills he printed were obviously fake: the bills turned up black or brown – not the needed yellow – when marked by a detection pen.
For a while the problem stumped Talton. He began taking a detection pen with him everywhere he went. He tried the pen on any paper he came across. Talton was about to give up when one day, in the toilet, he found himself staring at the roll of toilet paper.
He took out his detection pen and unexpectedly the pen mark showed up yellow on the toilet paper. Money made of toilet paper obviously wouldn’t fool anyone, so Talton did his research. He learned that newsprint was made from the same recycled paper pulp as toilet paper. Like toilet paper it showed up yellow under the detection pen. So, he began using newsprint for his counterfeit bills.
Talton refined his counterfeiting method further. Most counterfeiters scan the images of both sides of a bill, then print the images on a single piece of paper. Unfortunately for them, this counterfeit is fairly easy to spot since the US Treasury imprints a security strip and watermark on each bill. And working from a single piece of paper leaves the security strip and water mark looking wrong and easily spotted. Talton went with the far harder approach of printing the images on two separate sheets of newsprint paper. He printed imitation watermarks and security strips on the back of one piece of paper, then glued the two sheets together with the security features inside. This gave him a realistic looking bill.
He did not stop there. Talton hung the paper from clotheslines to dry. He then cut the notes to size. He went still further. He sprayed the faked bills with hair spray to give the bills the waxy texture of just-printed bills. Finally, the money was put in a clothes dryer with poker chips to soften the bills, making the bills feel convincingly worn.
It was a clever and careful effort. But Talton made one mistake and that mistake would prove to be his downfall at the hands of the Secret Service.
Talton used the same scan for every $100 bill he printed. This meant the alphanumeric codes to the left and right of the portrait of Benjamin Franklin on the bill never changed. These are the quadrant number and the faceplate number, which indicate which plate at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing had been used to make the bill.
Talton’s $100 bills all came from plate number 38, spot H, quadrant number 2. Consequently, his fake $100 bills were all marked H38 and H2. Every single one of the thousands of $100 bills Talton would eventually make had that same H38 and H2. That would prove easy to spot.
Once Talton had printed about two dozen $100 bills, he gave them to an acquaintance – “a street person,” is how Talton later described this man – to see what the man could do with them. The acquaintance sold the bills and came back for more. Talton was in the counterfeiting business.
Early in 2005 in southern California the H38/H2 bills slowly started showing up one or two bills at a time. The appearance of every counterfeit bill was logged by the Secret Service.
Through the next year Talton’s counterfeit bills followed a similar pattern: $100 here, $200 there, always spotted around Los Angeles. The volume, though, steadily increased: in January $11,500 worth of counterfeit bills were passed; by September that amount rose to $115,100. In 2005 and 2006, a total of $1,300,200 in H38/H2 bank notes were retrieved by the Secret Service.
Secret Service agents questioned anyone caught passing the notes, but the people questioned always told the same story: they had no idea the money was counterfeit. They certainly didn’t know where it came from.
By early 2007, the stream of notes became a flood. $347,700 of funny money was passed in March alone. The Secrets Service would later calculate that by the end of 2008, at least $127,000 in H38/H2 $100 bills had been spent in Macy’s stores, and $19,000 spent at Jack in the Box fast food restaurants.
The Secret Service still had no leads.
In September 2007, Talton received an order for $500,000 in counterfeit money. He dedicated an upstairs room in his new Lawndale, California house to his assembly line counterfeiting process. The operation had two Hewlett-Packard computers, nine inkjet and laser jet printers, and stacks of paper divided by type.
“Probably the best organized office I’ve ever seen,” a Secret Service agent would later say. Once a week, Talton drove to a Staples store in nearby Hawthorne to replenish his supply of printer cartridges. He’d drop his empties in the store’s recycling bin. He even used a Staples rewards card to accrue points – and in his own name. In the last three months of 2007, the Secret Service logged the passing of another nearly $1.3 million in counterfeit $100 bills with the H38/H2 mark.
But the Secret Service was still no closer to finding the person printing the fake money than they had been two years before. Then, on January 14, 2008, the Secret Service finally caught a break.
At an H&M store in Los Angeles a former employee bought $1,000 worth of clothes with $100 bills all with the H38/H2 mark. The following day two women returned with the purchases, asking for a refund. Under interrogation by the Secret Service, the women admitted they knew the notes were counterfeit. More importantly, they knew where the money had come from: a man named Troy Stroud. The Secret Service put Mr. Stroud under surveillance.
Two months later, Stroud was hawking Talton’s latest product: a counterfeit $20. It might seem counter-intuitive but counterfeit $20 bills are more of a threat to the economy than counterfeit $100 bills. Phony Twenties are so much easier to pass than fake $100 bills because few businesses bother to check every $20 bill they receive, while businesses generally do check $100 bills. The investigation became more urgent.
Secret Service informants wearing wires met with Troy Stroud and bought some of his H38/H2 bills. The Service got everything on tape and placed a tracking device on Stroud’s Range Rover.
On April 15, 2008, three agents tailed Stroud to a Popeye’s fried-chicken franchise in Inglewood. While Stroud waited in the drive-through line, Secrete Service special agent Matthew Mayo entered the restaurant and watched Stroud pay for his meal with a $20 bill. Naturally, the bill was counterfeit.
On April 23, Secret Service agents followed Stroud to Albert Talton’s house in Lawndale. The following day the agents searched the trash cans outside the house, turning up fragments of counterfeit bills and printer cartridges.
Early in the morning of May 8, Stroud was arrested. Talton’s house was raided later that day when the Secret Service entered using a battering ram and shotguns. Talton was upstairs, working. On his computer screen was the image of a $100 bill. The agents also found $162,000 in finished notes, and nearly $1.4 million in partially completed bills. “You can’t get caught much more red-handed than that,” a Secret Service agent commented.
Albert Talton and three co-conspirators were convicted of “forging or selling counterfeit obligations of the United States.” Talton was sentenced to nine years and two months in prison.
The Secret Service put the total of all the currency printed by Talton and successfully spent at $6,798,900. By the time of Talton’s conviction, his money had circulated in every state in the United States and in nine foreign countries.
After Talton was arrested, the local US Attorney’s office issued a press release mentioning that an Aston Martin, two Mercedes, and other expensive cars were parked in front of Talton’s Lawndale home. But when he was asked about this later in prison, Talton claimed he was not really motivated by money. He said, “It was just an experiment to see if I could do it.”
Sources and Further Reading:
https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/cac/Pressroom/pr2008/111.html
https://www.wired.com/story/the-inkjet-counterfeiter/
https://www.dailynews.com/2008/05/14/staples-receipts-help-nail-down-counterfeiting-arrests/
https://pvteyes.com/two-of-the-last-decades-biggest-currency-counterfeiting-cases/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-may-14-me-counterfeit14-story.html
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/5740527/united-states-v-talton/
https://www.sgvtribune.com/2008/08/11/leader-of-lawndale-based-counterfeit-ring-pleads-guilty/
Bio: John Sullivan is a Baltimore writer and lawyer. He grew up in a law enforcement family. His novel about a scam, Mr. Fox, is looking for a publisher.
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