Fake Money exhibit

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Government officials routinely deal with the issue of counterfeiting. Despite common wisdom, making phoney money may be the world’s oldest profession – or at least one of them. The World’s Gerry Hadden visited the Fake Money exhibit at the National Museum of Art in Catalonia. Download MP3
Video: Watch a confession of a former counterfeiter

• More on the MNCA exhibit

Click expand to see image descriptions (photos: Gerry Hadden)

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LISA MULLINS: Drugs are a very public police matter. We’re going to take a look at another illegal activity that generally flies below the radar. That’s the issue of counterfeiting money. Now despite the common wisdom, making phony money may be the world’s oldest profession, or at least one of them. The World’s Gerry Hadden went to the Fake Money exhibit at the National Museum of Art in Catalonia, Spain.

GERRY HADDEN:  For as long as money’s been around, people have been trying to counterfeit it. And since Roman times officials have been trying to stop them. For example, if you’d been caught counterfeiting Roman Denarius in the year 326, the Emperor Constantine the Second would have shown little mercy. Museum Curator Albert Estrada reads the emperor’s edict, here on display.

SPEAKING SPANISH

HADDEN: Any falsifier caught and or even accused of falsifying money shall be dispatched post-haste into the flaming fires. A severe punishment by today’s standards. But Estrada says governments have always feared forgers, nearly as much as invading armies, because money is, after all, a government’s life blood.

SPEAKING SPANISH

HADDEN: Money, he says, is always an instrument of public authority. We use it for business but the state invented it for collecting revenues. It puts money into circulation, forces everyone to use it, and then recoups that money through taxes. It’s a closed circuit. Here at the National Museum of Art in Catalonia it’s all mapped out. What Estrada calls the ongoing race between legitimate money minters and their phony money counterparts. In the beginning currency amounted to crude, hand-stamped coins of silver and gold. And copies were crude too.

SPEAKING SPANISH

MARGOLIS: The earliest counterfeiters, he says, would make a copper disc and then coat it with gold or silver leaf to hide what was really inside. But when they got worn down you could see the real metal beneath. You can see examples side by side here at the exhibit. The forgeries are really good, some are nearly perfect. The greatest difficulty until the Middle Ages, says Estrada, was finding a place to practice this illegal art.

SPEAKING SPANISH

HADDEN: He says, before the modern age people didn’t talk in terms of counterfeit money.  They spoke of the “money from the forests.” Because forgers made their coins in caves, or alone deep in the woods. It had to be like that because the sound of the hammering could arouse suspicion. As could the smoke, and the movement of materials. So for centuries counterfeiters hid themselves away. Punishments didn’t get better after the Romans. Under the barbarian Visigoth kings a counterfeiter would have his right hand cut off. In sixteenth century Spain, a forger faced a life sentence as an oarsman on one of the king’s ships. But no punishment, no matter how untoward, seemed to work. Then at the beginning of the modern age, the government money minters thought they’d finally found a solution.

SPEAKING SPANISH

HADDEN: Mechanization was introduced, Estrada says. Governments invented new systems that impeded copying. Coins became perfectly round and symmetrical. You can’t shave or file this coin because you’d notice, he says, pointing to an 18^th century German coin. They had drill presses that cut the elaborate patterns into the edges. Tamper proof, Estrada says, impossible to copy. Until, they were copied. The race went on. In the 19^th century desperate governments in Europe began publishing booklets for merchants on how to spot fake coins.

SPEAKING SPANISH

HADDEN: The most common test, Estrada says, was to bounce a coin off a small slab of marble. By how it bounced and the sound it made you could tell if it was real. Big bounce? Tinny sound? Fake. Little bounce? Dull sound? Real. In the digital world of today bouncing coins off stone seems nearly stone-age. Crooks continue to copy elaborate paper notes. Credit card cloning is constantly in the news. Estrada says the race will go on as long as people use money. Speaking of which, in case this exhibit causes visitors to worry about the bills in their own wallets, Estrada has installed a bill authenticating machine at the very end. Like the kind you see in banks. You just put your bills in and they shuffle out the back. The machine only beeps if it detects a suspicious note. For The World, I’m Gerry Hadden in Barcelona.

MULLINS: Photos showing the history of funny money and a video confession of a pretty sad attempt at counterfeiting. It’s all at our website, TheWorld.org. This is The World on PRI, Public Radio International.

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