Valley forged: early American counterfeiters and their heirs on Wall Street.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters - Book review

Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters

by Ben Tarnoff

Penguin Press PC, 384 pp.

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Ben Tarnoff's informative and entertaining new book Moneymakers is full of small bits of fascinating information about what it was like to print phony money in America in the years between 1750 and 1865. Among the things that struck me was that while counterfeiters needed markets and taverns and other centers of civilization in which to pass bad bills, they, unlike many other criminals, seldom set up shop in cities. Too many nosy neighbors attending to your spending habits, too many inquisitive constables wondering how your trash came to be filled with poorly printed money.

The first of the three counterfeiters Tarnoff tells us about is Owen Sullivan, who headquartered his operation in the Oblong, the remote and sparsely settled region on the disputed border of Connecticut and New York. Not only was it unlikely that a police officer would wander by and discover Sullivan, but if he did, it would be hard to tell if he even had jurisdiction. And with that Sullivan helped to establish, or at least uphold, one of the keys to counterfeiting success: if you're going to operate outside the law, it helps if the law is confused.

Sullivan--almost certainly not his real name--was an Irish immigrant who combined personal charm and entrepreneurial drive in building a thriving counterfeiting operation in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts in the 1750s. This was the period when paper money was introduced in the colonies as a kind of official IOU, a temporary solution to the problem of how to pay men who volunteered for the militia. Thus began a long, fierce argument between the advocates of hard money and paper money. Paper money proponents liked the convenience; it simplified the act of exchange and greased the wheels of commerce. Hard money advocates preferred the legitimacy of coinage, the hefty metal wheels that in a commercial exchange preserved the idea that the value of all things could be expressed in some amount of rare and hard-to-extract minerals. Hard money advocates saw charlatanry behind the idea of pretending that a scrap of paper had value just because it had some inky Latin words on it; no wonder the Protestants among them compared paper money to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, arguing that a thing doesn't change its essence just because one says it does. Hard money men...