Edward Mueller, a 63-year-old widower, made one-dollar bills in his kitchen from November 1938 and never passed more than one to a person. The Secret Service set ten thousand traps and never found him; a fire and two boys in a vacant lot did, in January 1948. He paid a fine of exactly one dollar. In 2015 Itzhak Loz, whose ring made and distributed more than $70 million in fake U.S. currency, was sentenced to 15 years.12
Mister 880: the $1 counterfeiter hunted for 10 years 0:00
For almost ten years the Secret Service hunted a man whose fake dollar bills spelled Washington wrong. Ten thousand traps never caught him.1 Sixty-six years after the January 1948 call, on May 28, 2014, agents executed a search warrant at a warehouse in New Jersey. The Secret Service called the fake $100 behind that case one of the most prolific counterfeit notes in history.3
In January 1948 a police detective on Manhattan’s Upper West Side telephoned the Secret Service about a small batch of what looked like fake one-dollar bills. The agent on duty asked him to read the name under Washington’s portrait. It was spelled W-A-H-S-I-N-G-T-O-N.1
The bill that matched nothing (1938 / 1999) 1:32
The Secret Service laboratory keeps a file on every counterfeit series it has seen. In November 1938 a customer paid with a one-dollar bill at a cigar store on Broadway near 102nd Street; the owner took it without looking, and a bank teller stopped it that afternoon. It matched no file. Nobody counterfeited ones, so a new file was opened: number 880. The first nationwide memo, signed by Chief Frank J. Wilson, described cheap bond paper and a portrait “poorly executed against a black background.”1
In New York, agents pinned a map to the wall with a red tack for every traced bill. Within a month forty more bills turned up, clustered on the Upper West Side, about five square miles and almost a million people.1 Sixty-one years later, in 1999, the Secret Service opened another file in the same city for a new counterfeit $100 whose own description was two words: “highly deceptive.” Prosecutors later said the people behind it “operated undetected for many years.” The Secret Service’s working belief was that the notes were printed in Israel.32
One note was laughably bad; the other was extremely good. Neither led the agents anywhere, and both kept spreading.
Who was Mister 880? Edward Mueller and the “Wahsington” bills 3:49
In spring 1938 a man moved into a top-floor flat in a brownstone tenement near Broadway and 96th Street, with a mongrel terrier. The New Yorker later gave his name as Edward Mueller: sixty-three, a former building superintendent, recently widowed, children grown.1 He tried to live as a junkman with a second-hand pushcart. It did not pay, and his savings were running out.
In November 1938 he became a counterfeiter of one-dollar bills, made in a corner of his kitchen and passed one or two at a time. He never made more than he needed to keep himself and the dog.1 By the end of the first year he had passed 585 bills, less than two dollars a day, and the agents had never heard of a counterfeiter like him.
Then the bills got worse. By late 1939 the name under the portrait read W-A-H-S-I-N-G-T-O-N; trying to fix his lettering, he had apparently swapped two letters. The supervising agent in New York, James Maloney, was irritated, The New Yorker wrote, and his men felt more foolish than ever. Reformed counterfeiters said no professional would try to pass anything so crude. But in 1940 almost nobody looked twice at a dollar, and the bills turned up in Baltimore, Atlanta and Denver and at a bank in Seattle.1
Ten thousand traps (1939–1943) 6:11
The Secret Service launched a manhunt over a one-dollar bill. Agents worked the Upper West Side store by store; over the years ten thousand storekeepers became traps. Two hundred thousand circulars went out. During the hunt for File 880 the service convicted 1,385 other people.1
The agents believed counterfeiters fall through greed and haste, and that if Eight Eighty ever tried to cash in fast he would be caught easily. The traps caught about a dozen New Yorkers passing his bills, and every one turned out to be innocent. By the end of 1943 the New York office had collected 2,840 of his bills, fewer than two a day, spread across all five boroughs and Jersey City.1 By the agents’ own rule, a greedy operation should have been the easiest catch of all.
The $70 million counterfeit ring led by Itzhak Loz (per the DOJ) 7:54
The $100 note first seen in 1999, the Secret Service would later say, belonged to one organization. According to court documents its leader was Itzhak Loz of Rishon LeZion, Israel, and between 2004 and 2014 the enterprise he led made and distributed more than $70 million in counterfeit U.S. currency. The court documents cover only those ten years.23
These notes were nothing like Eight Eighty’s: extremely high quality fifties and hundreds, printed on presses in Israel and in the United States. At its height, the Justice Department says, the ring smuggled $3 million in fakes into the country every three months, hidden in shipping containers. At $100 a note, that is at least 30,000 notes every quarter (our calculation); Mueller passed fewer than two a day.2
Inside the country a network of distributors spent the fakes at stores up and down the East Coast. The U.S. Attorney described it as “a close-knit and loyal network of distributors bound by family ties, loyalty and greed.” For years it held.2
The target then moved. In October 2013 a redesigned $100 note with a blue ribbon woven into the paper entered circulation.6 According to court documents Loz tried to recreate its security features and could not. Around January 2014, prosecutors say, he and a partner began shipping printing presses into the United States from Canada and Israel, to a warehouse they had bought in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia.2
One winter night: the fire that ended the manhunt (1947–1948) 10:15
By 1948 File 880 was the oldest open case in the Secret Service’s files, and the agents called him “Old Eight Eighty.” What ended it came from somewhere else entirely.1
That winter a fire gutted a top-floor flat at the back of the tenement on West 96th Street. The tenant was not at home. To work faster, the firemen threw the flat’s junk out of the windows into the vacant lot next door, without knowing they had thrown out the secret of File 880.1
In January 1948, with snow on the lot, neighborhood boys found a heap of junk that had not been there before: old tires, wrecked baby carriages, a bird cage. The two youngest, ten and twelve, dug in and found two metal plates and about thirty funny-looking dollar bills. One shouted, “Look! Stage money!” For ten days the bills were toys, until a father found the boys playing stud poker with them and took them to the police station on West 100th Street. That was the batch on the detective’s desk.1
Two doors: the plates, the knock and the Cherry Hill warrant 12:56
Three agents arrived a little after midnight. By morning they knew where the bills were found and that two boys had kept the plates. On the Saturday they followed the plates from boy to boy: they had changed hands three times, traded like toys. Two other agents followed the scorched junk to a firehouse record of the fire, and the building’s superintendent gave them a name.1
The last boy, ten years old, came home at dusk and handed the agents the plates of Old Eight Eighty. The agents then climbed to the top floor with the superintendent and knocked. A small, white-haired old man opened the door. In the kitchen, near the sink, was a small hand press, and in a drawer a few smudged “Wahsington” bills. Asked how long he had been making them, he answered, “Oh, nine or ten years.” The bills were only singles: “I never gave more than one of them to any one person, so nobody ever lost more than the one dollar.” He insisted he worked alone.1 Later he came back with a story about a partner named Henry; the agents checked every detail, and none of it held up.1
Meanwhile, in the 2014 case, a married couple arrived from Israel in March, recruited, court documents say, to help produce counterfeit hundreds in Cherry Hill, and printing began in April. On May 28, 2014, the Secret Service executed a search warrant at the warehouse; in the Justice Department’s words, agents essentially caught the couple “red handed,” running the machines. The same day agents seized more than $2.5 million in counterfeit hundreds from a storage unit Loz leased in New York, and over the next two weeks searched and arrested in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Florida.23
When word of Mueller’s arrest reached Washington, the chief of the Secret Service was James Maloney, who had once run the New York hunt. He teletyped back: “These developments please me very much.” As The New Yorker put it, the capture had no connection with the manhunt at all.1 In August 2014 a federal grand jury indicted Loz and twelve others, and all thirteen pleaded guilty.24 The public record does not say what led agents to the warehouse; it shows only how fast the end came once the presses were within reach.
One dollar: a $1 fine vs. 15 years 16:57
On September 3, 1948, in federal court in the Southern District of New York, Edward Mueller, seventy-three, faced three counts: possessing the plates, passing the bills and making them. The first two alone could mean up to thirty years. He pleaded guilty to the first two but not the third; “Henry did the manufacturing,” he kept telling his lawyer. The prosecutor recommended a suspended sentence because of his age.1
Judge John W. Clancy disagreed: “I think everybody who has anything to do with counterfeiting ought to know before he starts in that business that he is going to jail.” He gave Mueller nine months, then, after the lawyers whispered, a year and a day, which would allow parole after four months. A sentence of a year and a day must carry a fine; none was specified, so it became nominal. Mueller paid the court one dollar and was out by January 1949.1
In 2015 the sentence was not one dollar. On September 18, 2015, in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, Itzhak Loz, 48, was sentenced to 180 months, fifteen years. Judge Liam O’Grady also ordered him to forfeit $20 million and the warehouse.2
The agents’ own logic explains the gap: Mueller lacked the one thing they counted on, greed. One bill, one person, never more than he needed. The 2014 case was built the opposite way, with millions every few months, thirteen defendants and presses on two continents, held together, prosecutors said, by family, loyalty and greed. Mueller’s secret was thrown into a vacant lot where any child could pick it up; Loz’s moved into a warehouse where agents were inside within weeks of the first print run. The price of almost a decade of counterfeiting came to exactly the face value of one of his bills.
Full transcript
0:00 · Mister 880: the $1 counterfeiter hunted for 10 years
For almost ten years, the Secret Service hunted a man whose fake dollar bills spelled Washington wrong. Ten thousand traps never caught him. Sixty-six years later, on May twenty-eighth, twenty fourteen, agents execute a search warrant at a warehouse in New Jersey. The Secret Service called the ring's fake hundred one of the most prolific counterfeit notes in history. So what does it take to catch a counterfeiter the Secret Service cannot find?
For the first one, the answer begins with a phone call. January, nineteen forty-eight. Late in the evening, a police detective on Manhattan's Upper West Side telephones the Secret Service. He has a small batch of what look like fake one-dollar bills. The agent on duty asks him to do one thing. Look at the name under George Washington's portrait. How is it spelled? The detective looks. And laughs. W. A. H. S. The agent on the line sounds wildly excited.
Hold everything, he says: someone is on the way. After almost ten years, the agents finally have a lead. But where those bills came from had nothing to do with ten thousand traps. And when the case finally closed, the counterfeiter's fine came to exactly one dollar.
1:32 · The bill that matched nothing (1938 / 1999)
In Washington, the Secret Service laboratory can tell one counterfeiter's work from another almost like fingerprints. It keeps a file on every counterfeit series it has ever seen. November, nineteen thirty-eight. A cigar store on Broadway, near One Hundred Second Street. The owner works alone, and he is busy. A customer pays with a one-dollar bill. The owner takes it without looking. That afternoon, it goes to the bank with the day's deposit.
A teller stops it. By law, the bank hands it to the Secret Service. The very next day, an agent questions the owner. He has no idea who gave it to him. But in the lab, this bill matches none of those files. No other counterfeiter thinks one-dollar bills are worth the trouble. There is no open file for them at all. So a new file is opened. Number eight-eighty. The first memo goes out nationwide, signed by the chief, Frank J.
Wilson. Cheap bond paper. The portrait, quote, "poorly executed against a black background." In New York, agents pin a map to the wall. Every traced bill gets a red thumbtack. Within a month, forty more bills turn up. The tacks cluster on the Upper West Side: about five square miles, almost a million people. The agents expect a professional. They have no idea he is sixty-three. Sixty-one years later, in nineteen ninety-nine, the Secret Service opens another file in the same city.
But this time, the problem is the reverse. A new counterfeit hundred-dollar bill. The Secret Service's own description is two words: highly deceptive. Yet the people behind it, federal prosecutors later said, "operated undetected for many years." The Secret Service's working belief is that the notes are printed in Israel, nearly six thousand miles away. Two files, sixty-one years apart. One note is laughably bad. The other is extremely good.
Neither one leads the agents anywhere, and both keep spreading.
3:49 · Who was Mister 880?
Back to nineteen thirty-eight. That spring, a man moves into a sunny top-floor flat in a brownstone tenement near Broadway and Ninety-Sixth Street. He brings his dog. The Secret Service will not learn his name for almost ten years. The New Yorker later gave it as Edward Mueller. He is sixty-three, a former building superintendent, recently widowed. His children are grown. His dog is a mongrel terrier with no name. When neighbors ask why, he says: "What good would a name do the dog?
When I talk to him, he knows I'm talking to him, don't he?" He tries to live as a junkman, roaming vacant lots and the riverfront with a second-hand pushcart, the dog at his heels. It does not pay. His savings are running out. He has worked since he was thirteen and never asked anyone for help. He tells his children he is fine. November, nineteen thirty-eight. Edward Mueller becomes a counterfeiter of one-dollar bills.
He makes them in a corner of his own kitchen. Then he goes out with his cart and his dog, and passes one or two. And he never makes more than he needs to keep himself and his dog. So what could ever give him away? At the end of the first year, he has passed five hundred eighty-five bills. Less than two dollars a day. The agents have never heard of a counterfeiter like him. Then his bills get worse. By late nineteen thirty-nine, the name under the portrait reads W, A, H, S, I, N, G, T, O, N.
Trying to fix his lettering, he has apparently swapped two letters. The supervising agent in New York, James Maloney, is irritated, The New Yorker wrote, and his men feel more foolish than ever. Reformed counterfeiters look at the bills and laugh. No professional, they say, would try to pass anything that crude. But people take them anyway. In nineteen forty, almost nobody looks twice at a dollar. So the bills travel.
They turn up in Baltimore, Atlanta and Denver, and at a bank in Seattle. And the man they are hunting lives about six blocks from the cigar store where it all began.
6:11 · Ten thousand traps (1939–1943)
So the Secret Service launches a manhunt over a one-dollar bill. Agents work the Upper West Side store by store. Over the years, ten thousand storekeepers become traps. Two hundred thousand circulars go out. Radio listeners are warned again and again. Meanwhile, the Secret Service is catching everyone else. During the hunt for File eight-eighty, it convicts one thousand three hundred eighty-five other people. Take one of them.
A man drives to New Rochelle with fake fifty-cent pieces and spends them on cheap cigars and shoelaces, as fast as he can. Someone notices. A call goes to the Secret Service. Police pick him up before he gets out of town. That, the agents believe, is how counterfeiters fall: greed and haste. If Eight Eighty had ever tried to cash in fast, they said, he would have been caught easily. And the traps set for Eight Eighty?
They catch about a dozen New Yorkers passing his bills. Every one of them turns out to be innocent. The bills keep coming. Maloney later recalled thinking about the case at odd moments, especially when he tried to relax. And he never hurries. Five years in, the New York office has collected two thousand eight hundred forty of his bills. Fewer than two a day, spread across all five boroughs and Jersey City. So by the agents' own rule, a greedy operation should be the easiest catch of all.
From nineteen ninety-nine on, the second file puts that rule to the test.
7:54 · The $70 million counterfeit ring led by Itzhak Loz
The hundred first seen in nineteen ninety-nine, the Secret Service would later say, belongs to one organization. According to court documents, its leader is Itzhak Loz, of Rishon LeZion, Israel. The court documents cover only two thousand four to twenty fourteen. In those ten years, prosecutors say, the enterprise he led made and distributed more than seventy million dollars in counterfeit U.S. currency. But these notes are nothing like Eight Eighty's: extremely high quality, fifties and hundreds, printed on presses in Israel and in the United States.
At its height, the Justice Department says, it smuggled three million dollars in fakes into the country every three months, hidden in shipping containers. Set that beside Eight Eighty. He passes fewer than two bills a day. Three million dollars in fifties and hundreds is at least thirty thousand notes. Every three months. Inside the country, a network of distributors takes over. The fakes are spent at stores up and down the East Coast.
The U.S. Attorney later described that network in one line: "a close-knit and loyal network of distributors bound by family ties, loyalty and greed."
Greed: the very thing the agents of the forties counted on. But here, greed doesn't bring it down. For years, it holds. Then the target moves. In October twenty thirteen, a redesigned hundred-dollar bill goes into circulation, with a blue ribbon woven into the paper. According to court documents, Loz tries to recreate the new note's security features. He can't. So around January twenty fourteen, prosecutors say, Loz and a partner start shipping printing presses into the United States, from Canada and from Israel.
Their destination is a warehouse they have bought in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia. From here, count the months. Five, until the twenty-eighth of May. And in Manhattan, at the turn of nineteen forty-eight, a fire is about to break out on West Ninety-Sixth Street.
10:15 · One winter night: the fire that ended the manhunt
By now, File eight-eighty is the oldest open case in the Secret Service's files.
The agents have a name for him: Old Eight Eighty. Nine years. And what ends it comes from somewhere else entirely. That winter, the fire guts a top-floor flat at the back of the building. The tenant is not at home. The flat is crammed with junk. To work faster, the firemen throw it out of the windows, into the vacant lot next door. Without knowing it, they have just thrown the secret of File eight-eighty into that lot.
No one is hurt. Except an old mongrel terrier, which dies in the smoke before the firemen arrive. The fire chief remembers one odd thing about the dog. It had no name. When the tenant comes home and sees what is left, he says: "Almost everything that was any good is gone." He moves in with his married daughter. But almost every day, he comes back, climbs up to the burned flat, and stands around. January, nineteen forty-eight.
Snow covers the vacant lot. Some neighborhood boys playing there find a heap of junk that wasn't there before. Old tires. Wrecked baby carriages. A beat-up bird cage. The two youngest, ten and twelve years old, dig in. They find two metal plates and about thirty funny-looking dollar bills.
One of them shouts: "Look! Stage money!" For almost ten years, thousands of grown New Yorkers took those bills as real. Two boys know they are fake at a glance. For ten days, the bills are toys. Then a father finds the boys in his cellar, playing stud poker with them, and suspects the bills are fakes. He takes them to the police station on West One Hundredth Street. That is the batch on the detective's desk. Three agents arrive a little after midnight.
By morning they know where the bills were found, and that two boys kept the plates. But it is Saturday, and the two boys have gone off without a word.
12:56 · Two doors: the plates, the knock and the Cherry Hill warrant
The agents spend Saturday following the plates from boy to boy. The plates have changed hands three times. For a used catcher's mitt. Then for a Japanese bayonet. Then for a bag of marbles. The key evidence in the Secret Service's oldest open case is being traded like a toy. At the same time, two other agents follow the junk. It is scorched. There was a fire next door. At a firehouse on Ninety-Seventh Street, the battalion chief has a record of the fire. The building's superintendent gives them a name.
March, twenty fourteen. A married couple arrives from Israel, recruited, court documents say, to help produce counterfeit hundreds in Cherry Hill. In April, the printing starts. Prosecutors say the enterprise prints millions of dollars in fake hundreds there. Back in nineteen forty-eight, the last boy, ten years old, is out somewhere on the Upper West Side. He comes home at dusk. He takes the agents to his room and hands them the plates of Old Eight Eighty.
The two agents on the junk trail climb to the top floor with the superintendent. They knock. A small, white-haired old man opens the door. The agents look past him and ask the superintendent where the tenant is. You are the only tenant of this flat?" "Yes." He grins at them, almost toothless. In the kitchen, near the sink, is a small hand press.
In a drawer: a few smudged "Wahsington" bills. They ask him how long he has been making them.
He answers cheerfully: "Oh, nine or ten years. A long time." He tells them the bills were only singles. "I never gave more than one of them to any one person, so nobody ever lost more than the one dollar." But, The New Yorker reported, the agents do not want to believe this polite old man is the counterfeiter they hunted for almost ten years.
They press him: someone must have helped. He insists he worked alone. May twenty-eighth, twenty fourteen. The Secret Service executes a search warrant at the Cherry Hill warehouse. In the Justice Department's words, agents essentially catch the couple "red handed," running the machines. The same day, agents seize more than two and a half million dollars in counterfeit hundreds from a storage unit Loz leases in New York.
Over the next two weeks, agents search and arrest in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Florida. Back in nineteen forty-eight, word of Mueller's arrest reaches Washington. The chief of the Secret Service is now James Maloney, the man who once ran the New York hunt.
He teletypes back: "These developments please me very much." But later, Mueller comes back on his own with a new story: a partner named Henry. The agents check every detail. The neighbors. The bars. The veterans' records. The union. None of it holds up. Ten thousand traps. Two hundred thousand circulars. Almost ten years. As The New Yorker put it, the capture had no connection with the manhunt at all. In August twenty fourteen, a federal grand jury indicts Loz and twelve others.
All thirteen plead guilty. Line up the dates. The note circulates for fifteen years. The presses reach New Jersey around January twenty fourteen. By the end of May, agents are inside. The public record does not say what led agents to that warehouse. It only shows how fast the end came, once the presses were within reach. Now both men face a judge.
16:57 · One dollar: a $1 fine vs. 15 years
September third, nineteen forty-eight. Federal court, Southern District of New York. Edward Mueller is seventy-three years old. He has been indicted on three counts: possessing the plates, passing the bills, and making them. The first two alone could mean up to thirty years. He pleads guilty to the first two, but not the third. "Henry did the manufacturing," he keeps telling his lawyer. Even the government asks for mercy: the prosecutor recommends a suspended sentence because of his age.
In the dock, he stands in an old, frayed gray suit, turning a wrinkled felt hat over and over in his hands. Judge John W.
Clancy disagrees: "I think everybody who has anything to do with counterfeiting ought to know before he starts in that business that he is going to jail." He gives Mueller nine months. The old man is led out, still grinning. Then the lawyers whisper to the judge: a year and a day would allow parole after four months. "Bring the defendant back!" A sentence of a year and a day must carry a fine. None is specified, so the fine becomes nominal.
Edward Mueller pays the court one dollar. By January, nineteen forty-nine, he is out. In two thousand fifteen, the sentence is not one dollar. Counterfeiting U.S. currency is a federal crime. September eighteenth, twenty fifteen. Federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Itzhak Loz, forty-eight, is sentenced to one hundred eighty months. Fifteen years. Judge Liam O'Grady also orders him to forfeit twenty million dollars, and the warehouse.
So how did a man with some of the crudest fakes the agents had ever seen stay free for almost ten years? By the agents' own logic, because he lacked the one thing they counted on: greed. One bill, one person, never more than he needed. The twenty-fourteen case was built the opposite way. Millions every few months, thirteen defendants, presses on two continents, held together, prosecutors said, by family, loyalty and greed.
In the end, both secrets landed somewhere they could be found. Mueller's was thrown into a vacant lot, where any child could pick it up. Loz's moved into a warehouse in New Jersey, where agents were inside within weeks of the first print run. And the price of almost a decade of counterfeiting came to exactly the face value of one of his bills.
American Money History
