Citation Needed - Frank Bourassa - The Greatest Counterfeiter in the World

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Counterfeiting of the currency of the United States is widely attempted. According to the United States Department of Treasury, an estimated $70 million in counterfeit bills are in circulation, or approximately 1 note in counterfeits for every 10,000 in genuine currency, with an upper bound of $200 million counterfeit, or 1 counterfeit per 4,000 genuine notes.[1][2] However, these numbers are based on annual seizure rates on counterfeiting, and the actual stock of counterfeit money is uncertain because some counterfeit notes successfully circulate for a few transactions.

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be fronting this fanfare of fakers tonight, but I'll need a group of great big phonies. First up, two guys who won't even tell you their real names. No illusions and Heathenright. Yeah, I know. Lying about my name is my middle name.

And I'm actually, Keith is my real name. And also joining us tonight, two men who were faking it before it was cool, Tom and Cecil. Yeah, that's actually why I arch my back every time I answer one of your phone calls. I am also here. Hi, Cecil. Cheers.

Hi. Cheers to you. Before we begin tonight, I'd like to thank our patrons. Patrons, you make this little product of ours real. You are the treasury stamp that keeps the cha-ching in our swing. And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us Tom, what legendary person, place, thing,

concept, phenomenon, or event we'll be talking about today. Today we'll be discussing my personal hero, Frank Barrasco. This guy's awesome. I'm so excited. Love him. Yes. Love him. So Tom, you've apparently found a guy with a job slightly more fraudulent than your own. Are you ready to gloat?

If by gloat you mean take copious notes, then yes. So who was Brank Barassa? You know, I have always sort of resented the idea of working. Way to swerve out of the way of that question there, Tom. Thank you, Noah. Thank you. I'm glad you noticed. You know, I mean, honestly, the whole system just feels like a scam.

Like my life and all the activities of earning too closely mimic just a very complex ATM machine. Sit in front of a computer, hit the right keys in the right order, wait a little while, money spits out of the system. Say the right words, the right person, you get the same result. The goal for me has never been the work, but that result, the cash. And all the activity that leads up to a payday feels like just a petty annoyance, the dance that must be done for the dollars to spit out of the machine.

This is likely why the story of Frank Barassa, the greatest counterfeiter in the world, struck such a chord for me. Here was a man whose life's mission was to cut out the middleman of labor for money and just make the actual fucking money itself. Yeah, that is if you don't mind victimizing treasury margin points, Tom. Is that what you wanna do?

Do you wanna murder treasury margin points Tom. That what you want to do? Do you want to murder Treasury margin points? Nobody wants to work these days. I'll tell you. Eli, what's a Treasury margin point? Thank you, Heath. I asked chat GPT why torture was bad and they program it real hard to tell you not to do crimes. And it was like come on man

You know, it's fine. What do you don't bother me? It's not I got eight billion people trying to make me a sexy Japanese lady right now. You got to give me this shit I'm feeling with a lot as long as only like a couple people do it. I was Scarlett Johansson for a week Yeah, and then she yelled at me Even as an adolescent Frank was a hustler. He figured out that making money was the result of bridging the gap between what someone wanted and what they didn't have. And if you could be that bridge, the rewards were handsome indeed.

From his hometown in a suburb outside of Quebec at the age of 12, Frank noticed that there was something of a thriving underground marketplace at his school of shoplifted goods, mainly clothes. Some enterprising students in his seventh grade class were light-fingered enough to get the goods, but not quite sharp enough to turn their stolen merchandise into much of a profit for themselves. Frank figured he could act as the fence for the stolen clothes. At 12 and seventh grade, he became a fence for the stolen clothes, buying up that stolen

stuff and turning it around to kids looking for a deal and making a tidy profit for himself in the process. Frank's first foray into felonious finery flipping netted him hundreds of dollars a week. Thank you. In fairly short order. Oh sure. But when I do it, you guys are like.

And according to Frank, it was, yeah, you gotta do it well. You gotta do a good job. No, don't just type in the chat GPT buddy. I'm just, random alliteration doesn't work as well. According to Frank, quote, it was great. It gave me a very nice boost toward independence. Just Frank in the hallway of his high school being like, Psst, that's Ze Cavaricchi's sports

and pizza. Who needs pleats? Come on. Tight rolls here. I got tight rolls. I kept up the fencing racket until he was 15, at which time he was expelled from school and also from his family home. I didn't want to boost my independence that much, Mom.

Come on. Frank then took up the wrench and began working as a mechanic. What? A detail I love because he's 15 and there's absolutely nothing I could find that indicates that he was trained for that work in any way. I'll fix it. It didn't matter because fairly swiftly, Frank once again saw opportunity this time in stolen car parts and then just straight up selling those stolen cars.

Sure. And he kept that up until his mid twenties. Hey, listen, I know I'm the new guy here, but like it, it starts as a full car guys. I feel like we're making it harder than it has to be. Right. At this point, Frank briefly tried to go straight and he launched his own business. This was a factory that made brake pads.

What do you think is just about the most insane thing to just start doing out of nowhere? Oh, no, Tom, sorry. As someone who's paid to have their brake pads replaced this year, I can confirm it's actually very similar to stealing cars. And this was insane because owning and running any business on your own is just a mountain of work, but running your own factory. Well, that's a mountain of mountains. And Frank was routinely working 20 hours a day to keep up with the ridiculous demands

of the job on paper. The business was a success, but Frank? Frank was not. His health began to suffer and he began to sweat and shake constantly. He had panic attacks and eventually he had a nervous breakdown. Pussy. Noah had a heart attack mid-edit and he finished, damn it, he finished. Still here today. And he did the edit.

Did the edit, yeah. So Frank, Frank made two important decisions. Thank you. No one gets it. This guy knows what I'm talking about. So Frank, he made two important decisions. The first was that he was going to sell the business, which he did for a nice profit. And the second was that he was never going to make money in any non-criminal business again. It simply was not worth his time and effort. After traveling the world for a couple of years with his girlfriend on his brake pad factory sale money, Frank returned to Canada and set up shop

growing and selling weed. Okay so you know Tom, I am gonna find a hero of yours that you don't know about and I am am going to essay him so fucking hard. In 2006, a few years into his weed enterprise, he was caught and arrested. But since he was Canadian, he served only a handful of months before being released. And this is the point at which Frank's life really changed. He knew a few very important things. First, he knew that money was awesome. The second, that the straight life was not for him. And third, that if money was the goal, well then rather than working to make money, it simply made more sense to literally make the money

itself. For once, the consummate middleman was cutting out the middleman entirely. But see, counterfeiting money, that's really fucking hard to do. And counterfeiting Canadian money, particularly so. In fact, Frank quickly learned that the best currency to counterfeit was American money. USA! USA! We're number one! America, crazily enough, still uses paper money, unlike most of the rest of the world,

and the US dollar is generally accepted all over the world, so it's highly desirable, which would make it easier to move once he had cracked the code on how to actually manufacture his own scratch. Okay, so I looked up why we don't change to polymer bills like the rest of the world, and the answer was, fuck you, Heath. Why do you hate freedom? Seriously, the reason we don't change it is because idiots would get all mad.

So nobody wants to suggest changing it. Yeah, my favorite excuse I found online is that polymer bills are more difficult to recycle. Because you know how we recycle your money when it's a little old, right? You pull out a bit, this one's not ready. Well, no, but like, look, we do actually recycle paper currency when it gets old, but like, we don't do this thing the rest of the world does because we're so environmentally conscious

of some serious bullshit coming from America. Listeners here may recall the story we told some time ago about the kid who made a nuclear reactor at his mom's shed, and how many of the plans and the knowledge that he gained to build that reactor came right from government employees. And the same would be at least partially true now for Frank. You see, much of the most important information about the specific details of American currency can be found fairly simply on government websites. Specifically, the secret recipe for American paper was the most important

detail. Pretty much any asshole can scan and print a $20 bill and it will look like a $20 bill, but it still won't pass muster because it won't feel like a real $20 bill. There is a unique texture and feel to American money that is instantly recognizable at first touch. If you cannot counterfeit the feel of the money, you cannot counterfeit the money at all. The other secret is storing it for a couple of weeks in your butt crack to give it the right level of pathogens. You know?

Thanks. You know, make that joke as often as you want, Cecil. Nobody's ever gonna believe that's what you were doing with those. Thank you. Science! Science is what I was doing. Frank, bouncing around to different internet cafes so as to never do his research in the same place twice, eventually figured out that the paper of American money was actually a

blend of 75% cotton and 25% linen. And that there was actually only one paper mill in the entire country that made this paper. In fact, the mill that makes paper for American money, Cranenco, only makes American money and nothing else. They've done it since 1879. It's actually right next to where I went to college. It's in Dalton, Massachusetts.

I've driven right past it. And my buddy who lived in Dalton, who went to the same college, when we passed it, he was like, yeah, you can't see it right now, but if you get like 20 feet closer with your dumbass old Volvo, a bunch of guys with AK-47s will pop out real fast.

I don't doubt that at all. Yeah. So while Frank had the ratio for the paper, he didn't have a supplier. And his email queries he initially sent out were pretty much immediately clocked as some idiot trying to get, well, counterfeit paper. So he was going to need a very different approach. Yeah, that paper company also makes a really amazing paper money lobbyist.

That's what, that's the other thing they make. Using a pseudonym, Frank began hitting up foreign paper mills pretending to be from an investment company that needed counterfeit resistant paper to print their bonds onto. And eventually he came across a Swiss company that agreed that they could make a rag paper for his investment firm. Now, Frank wasn't dumb enough to just ask for the Colonel's secret recipe at the start. Instead, he sent a series of emails back and forth with the company, each time making small tweaks in the percentages of the rag paper until they slowly arrived at the 75-25 ratio without ever actually asking for it directly.

So, guys, I was thinking, I don't know, top of my head, 76-24, maybe 74-26. Now you say a number. 26, 24, maybe 74, 26. Now you say a number. I don't know. I'm fucking with you. Although we shouldn't have done exactly 75, 25, right? Like that's too round. It is too, it seems lazy. Yeah.

So the next problem was gonna be the security strip. Frank was gonna counterfeit 20s and the $20 bill has a security strip running alongside it. Claiming that he was gonna be making investment bonds, the paper mill eventually agreed that they could make the security strips that read USA 20. What?

By the way, I didn't introduce myself yet. My name is Ousa T. Wente. I like my name on my phone. My name's Ousa, just put the thing with that. Space it like a different. The only thing left to worry about now was the watermark on the paper and the paper would be perfect for printing. The paper company had no issue with the watermarking, but the problem really was they didn't have the equipment to actually produce that watermark. Frank, an absolute unicorn of a client they must have thought agreed to purchase

himself the $15,000 piece of equipment needed to produce that watermark from a company in Germany and he had it shipped directly to the Swiss paper mill I mean, no, I don't want to get ahead of the story But I feel like even with all these disparate parts people might catch on when they saw US money coming out of the printing presses. Yeah, right? Right. I feel like he kind of outsourced the counterfeiting here. He's still a middle man really. He's still just working on the paper. Also, why are they telling the story like the Swiss company doesn't know what they're doing? It's fun. They're like, we come to a crime. I would be so annoyed to keep pretending we have never cooperated with Germany about a

crime before here in Switzerland. That's crazy. The final product from the Swiss paper mill was absolutely perfect. It felt, it handled, it crumpled and folded exactly like actual currency. It was beautifully watermarked and it had the security strip running along the side of it Frank had the paper and so promptly he placed a $50,000 order from his new Swiss friends now $50,000 worth of just paper even custom as fuck paper

This is still a fuck ton of actual paper so much in fact that in terms of raw material This would be enough for Frank to forge out a quarter billion dollars of US $20 bills. Whoa, that's like 55% of a Trump presidential judgment. That's crazy. Now I should be clear here about something that I had never considered. The thing is, if you're making counterfeit money in bulk like this. The goal is not for you to actually have $250 million in 20s just under your sofa cushions. That would be absurd and dangerous for about a thousand reasons. The money itself would need to be sold at a discount. And Frank,

he figured he could find buyers willing to take the cash off his hands for about 30% of its real cash value, which is still $80 million or thereabouts. His total personal investment at this point was about $65,000, which is a hell of a profit monitor. How do you know people who would do that? Like did he email Switzerland back being like, Hey, it's Usa T1T again. You remember me? Unrelated.

Would you like to buy $250 million cash for $80 million? It's really nice paper stock, check it out. Okay, fun fact. My old drug dealer bought some counterfeit bills a few years ago and got caught when he tried to age it in a public dryer and it burst into flames. Wow.

Blunder Mifflin, right? in a public dryer and it burst into flames. Wow. Blunder Mifflin, right? Now what Frank needed was a printing press and one that could really crank out this cash in bulk and whose print quality would match the paper he'd so assiduously sourced. Having some connections from his time in the drug trade and in jail, Frank eventually connected with a guy

who procured for Frank a Heidelberg offset printer, which was both a massive machine and also something that could still fit in, say, a small barn if one were so inclined. The printer, the plates, and other printing bullshit sent him back another $300k, but Frank was still making good money selling drugs at the time, so he was actually quite flush with actual cash. Tom, this actually sounds like a lot of fucking work and investment. Couldn't he just start like a brake factory or something? Like 20?

Yeah. No, people act like drug dealers at easy jobs, but y'all motherfuckers never wake me up at 2 a.m. with your mom's signature forged on a check begging me to do an emergency podcast episode. Eli does that to me all the time. I do do that to him. So Frank at this point, he's got the printing press and he'd received a sample of the paper, but the actual bulk order of the currency paper, that was going to be another matter. Frank was concerned that authorities may have been tipped off about this just extremely suspicious currency paper.

And it wasn't like the Amazon guy was just going to leave it for him in a parcel locker. This was a pallet load of blank American money. Once the money arrived in port and had been unloaded, Frank actually went to the docs and he set up a three day long stakeout watching the pallet of paper to make sure that no one else was watching that same pallet of paper to make sure that no one else was watching that same palette of paper Just Frank and a customs cop both holding up a newspaper kind of stared at each other They keep circling around behind each other for three days Frank then hired a box truck to pick up the paper a truck He was definitely not going to be driving himself. And then I love this.

He hired another guy in a different car to follow immediately behind the box truck and at the on-ramp for the expressway after the box truck gets onto the expressway, the dummy car following the truck pretended at a breakdown, snarling traffic for 20 minutes and occluding the on-ramp completely. Awesome plan. This gave the truck plenty of time to enter the highway without anyone who might be tailing the truck able to follow him behind. Just a big squad of apple carts rolling out the back of the truck like fucking spy hunter with the oil slick. That's awesome.

Okay, I just want to state for the record that it is the official position of Citation Needed Media LLC that Frank now deserves to get away with this crime and also he's my friend. I know, I fucking love this guy. But Frank was still not going to take any chances. I feel like he was. No, it was some. So, okay, some.

The box truck driver was instructed to drive the truck and then leave it in a parking lot. Frank then hired several different people to surveil the truck, 24 hours a day for three more days. The drivers and the surveillance guys did not know each other, and none of them knew what the truck actually contained. And after the quarantine period was over, Frank then hired a new box truck, and the paper was offloaded from one truck to the next, but all of it was also offloaded onto fresh pallets, just on the off chance that the pallets themselves were outfitted with some tracking of some kind.

I'm working 20 hour days and having a nervous breakdown, but I love what I do so it's worth it. What do I do? Oh, I import Swiss paper in the most paranoid way possible. Well, the moral of this story is that this is all still less stressful than your average nine to five. Finally, the paper was driven to its destination. This was a barn owned by a farmer who rented him the space without asking a lot of questions.

Frank was finally ready. What are are you gonna do with my barn? Who fucking cares? Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! At night, after his girlfriend was asleep, Frank would sneak out of their house, drive to the barn, we'd work all night on the printing press,

churning out dollar dollar bills, y'all. In the morning, he would return before his girlfriend awoke, make her breakfast, and slip into bed. And the only one who knew what Frank was up to was Frank. Okay, you guys are picturing Frank as Tom this whole time, right? 100% yes, correct. Oh yes, absolutely. Just sitting on a folding chair in a barn, big smile on his face, giant machine spitting out 20s.

Taser alarm clock wakes him up at dawn, gets back to his house, Good to go. He hits snooze three times, gets electrocuted. Yeah. Frank knew that the most dangerous part of the operation was going to be fencing the counterfeit cash. And that the best way to do this successfully was to print all $250 million before starting to sell any of it. Once he began selling the money,

his anonymity would necessarily be forever gone. So for five months, Frank toiled all night, every day, until he had printed a quarter of a billion dollars in US $20 bills. He was now very, very rich, but he needed to move the money before he could really do anything with it. All right, well, apparently the real challenge to a quarter of a billion dollars is

spending it. So while I hold onto my seat, we'll take a quick break for some Apropos of Nothing. Mr. Smith, thanks so much for your visit. No problem. How's everything coming with my order? It's great. Great. We just, we had a few questions. Sure. Yes, of course.

Great. So at first you wanted a 70-30 blend and then an 80-20 blend and then we settled on 75-25. Yes, right. We noticed that's the exact same blend as U.S. bills. Are they? Well, you know, my nation won't mind that similarity. Right. Yes. What nation is that again? Oh, it's the biggest one. Is that still one?

Yes. Yes, yes. Then that's the one. That is the one. Yeah. Right. So another thing about the cutter that you sent to us. Ah, yes, the cutter.

Yes. How is it working? Well, it's it's works fine. It just came in a box labeled property of the US Mint. Oh yeah, yeah, they uh, they used to work for Altoids. The paper cutter did? Yes, yeah, it's you know, it's for those boxes. Aren't aren't the Altoid boxes metal?

Yep. Yes, they are. Right. Aren't aren't the altoid boxes metal? Yep. Yes They are Right Mr. Smith, I'll just ask you directly Are you making counterfeit money? Yes, oh thank goodness we were worried you were making those Christian pamphlets that look like money Oh fuck. No, what kind of asshole do you think I am? I know, right.

Right. And we're back. When we left off, Frank was doing a thing the government does but with significantly less money going to the military industrial complex. What happened next Tom? Do you think we print cash and then buy military stuff with it from ourselves? I don't know that we don't. Like we...

I got tanks here. I got tanks. Yeah exactly. I don't know that we don't like we I know equal to that statement about what our government does with money. These are just words He's learned. Thank you. Is it just words he's learned all of this is translated I'm just speaking fanatically so when the Fed does monetary policy and they like inject money into the economy You're like, oh, they're printing more paper money and actually growing it and actually seeing a giant syringe full of money. That's right.

Yeah. So they had to make a million dollar bill and give it to themselves. I read that on the mental floss.com. All right. So Frank had been selling drugs now for a lot of years and he thought he was fairly well connected, but if selling drugs for a lot of years and he thought he was fairly well connected. But if selling drugs is dangerous, selling money is doubly so and many of his connections,

even high up on the criminal food chain, did not want to touch the counterfeit cash. Eventually he found some guys who were willing to buy a relatively small sample of the cash, about 10k each. They in turn planned to sell the money overseas, specifically in China. Now this was a fairly safe plan, since if the money was discovered as fraudulent in China it would be very difficult to trace the path back to Frank in Quebec. Not so difficult that this episode isn't named after him, but difficult. Once the buyers had their samples and discovered for themselves just how good the money was,

they began to buy up more and more of it. First 100k and then a million. If Frank had just stuck with these buyers, it's likely this story would never have been written and Frank never would have been caught. But the pace of the fencing operation was too slow and sitting on pallets of funny money was dangerous in its own right. So Frank just needed to speed things along. The counterfeits so good they buy the million with the 100k he sold them last month. Hey, could you furnish the million for like three seconds?

He cuts open a bag of the money with a knife, rubs a bill into his gum. Yeah, that's good stuff. Guy just lays one in the back of his hand, snorts it. Just like, no, that's perfect. It's good. He's got a bigger bill to snort the smaller bill with. Sneezes out a bunch of quarters. Of Frank, he became connected with a guy named Eric LeFevre. Eric's thing was selling stolen heavy machinery.

The problem was that Eric was already under surveillance by the authorities after selling some federal agents stolen dump trucks. And after hearing about the counterfeit money scheme, Eric offered to sell the same feds some counterfeit cash, which of course the cops were all too happy to humor. Eric struck a deal to buy $100,000 from Frank and was excited about the easy money he was going to make flipping the cash. Ah, it's the problem with crimes. Somewhere on the chain, there always has to be an idiot. Right. Yeah, in both directions and to the horizon, as I recall, Eli. Yeah, in both directions and to the horizon, as I recall, Eli.

Frank delivered on the cash, and Eric delivered the cash to the feds, and the feds now wanted to nab Frank. So they placed a second order for another $100,000, but Frank, he got a weird feeling about the deal. He gets the money from Eric this time. Okay, just one more thing. He puts the bill into a vending machine. It spits back out. You motherfucker. Gunfight. Oh, Frank didn't know that he was being watched, but he was high above him. A helicopter had eyes and cameras on Frank.

Frank on a hunch, delivering to Eric, decided to park the car in the garage rather than walk into Eric's place, carrying the box of fake money. This means that all the surreptitious surveillance chopper would could actually film of him was Frank driving into Eric's garage. You know, maybe we should use a quieter aircraft for surveillance, Tony. What do you think? What? That next morning, 5 a.m., the police served a warrant at Frank's girlfriend's house. But remember, Frank's girlfriend has literally no idea what is happening

at all. She's a school teacher. Jesus. When the cops knock on the door, Frank just tells her, don't do anything. Don't say anything. He opens the door and he is calmly enlisted in front of his incredulous girlfriend. The cops search the house and to the utter shock of his girlfriend, the cops turn up guns and drugs, a million dollars in counterfeit 20s,

and some of the printing plates for those bills. It does not at this point look great for Frank. I'm sorry, Frank, what the fuck were we using the barn for then? Frank! Yeah, clearly it didn't get too weird a feeling about that shit. I know. You can't take your work home with you, Frank.

Frank, you gotta read Radical Acceptance, man. You gotta read it. As leverage, the cops also arrested Frank's girlfriend, and they threatened to have her home seized. And this, this got Frank to confess. But only to exactly what they already knew from the search. He didn't give up the location of the press, or even indicate how much money he had printed. Like all things Frank, he actually had a plan for what was going to happen if he got caught.

As long as they didn't confiscate all the money, he really wasn't in all that much trouble. The Canadian system only makes you actually serve about one sixth of your sentence. So even if he got a fairly heavy sentence for a Canadian, he was really only looking at going away for a year, maybe two. Really? And if he had a barn full of cash to come back to, that was not the worst price to pay. The cops are like, okay, looks like Frank is legit now.

He's selling individual soda bottles and candy. Okay. That's cool. I don't want to underplay how hard it is to go to prison or the brutality of the prison system, but for $249 million, I'm going to learn some chess and read some books. You know what I'm saying? Well, I love his plan for it.

If he got caught was be Canadian. Why is that their system? Oh, but you did a murder, but we're going to make you do three days. Are you sorry? So what Frank didn't count on though was the involvement of US authorities. Since the money being counterfeited was US money, the US Secret Service was also present in his arrest and at the search of his girl's house. Frank was willing to do, you know, Canadian time, but when he was faced with the prospect

of the American criminal justice system, he was now staring down the barrel of a life sentence. Now things did look bleak here, but remember that Frank had parked in Eric's garage when delivering the money, which led to Frank's arrest. And Frank's lawyer figured that if the cops hadn't actually seen Frank deliver anything to Eric, then the search and arrest warrant weren't then based on any probable cause. And he had a shot at getting the whole case thrown out. No probable cause, no warrant, no evidence, no case.

Your honor, there's no evidence of my client literally carrying cartoon bags with toddler signs. So, motion to dismiss? What the fuck is happening? Oh, motion to dismiss. Blah, blah, blah, blah. So yes, you just mumbled. Yeah. Yes. Prosecutors got completely freaked out.

If the motion to dismiss the case worked, Frank would go completely free, but Frank also knew this gambit was risky for him as well. So Frank instructed his attorney to make a deal that if they would drop the extradition to the US bid, he would drop his motion to dismiss. And the prosecutors figured they had a slam dunk case on the Canadian side of things, even if the American case fell through, and they didn't want to risk the motion to dismiss, so they agreed. And Frank was sent home on bail to await trial.

Well, I bet America's willingness to hand out life sentences for victimless crimes is a pretty effective deterrent, huh? We probably have way less crime than Canada, because otherwise it would be morally reprehensible to do. Tough on the crime. We have way less crime, right? Yeah. Yeah. Wait, is crime that French fries with the gravy on it?

Yep. Because if it's not, no, no. We have more of that too. Yeah. So what the cops really want, in addition to Frank, was the printing press. But Frank never returned to the farmer's barn. And even though he was done with the press itself, Frank never tried to resell it. Instead, he patiently waited for his trial, working a day job in construction,

while the cops frantically tried to figure out how Frank had actually manufactured the counterfeit money, and where the hell all that equipment was stored. Hey Frank, I'm your new coworker, Cop Officerton. Wondering if you could help me with a school project for my kid. I want to print 250 million dollars. During the year leading up to his court date Frank's attorney negotiated a deal with prosecutors that Frank would plead guilty in exchange for a three-year sentence which meant that Frank would really only serve about six months in Canadian prison. I can't explain how much I would be willing to do that. This is, I would do it in the middle of this podcast.

Eli, just me and you playing chess, reading books. Absolutely fucking each other. It's the best. I'm so happy we said fucking at the same time. Oh no, not trapped in a room I can't leave. He said in a room he can't leave. This was already a great deal for Frank, but he had an even better idea. He wanted to go to court.

And walking into the courtroom for his plea, Frank asked his lawyers, hey, if I had $200 million, can you do something with that? Hey, Frank, can I talk to you in the hallway real quick? Just us two in the hallway? Okay, awesome. Now that we're in the hallway, we're going to a different building's hallway. That would be awesome to talk about this. Fuck. Obviously, $200 million is an enormous amount of fake currency and the authorities had an

obligation not to allow that money to enter circulation. And so the prosecutors came to the table, but Frank held all the cards. He held 200 million of them, in fact. Well, I, they were 20, so 10, he had 10 million. This is Everest all over again. So they ironed out a deal where Frank would give them the printing press and $200 million in counterfeit money in exchange for Frank getting a sentence of time served and all proceedings against his girlfriend being dropped as well as the return to her of all of her seized property and he gets his car back.

His car? His car. Which part of that deal? Yeah, they took his car back. We got your Honda. Where are you going to drive? So they had a deal going and he was like, one more thing. You're breaking my balls.

I need that Honda. For real? Now prosecutors very angrily agreed though. Frank would have to pay a fine of a little less than $1,500. Oh wow. Canadian. It is not at all clear. Frank asked if they took cash.

They're using that pink pen on every bill for that $1,500 You accept snickers and Pepsi or your What about it quits The last best hope for prosecutors was to somehow get their hands on the printing press and the cash before the date agreed upon in the deal for the turnover. If they could get to the money first, then Frank would lose all of his leverage, the deal would be dead.

Frank was worried that the farmer whose barn that all this shit was stored in him was going to eat shit himself if it was found on his property, so Frank had to come up with a way to move the press and the money out of the barn with no one knowing while he was under intense and constant surveillance. I am rooting so hard for Frank at this point. I'm praying. I'm doing whatever praying is, is what I'm doing. But Frank had a plan for this as well.

Before striking the deal with the prosecutors, Frank had already moved the money. One of Frank's friends loaded the pallets of cash and the printing press into a box truck. And they drove the box truck to a hotel managed by a different friend, who had no idea what the truck contained, but who agreed to keep an eye on it for a while. Which I absolutely would have agreed to, and which I also 100% would have opened in first 15 minutes that it was on my browser. I can't be trusted with secrets. Anyway, that box truck packed with $200 million in counterfeit 20s sat in the parking lot of a hotel for two months secured by a hardware store patent.

Y'all think you guys have any friends that you could trust with your $200 million in cash? Because like, no offense to anyone present, but I don't feel like I do. It's not me. You cannot trust me. I was going to say Tom and now I can't. Fuck. I would trust you, but I would steal that money.

Like it goes one direction, but really does. Yeah. I would be making this relationship, Tom. Jesus. On the agreed upon date, Frank led the cops to the truck. They popped the rinky dink bullshit padlock and there in a parking lot of some skeezy hotel was all $200 dollars of the promised cash and the heidelberg offset printing press. Frank obviously wasn't a master lock because you can

shoot those with a shotgun and they won't understand. Frank had kept up his end of the deal and so prosecutors had no choice but to keep theirs but Frank wasn't done yet. Remember, Frank had sold only a few million of the counterfeit cash to buyers and he had now given up to the feds $200 million. But he printed $250 million, which by now the U S secret service had figured out based on the size of the paper order, tens of millions of counterfeit dollars were completely unaccounted for and neither us nor Canadian authorities had any leverage in this situation whatsoever.

Frank Barassa now works as a consultant for governments and businesses looking to avoid counterfeiters. The $50 million that Frank still has somewhere scrolled away, fenced at 30 cents on the dollar means he has a secret stash of almost 15 million dollars and absolutely no one but him knows where it is. Also in fairness I do want to say that the Into the Shadows YouTube channel is where I learned this story rather than Wikipedia it's actually a really great channel I encourage people to check it out. Alright and Tom if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be?

Yeah, next time don't sell the money for money. Just use the money as money. All right, and are you ready for the quiz? I've got my Heidelberg offset printing press and plates ready to go, Eli. All right, Tom. Are you Frank Barassa? A. Yes. B. No wink. Are you Frank Barassa? A, yes.

B, no wink. I don't know what you're talking about. C, it's a HIPAA violation moving on. Got it. You betcha. Wink. All right, so having worked in retail for a huge portion of my life,

I've had a few encounters with counterfeit currency, which was the dumbest. A, when I was working at a gas station and a guy tried to pretend one of those bullshit religious tracks was a real $10 bill by holding it just a little bit out of the corner from behind all the rest of his money, as though I wasn't going to have to hold it at some fucking point. It was a $100 bill too. It was a fake $100 bill.

He didn't think I'd buy that, so we just only held out the one and the zero. Was it B, when I was delivering pizza and a dude tried to give me what was very clearly a twenty dollar bill printed on regular ass paper and then just ran through the dryer a bunch of times. And then when I told him, dude, this is obviously fake. He cried and said his brother-in-law could go fuck himself. Or see when the cops were following up on that last one and they brought me a lineup of dollar bills to choose the one I'd seen from, one of which was the damn

near notebook paper dollar bill that I got and the other three of which were real. Did they make them say, give me the keys you fucking fuckers? They had two of them that were really crumbled up like his, but one of them, they could clearly only find two actual old crumbled up funnies, so they had clearly just crumbled one up themselves. That was the last one, that was CC was the last one. Oh, I have to guess. I forgot. I was afraid that I actually have to pick one. It's D, secret answer, all of the above.

It is all of the above. They were all equally stupid. All right, Tom. Frank was a master at committing crimes in plain sight. What was the name of his brilliantly hidden business front? A, his kitchen cabinetry business counterfeit. Oh my God, that is so good. His handmade knife shop called forged. C. His IVF clinic reproduction not allowed in Alabama.

Or D. Telecommunications outfit phony. Phony? Oh shit. Phony. Alright, I like phony. Phony it is. I am sorry, it's A? Counterfeit? Counterfeit is also my first guess. That's right, yeah.

It's your run. Cecil, you would not betray Tom's trust for $200 million, so you're the winner. He really wouldn't. I wouldn't open it. Well, I wouldn't know. I would betray your trust for $21 million, Tom, but I wouldn't know the $200 million. You wouldn't open it. I know you wouldn't open it. Well, I wouldn't know I would betray your trust for 21 million dollars sound But I wouldn't know the 200 million dollars Right, but one of those guys had to load 200 million dollars into the fucking truck

Trust me would not to look into your truck. You cannot trust me to load you You it was all in by it was all boxed up I should have said you can't emphasize and I can't emphasize enough that You cannot trust me to look into your truck You can't trust me with a medicine cabinet that doesn't lock. I'm just letting you know Right now I'm taking one every Cecil went it's Noah Her Tom no sir for Tom Noah, Cecil and Eli.

I'm Eli Bosnik. You missed one. You did it twice. Let's go back. You missed bro. Yeah. Noah, Cecil and Heath. I got it.

And Eli, thank you for hanging out with us today. Sorry, I was thinking about how quickly I would betray you all for $200 million. I was salivating with it. I was glad NOSA didn't turn into some kind of racist cat cartoon character. I was going to say be careful. Be careful you give him too much airtime and all of a sudden he's a voice and then it's a bibbity-bobbity-boo. All right, we'll be back next week and by then Noah will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then you can listen to our other podcasts or teach us how to do that counterfeit because I would how to do that counterfeit because I would love to do that. Just don't trust me. Anyways, if you'd like to help keep the show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod. For instance, if you have $50 million lying around

and you want to put it into our podcast, we could do that. Or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com. We'll buy it for 31% or more. Whatever your number is. Whatever it is, we'll figure it out.

We'll do it. We're great at fencing money. And some people leave them as tips for servers. Honestly, that makes my skin crawl. Right? So who's buying your fake money? I don't know. Probably terrorists or something. Terrorists? Sure.