Twenty-three Cases & the Counterfeiter

Ok, I confess: I have known a couple counterfeiters. They were ordinary sorts and, to the best of my knowledge, they never gave me reason one to think that they were involved in the shady underbelly of Nigerian banks or similar monetary crimes. One was a guy I knew from work and the other was a guy whom I had known for a couple years. Never suspected a one of 'em.
     The last guy in the series had a Kelley B and a bunch of other letterpress – and offset – in a pretty large rental store front place. When Cindy & I were working on getting a new house he offered to be my mail drop for print shop items that I wanted to add to the set up once we got moved.
     So we moved.
     The morning after we got all of our stuff pulled off trucks and out of vans and into the house, Cindy got up to see what the weather was gonna be. She's never trusted lookin' out the window, so she had the TV on to one of the morning news & wx stations. Just as I was leaving the house we saw and heard that someone in a nearby community had been arrested for counterfeiting.
     "Goodness, I wonder who that is," she said with dismay.
     "Probably Tom," I said with a point-of-fact snippishness.
     "Good grief. Why would you say that?"
     "'Cause he's got seven kids and he's $14k in debt."
     And with that I left for work.
     Now I had no real reason to think that Tom was the arrested party. It was just that he was the only printer I knew in that end of town who would have had the equipment and, more importantly, the reason to get involved in counterfeiting.
     So when I got to work, Cindy called to tell me that I had been right.
     Upon hanging up I started thinking about it. Tom had a huge paper cutter. The last time I'd been to his digs to use the cutter, he said he had to do it himself. Some sort of government job, high security, all that.
     Fine. Whatever. Here's the paper.
     And the kid count and my knowledge of his debt load made it all make sense.
     What I wasn't ready for was having to call the Secret Service to find out what they had done with anything with my name on it that had been delivered to Tom's shop, pending my picking it up once we'd moved the house & all that.
     The agents were very understanding, although they did want to know if I had any fiduciary relationships to the suspect and all that. I explained the whole deal and they said that I could contact Tom to arrange for my stuff to end up in my possession.
     He had evidently made bail.

Now the first guy I'd known to be a counterfeiter got arrested the very afternoon after I'd had a conversation with him in the morning about the university's printing plant. We were talking about the two color offset press, the very nice camera & developing & plate making facility and how neat it was to have quality gear to play with.
     "A good man with an eye for detail could get himself involved real quick in some serious counterfeiting," I said facetiously.
     The friendly smile disappeared from his face and he told me he had to get to work.
     The federales picked him up that afternoon. I heard about it from the shop foreman. He informed me that it would probably be best if I stayed out of the print shop for a while, owing to the investigation.
     "Don't get yourself involved," he said. "They've given me a pretty good grilling myself."
     I stayed away.

Now I had to go over to Tom's digs and retrieve the three packages of printing stuff that I'd ordered. Couple fonts of type and some other metal from Quaker City Type and a couple packages from M&H and Barco Type. The usual run of the mill stuff that would be of no interest to the Secret Service agents, except that it had been sitting on Tom's kitchen table when they broke in at 4 a.m. to pick him up.
     And had it not been for the fact that I'd bought a type case stand and some other high profile printshop items from Tom, my name would have meant pretty much nothing.
     Except for the stuff I'd bought.
     'Cause if I'd bought what Tom might have acquired in some shady deals would make me the recipient of shady goods, which would play into the investigation, which would make me raw meat. And this after I'd already been hanging around the university's print shop, from whence was arrested a previously suspected counterfeiter.

"Your number showed up on too many pages, Bub. Wanna explain that?"

What I'd gotten from Tom was basically a type case stand, one of those nice solid oak paneled ones in the back pages of the 1923 BB&S foundry's catalog. Holds 23 California cases; metal runners; solid cabinet just the right height for putting stuff on & easy enough to pull cases in and out. Beautiful, cathedral style woodworking. Looks like it belongs in a church.
     One of those.
     If the federales decided that the cabinet were part of some criminal investigation, I would be out the forty-odd bucks that I'd given Tom for it and I'd probably be out the cases in it too.
     When I called the SS and talked to the agents, they pretty much cut me loose, other'n being one of the people on the sidelines who had been lit up by the lights looking for Tom & his handlers. Which was another story. And I still have the case cabinet. You can see it on the right.