Page:Houdini - The Right Way to Do Wrong An Expose of Successful Criminals.djvu/92

86 coin heavily gold plated. The most successful and, therefore, the most dangerous of all counterfeits are those composed of actual gold and silver but with a mixture of metal. The actual value of the gold in the counterfeit five-dollar gold pieces dated 1881 and 1882 has been determined by assay to be $4.43.

Genuine gold and silver coins are often tampered with. These schemes are known as "sweating," "plugging," and "filling." For instance, a hundred gold ten-dollar pieces subject to an acid bath would lose perhaps $35 or $40 worth of their gold and remain unchanged in appearance. The coins are put in circulation again, and the gold which has been "sweated" off of them is easily extracted from the acid bath and sold. Coins are also robbed of precious metal by drilling a hole, the cavity being filled with an alloy and the filling covered with a light gold wash. Filling a coin is sawing it through the edge in two parts, scraping out the gold, and putting the two parts together again filled with some baser metal. Thomas Ballard was the first counterfeiter to successfully reproduce government fibre paper, which he did in 1870. The next year he and his gang were captured, but escaped from jail and found a hiding-place from which they continued to issue dangerous counterfeits. In 1873 his counterfeit $500 treasury note alarmed banks and government officials. Ballard was finally captured in his lair in Buffalo just as he was about to produce a counterfeit $5 bill of a Canadian bank. This bill, he boasted, was to have corrupted all Canada.

John Peter McCartney was the counterfeiter who successfully removed all the ink from genuine $1 bills so that he could secure government paper on which to print counterfeit bills of much higher denomination. He made a fortune, so it is said, but was brought to book at last.

To a counterfeiter named "One-eyed Thompson" is given the credit of being the first to transform bills of small denomination to larger by cutting and pasting. He also had an ingenious trick of cutting up $10 or $100 bills into strips and