Printer Agrees to Plead Guilty in Counterfeiting

In what authorities called one of the biggest single counterfeiting schemes in U.S. history, a Costa Mesa printer has agreed to plead guilty to forging almost $10 million in phony bills that had begun to turn up around the Southland last spring.

Hal J. Stepanich, 33, who was scheduled to go on trial in federal court in Santa Ana on Tuesday, instead will enter a guilty plea in exchange for concessions by prosecutors that could help him at the time of his sentencing, said federal public defender H. Dean Steward.

Authorities had traced a trail of phony bills--printed in denominations of $20, $50 and $100--in recent months in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties and elsewhere, eventually leading back to Stepanich and another Orange County man, who was arrested recently in Houston, federal prosecutors said.

Working out of his former wife’s garage near Palm Springs, Stepanich and partner Richard L. Wattel, 62, made the counterfeit bills on about $10,000 worth of printing equipment they had bought, federal prosecutors charged. Stepanich, a printer by training who worked as a pressman at a Costa Mesa print shop until February, was arrested by federal officials in April.

Wattel is awaiting trial on counterfeiting charges in federal court in Texas, officials said.