Plumbers Discover Cash Flow Problem in Sewer : Counterfeiting: Phony $100 bills are found clogging Cal State Long Beach line. Secret Service agents believe ‘money’ may have been printed on campus.

Campus plumbers investigating a clogged sewer line climbed down a manhole and found about $1 million in sopping wet, counterfeit $100 bills stuffed into a pipeline beneath Cal State Long Beach, officials said Friday.

Secret Service agents said they were looking into the possibility that the money originated on campus.

“It just looked like a bunch of bills floating on top of a mass of green mush,” said Ron Perron, field operations lieutenant for the campus police department, summoned to the scene Thursday by plumbers. “It’s a very difficult medium to work in because you’re dealing with (waste) intermingling with all the currency.”

Bill Vann, a custodian who witnessed the discovery, said, “It was just a big glob.”

Secret Service agents said they recognized the currency as having come from the same lot as about 10 bills that were spent in Long Beach area restaurants and retail stores during the last 10 days.

The relatively poor quality of the currency, they said, led them to speculate that whoever fabricated the cash was inexperienced in counterfeiting money. Investigators said the counterfeiter probably decided to dump the bills after running into trouble passing them off as authentic.

“My guess is that they decided it was (unacceptable) and tried to destroy it,” said George Franklin, assistant to the special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Los Angeles office, where the bills were taken for storage. “I’d say they got pretty frustrated.”

Secret Service agents interviewed campus police, but had not spoken to students, Franklin said, nor did they have any suspects.

The sewer line where the money was found, Perron said, is connected solely to drains in bathrooms in two engineering buildings on the north end of the campus.

Investigators theorized that the bogus money was either flushed down one of the engineering buildings’ toilets or dropped into the sewer through the manhole, located on a fairly well-traveled campus road.

University officials said that the engineering buildings are open to students and faculty from early morning to late evening. They contain classrooms and laboratories related to the fields of environmental, thermodynamics, mechanical and civil engineering--none that require equipment capable of printing or duplicating counterfeit money.

Elsewhere on campus, the story is different.

“We have all the equipment to do it,” said Armando Archuleta, a custodian familiar with the campus. “We have computers, printing machines, paper. This is a city in a city.”

University spokeswoman Toni Beron confirmed that some equipment capable of being used in the production of phony money exists on campus. There are laser printers and a printing press in the design department of the School of Fine Arts, as well as process cameras and offset presses in the graphic arts program. Beron said that because the equipment is used all the time, it is “hard to imagine how it could be used for illegal activities.” That opinion was shared by university President Curtis L. McCray.

“I’m kind of dumbfounded,” McCray said. “I suppose it could have been someone here, but I find that hard to believe.”

Many students and staffers Friday seemed unaware that their university had been the site of a major discovery of counterfeit money. As word slowly spread, some jokingly referred to each other as counterfeiters and laughingly talked about the state of the university’s budget, which is facing a potential cut this year of $5 million.

“Let the state cut our budget all they want,” quipped Alicia Franz, a secretary in the engineering department. “We’ll just make our own money.”

At the Secret Service office in Los Angeles, investigating agents faced a more immediate problem: finding a volunteer to count sodden currency.

“I wish you could see this,” Franklin said. “It’s pretty pathetic.”

The green glob of money, which weighs about 40 pounds, will end up in a vault in Washington for use as evidence, Franklin said.

“My guess is that this guy will do it again. If he has the plates, he can make more of these bills. He’ll work on it a little more and then he’ll get caught.”COUNTERFEIT MONEY FOUND

Campus plumbers at Cal State Long Beach discovered about $1 million in counterfeit money while they were investigating a clogged sewer line. The Secret service is looking into the matter. Its investigation focused in part on the two campus buildings highlighted below

1. Engineering Building 3 and Engineering Building 4 are the ohly structures serviced by the clogged sewage line where the money was found. Investigators were studying the possibility that the money was flusehd down toilets in one of the buildings.

2. The counterfeit money was found by campus plumbers under a manhole near the two engineeering buildings.