ROLL OUT THE DOUGH : The Treasury Tries a New Recipe That’ll Be Harder for Copycats to Fake
New cars debut each fall, fresh couture collections are trotted out twice a year and breakthroughs in computer technology come so fast that the new motherboard in your back seat is obsolete before you’ve left the computer-store parking lot.
So, of course, we’re doing away with old money. Not “Poppy” Bush/mainline Philadelphia/cotillion old money but paper currency, which has looked and felt pretty much the same since Roosevelt was a President and not a dime. But maybe you’re asking: If it’s been spendable tender since the Crash--when no one had any so it didn’t wear out very fast--why tinker with it now?
With far less ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay than the Elvis stamp was accorded, the (modestly) new and (slightly) improved currency is fluttering wallet-ward in the New Year, its arrival announced this fall here in the West Coast counterfeiting capital, Los Angeles, which also happens to be the region’s bank robbery capital. (If we could get the bank robbers to steal only the fake dough, cold fusion would not be beyond our grasp.)
Five million color printers make it harder to fake a good excused-absence note to the teacher than a credible sawbuck. An L.A. artist was recently busted for making $20s on a flatbed color scanner and an IBM PC. (He says it was art, not lucre.) A Mission Viejo man was caught at Sears trying to pass a $20 bill that he’d made at home with his color scanner and bubble-jet printer. My favorite counterfeiter made $1 bills on typing paper in his kitchen for 10 years, misspelling “Washington,” and assuming--correctly--that no one gives a second look to mere singles.
Despite predictions of a cashless society, it is comforting and even flattering to know that, especially overseas, ours is still the money to fake; the same people who chant “death to America” have made the almighty dollar the counterfeiter’s standard, ideally 100 almighty dollars at a time.
Hence the government’s decision to start its counterfeit-resistant revision with the $100 bill. New bills will be introduced at intervals of six months to a year: the same size, the same color and the same American luminaries (Salmon P. Chase is my heartthrob, one I worship from afar--very afar--on the $10,000 bill) but with their likenesses larger and off-center, a security thread added to the paper stock, a tricky watermark and a microscopic line of type around each portrait.
The public will not accept this easily. Remember New Coke? Expect revolts at ATMs. Mini-mart clerks will tell you they don’t accept foreign money--no, maybe not; you could put George Hamilton’s face on a $10 bill instead of Alexander Hamilton’s and some of them wouldn’t notice. Late-night talk radio callers will swear that the infinitesimal border of type is Vince Foster’s reconstructed suicide note.
At least the Treasury Department is not following the post office’s descent into vox populi by People magazine and dropping the Dead Presidents. Washington (or “Wahsington,” as my little old counterfeiter spelled it) and Lincoln endure--civic heroes, quarters, pennies, as woven into our culture as the bacillus-looking red and blue threads in our greenbacks.
I’ve always loved the World War II movie scenes of innocuous apple-pie trivia tests designed to blow the cover of even the most convincing German infiltrator masquerading as G.I. Joe. It was “Jeopardy” for Nazi spies: The counterfeit G.I. could sing every verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner”--pretty damned suspicious if you ask me--but tripped up on the little stuff.
These days, the Sarge might say, “So, Bobby, who’d you like in the ’94 series?” Bobby says, well, he had favored Baltimore but didn’t mind that Cleveland won. The Sarge nods noncommittally and then says, “Good team, Cleveland. Except there wasn’t any ’94 World Series because of the baseball strike, Hans ! “
