“Pete McCartney was a counterfeiter—a coney man, as government agents called them. He’d been arrested many times for making and passing fake money, but had always found ways to wriggle free.”

Pete McCartney is an amateur escape artist as well as a professional counterfeiter, and he exemplifies some of the challenges faced by the US government in protecting its “legal tender” in the 19th century. “Coney” men like McCartney were slippery, highly skilled criminals who could make vast profits without resorting to violence, and this ensured that their jail sentences would be relatively lenient. They also had ready supplies of real money with which to bribe officials. As a result, even if they were caught, they often returned to criminality before long.

“Ben was tempted by the idea of making money—literally making it. And he learned quickly from Kinsey. At the age of twenty, hunched over the desk in his room at his father’s house, he cut his first two counterfeit plates: the front and back of a $20 bill.”

Benjamin Boyd, the son of a master engraver and a talented engraver himself, quickly fell under the spell of Nat Kinsey, a renowned engraver of landscapes who was also secretly a counterfeiter. Boyd soon began crafting the best counterfeit plates in the business. His arrest in 1875 was such a blow to the coney network in the United States that drastic schemes were devised to free him—including the attempted theft of Abraham Lincoln’s body.

“By 1864 an astounding 50 percent of the paper money in circulation was fake.”

The US federal government only began mass-producing paper money in 1861, to help pay for the Civil War, and it was slow to mount an effective response to counterfeiting, which soon ran rampant.