I’m going to tell you the story of the man who solved a crime.
Not, like, a cop who put together the clues and got his man, but a person who took a crime as old as civilization and fixed the problem where it got you in trouble.
The man: Artur Virgílio Alves Reis.
The place: 1920s Portugal.
The crime: Counterfeiting.
The problem he fixed: That the money is counterfeit.
(This is going to be a long 🧵 . Just trust me.)
Our boy is born in Portugal to financially troubled parents. Starts college, but falls in love and drops out to get married.
He hears there are jobs in Angola. Big ticket engineering contracts.
Our boy forges an engineering diploma. Gets a series of engineer jobs. Is actually, somehow, a really good engineer.
Doesn't pay enough, so he does some shady shit.
Ends up back in Portugal, broke, but just before that he meets a couple of rich guys with financial connections.
🧵
Screws around a little, comes up with the idea to forge cash.
He realizes the fundamental flaw of all counterfeiting schemes is the same:
That the money is counterfeit.
So he gets his rich friends and an ex-spy to help him fake a commission from the Bank of Portugal to *the actual company that prints the money.*
🧵
He splits the fresh, crisp bills between many different bank branches.
Some are wary. They send samples of the shady bills to the Bank of Portugal.
The Bank looks at them, says, yeah, these are totally genuine. Definitely ours.
But our dude realizes he can't launder fresh cash forever. So he comes up with a new plan.
Two parts.
Part 1: Start his own bank to take his large deposits.
He does the whole bank thing. Staff, loans, bureaucracy, branches in every city.
🧵
A new, well-funded financial institution owned by people from other industries raises suspicion.
There are stories starting to spread in the press.
Regulators do a few spot checks, and the money is definitely authentic. Still, there are rumors...
...and those rumors are what lead both a financial inspector and a newspaper reporter to the office of the manager of the main branch on the same day.
🧵
The head of the company is a longtime employee of Alves Reis who has, for like 5 years now, thought he was working for a legitimate businessman.
He welcomes the inspector in and shows him where the records are, next to his own office. Nothing to hide.
Then the reporter comes up to the office. Says, dude, I can prove your entire bank is a fraud. But my editor'll make it go away for about $10k.
Inspector hears it, walks right into the office and arrests the reporter for extortion.
🧵
Okay, so, Part 2.
Remember, the problem with counterfeit money is that it's counterfeit. The one glaring, obvious problem that no one has thought to fix.
And my dude's money is still a *little* counterfeit. Just a smidge.
He's got a fix in mind.
Part 2 is as straightforward as Part 1.
Buy the Bank of Portugal.
🧵
Now, in 1925, the Bank of Portugal, despite being the country's central bank, is actually a private institution. It has government-backed authority to make currency and set financial policy, but it’s a private company with shares held by the sorts of assholes who hold bank shares in 1925.
And the Bank of Portugal decides what is and is not valid money.
So our pal spreads rumors to tank the stock price, then picks up shares on the cheap through cutouts.
🧵
It's hard to do this without attracting some government attention, though.
So a team of inspectors ends up raiding a minor branch of our guy's bank.
They don't find anything.
The accountants say the ledgers look correct, the currency experts certify that all the money is legit.
But the captain or whatever of the inspection team figures he can find something at the scene, so he plays for time.
🧵
He comes up with busywork for his currency inspectors. Tells them to do the utterly useless task of sorting all of the money in the branch by serial number.
Now, our bro planned for this. When he placed his fake order with the printer, he carefully estimated valid but unused serial numbers for his print run.
But, obviously, the government had gone on printing money.
🧵
One of the poor experts put on tedious and demeaning money-sorting duty, who's probably stuck in a back room while his coworkers are at 1920s Portuguese Starbucks, discovers that a few of the bills have matching serial numbers.
The team crowds around, maybe a little like on CSI. The currency experts can't tell the difference between the matching bills. By every anti-counterfeiting trick they know, all the money is real.
Can't be, though, because serial number matches just can't happen.
🧵
By some amazing stroke of luck, a few actual customers deposited bills identical to the fake(?)s.
The government arrests our dude.
But he'd thought of this, too, at least as a contingency plan.
He has forged documents implying that the plot to steal the Bank of Portugal was organized by...
...the director of the Bank of Portugal!
🧵
He shows these to his warden, who gets them looked over. They check out. So the warden moves him into a really nice room, lets him have guests whenever he wants.
And whatever equipment he might need to continue his legitimate business so that things don't get fucked up during this unfortunate and obviously unjust prison stay.
So our main man sets up a forging station in the corner of his cell.
🧵
He's got the warden on his side, trying to prove his innocence. When people come to see him, he produces documents that clearly exonerate him and which pass inspection.
But the cops are absolutely sure he's their perp, and, well, they report to that bank exec he's accusing.
Our dude's not cracking.
So the pigs do a classic cop show trick: they arrest his wife.
🧵
And that is the thing that fucks the scheme up, because to get her out he confesses each and every individual detail just to prove she wasn't involved.
What's going to happen to him anyway?
Even if a jury convicts him -- and public opinion has generally been on his side -- the maximum sentence for counterfeiting is three years.
In 1925, all of the other stunts he pulled *aren't actually crimes*.
He was just being a rich banker. Doing things that are totally legal for rich bankers to do.
🧵
Meanwhile, the Bank of Portugal now has the problem that there are a large number of counterfeit bills circulating that are absolutely undetectable. Because they're real.
So they just cancel an entire category of paper money.
All of the 500 escudo notes with Vasco de Gama on them? No longer legal.
There's a deadline for exchanging them.
Hey, you know what happened a lot in the 20s?
There's a run on the banks.
🧵
So. Despite smashing through the Portuguese economy to the point of controlling a fortune equal to about .9% of its GDP, our pal here is looking at three years, tops.
But there's a thing about destabilizing economies.
It destabilizes governments.
I'm not saying that our main man Artur caused the military coup of 1926.
That would be absurd.
He's a guy with a fake engineering degree, not a Bond villain.
But he definitely *did not help*.
🧵
So, the government gets overthrown.
New people in power. People who don't like a guy whose life ambition was to cause inflation.
They change the laws.
They don't even really pass any, they just say that counterfeiting gets you 25 instead of 3.
And that friendly jury? You're outta luck, bro, you're going to be tried in front of seven judges instead.
Seven judges who have just seen what happens to people who don't live up to expectations.
🧵
There are witnesses upon witnesses. 85 total.
Finally, they get our guy up on the stand. He can't hope to get out of this one.
They're throwing the book at him. They wrote the book just so they could throw it at him.
So he confesses again. He gives the absolutely most complete and technical description of every single last bastardy thing he did.
Including a lot of them that the prosecutors hadn't figured out yet.
🧵
Gets one last chance to show off that he is the smartest guy in the fucking country.
Now, this is the part where the ringleader turns on his accomplices and sells them out in a desperate bid for mercy.
Our dude does not do that.
He gives detailed explanations of the lures and lies he used on the others. They are all, according to him, completely innocent.
Just pawns. Let them all go.
Doesn't really work. He gets his 25, the others get similar.
But they don't convict his wife.
🧵
And at the end of his sentence, he gets out on the same day Germany unconditionally surrenders to the Allies.
Reunites with his wife. Meets his kids.
And gets offered a job at a bank.
FIN
(References in next post.)
@HeatherNatalie That sounds awesome. :) Wish we'd done that at my standups when I was in tech!
Relevant to that, I'm thinking of doing an audio version. Not a full podcast treatment, just using what I've posted here as a script.
@you_jo_girl There have been a few TV treatments, but I can't find English subtitles for any of them.
That said, ere's a link to the 50-episode TV series by a Portuguese network, which they've posted free online: https://arquivos.rtp.pt/programas/alves-dos-reis/page/1/#filters
You at least need to watch the opening title sequence. ;)
@Rose_On_Mars Nice story. The same happened in #Italy with the 1894 bankruptcy of one of the 6 central #banks, which were then abolished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banca_Romana_scandal
#UlisseBarbieri wrote a catchy song about it:
https://www.ildeposito.org/canti/il-crak-delle-banche
Thank you for telling me about this!
It's very interesting to me that there were multiple banks allowed to issue currency. I'm not sure whether or not that was unusual in Europe.
Going to have to research this and see if there's another story in it!
This bears further reading!
@mjbraun Thank you for the recommendation!
A friend of mine also recommended this, which I'm going to look for a used copy of:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1135782.Scams_Scandals_and_Skulduggery
@Rose_On_Mars Absolutely fantastic read, 10/10 story.
Shame he didn't manage to acquire the bank, though.
Wow… a very good story, thanks for sharing!
I suggest my followers to read the whole thread, is almost a book in itself!
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