GoKawiilIn fiction as well as in real life, counterfeiters have always been portrayed as master forgers and artists who reproduced banknotes with astonishing precision. They were often shown as vast criminal enterprises and gangsters who destabilized economies with fake currency. Then there was Emerich Juettner, a frail old immigrant living alone in a shabby New York apartment, quietly printing one-dollar bills on a cheap hand press. He was, by almost every conventional standard, terrible at counterfeiting.
And yet he succeeded for nearly a decade. By the time the United States Secret Service finally caught Juettner in 1948, he had become kind of folk hero. The press adored him and the public sympathized with him. A Hollywood film would soon immortalize him under the nickname “Mister 880,” a reference to his Secret Service case number.
Emerich Juettner (also known as Edward Mueller) hardly looked like the sort of person who would trouble federal agents. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1876, he emigrated to the United States and spent most of his life drifting through modest occupations. Initially he worked as a picture frame gilder before marrying Florence LeMein in 1902 at the age of 26. After the birth of his son and daughter, Juettner began working as a maintenance man and building superintendent in New York's Upper East Side. His job allowed him and his family to live rent free in the basement of the building where he worked.
In 1937, Juettner’s wife died and the sixty-year-old suddenly found himself living alone in New York City. He then became a junk collector.
Juettner bought a used, two-wheel pushcart and spent long days ambling about the streets of New York picking up the discarded goods of city dwellers and selling off the occasional find to a wholesale dealer. But Juettner’s earnings were sporadic and he was barely putting food in his mouth. This forced him to look into another way of making a living.
In his youth, Juettner had learned metal engraving. He had also dabbled in photography. Combining these two skills, in November 1938, he began to make counterfeit one-dollar bills. He snapped pictures of a $1 bill, transferred the images to a pair of zinc plates, and then meticulously filled in small details of the bill by hand.
Juettner’s fake notes were laughably crude. He produced them using inexpensive materials and primitive techniques in his apartment kitchen. The paper was wrong. The ink was poor. The engraving lacked detail. The bills often appeared slightly blurred or uneven. Some notes even had spelling errors.
Scenes from the movie Mister 880 dramatizing Juettner’s counterfeit operation.
They were not the kind of counterfeit currency that could fool bankers or cashiers under careful inspection. But Juettner understood that almost nobody examines a one-dollar bill closely.
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