It began, as all great ventures must, with an idea. Cerebral, bespectacled Polish Emigré Czeslaw Bojarsky found himself in postwar Paris with an architectural engineer’s degree, a distinguished war record, a wife and child to support—and a language barrier that barred him from practice. He tried making shoes, inventing an electric razor, singing in a national radio contest. Nothing worked. Then, as he later told the judge, “I suddenly remembered the theory of my professor of political economics at the University of Danzig. He said that a man who lights a cigar with his bank note is harming the entire society, for every bill in circulation contributes to the wealth of the society. Stretching the theory just a bit, one might well say that the man who makes a false bill and introduces it into circulation is doing society no harm.”
Fear of Panic. Inspired by this happy thought, Bojarsky set to work reading books about papermaking, visiting pulp factories on guided tours. Then, using a combination of rain water, cigarette paper and other wood fibers, he mixed his first batch of pulp in a secondhand bidet. Helas! The first sheet that he pressed looked “like a crepe suzette.” Bojarsky persevered, made his first contribution to the wealth of society by passing one of his homemade franc notes in return for his Christmas chicken of 1949.
After that, he lived modestly, spending only enough funny money to get by, banking much of the rest. It was 1952 before the Bank of France first detected his handiwork, soon became so apprehensive about the size of the operation that they did not dare sound a general alarm for fear of triggering a national panic. (“Had they said something,” Bojarsky later complained, “I would have stopped. But as they never did, I figured they just weren’t interested.”)
On the Carpet. The money factory was finally closed down by accident. Late in 1964, Bojarsky proudly related his success to an old friend from the Polish army, offered to let him share the profits. It was not long before the new partner and his brother-in-law were carrying bundles of the phony bills to the post office and exchanging them for 5% treasury bonds. On the trail at last, the police tailed the pair to Bojarsky’s modest home in Paris, found nothing in searching it until one cop tripped on the carpet, flipping the hidden switch that opened a secret trap door. There it all was—Bojarsky’s carefully constructed pulp vats and printing presses, surrounded by hundreds of bills drying on polyester slabs. For 16 years he had worked ten hours a day in a lO-ft.-sq. cave doing the jobs of seven skilled technicians, turned out a crackling $1,000,000 worth of multicolored likes of Molière and Victor Hugo.
It was such beautiful work that when he came to trial, all hands agreed that even in France, where 80% of the world’s fake currency is produced, Bojarsky deserved the title “the Leonardo da Vinci of Forgers.” Almost regretfully, police packed him off to La Prison Centrale in Melun last week to begin serving a 20-year term. But, sighed Emile Benamou, director of France’s National Center for the Repression of Forgers, and the man who spent 13 years tracking down Bojarsky, “His qualities as an artist are marvelous. Had it been dollars that he was making, we would never have caught him.”
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