Speaker 1: So listen all at once ad free. Subscribe to True
Speaker 1: Crime Clubhouse on Apple Podcasts. Welcome to Lives of Crime,
Speaker 1: True Crime from True Criminals. I'm Steve Fishman from Orbit Media.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is a first person account from Jeff Turner.
Speaker 1: He was a counterfeitter, one of the best of his generations.
Speaker 1: He was persistent, resourceful, skilled, and inventive in ways you
Speaker 1: won't believe, in ways US Treasury agents couldn't believe. And
Speaker 1: he did it all for love. We call this episode
Speaker 1: making Money.
Speaker 2: I met this girl, Jessica, and you know, we hit
Speaker 2: it off, started dating, and after about a year or two,
Speaker 2: we decided to just kind of move away, get get
Speaker 2: out of Florida. So we moved up to Knoxville, where
Speaker 2: we got married. We had a couple kids. I mean
Speaker 2: it was really good for a while. Like I was
Speaker 2: still doing drugs, but it was like completely like manageable.
Speaker 2: I'd come home, She'd be cooking dinner. As I walk in,
Speaker 2: you know, the kids would run up to me. You know.
Speaker 2: We had a nice car, a nice house. Really it
Speaker 2: was like American dream shit. My marriage was happy for
Speaker 2: a long time. I was working like sixty seventy hour
Speaker 2: weeks at this sign company, and you know, we had
Speaker 2: a newborn baby at home, so I wasn't getting hardly
Speaker 2: any sleep, feeding the baby every two hours. So I
Speaker 2: got a call from the owner asking if I could
Speaker 2: work on Saturday to do these service calls. I hardly
Speaker 2: slept the night before, like at all, and so I
Speaker 2: went into work at like eight am. I was by myself.
Speaker 2: I was driving a bucket truck. I was so tired.
Speaker 2: I was like slapping my face trying to stay awake,
Speaker 2: turning the radio on, rolling the windows down, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean. I remember I'd like just kind of
Speaker 2: close my eyes for a second, and then i'd hear
Speaker 2: the little reflectors hit the tire, and I'd wake up
Speaker 2: and go back on the road and smoke a cigarette
Speaker 2: to stay up, and then you know, I'd close my
Speaker 2: eyes for a second. But then my tire went off
Speaker 2: into this little embankment. So I woke up again and
Speaker 2: jerked the wheel. But because that front right tire went
Speaker 2: down into the embankment just a little bit, when I
Speaker 2: jerked the wheel, it just turned and flipped, so like
Speaker 2: the bucket truck flipped like six times. While it was flipping,
Speaker 2: my head shattered the window. So I just kind of
Speaker 2: came to in this upside down bucket truck. You know,
Speaker 2: my whole shirt was just red from blood, and they
Speaker 2: found ballasts like hundreds of yards from the truck. It
Speaker 2: was just everything flew out. So the owner of that
Speaker 2: sign company knew I was on drugs, but he kind
Speaker 2: of just looked the other way because, like, I was
Speaker 2: a good worker, but after I wrecked the truck, he
Speaker 2: felt obligated to just fire me. Rent was due, our
Speaker 2: lease was up in a couple months. I was a
Speaker 2: functioning addict. We didn't have a lot of money, didn't
Speaker 2: have enough to even pay rent. So me and my
Speaker 2: wife had the conversation like, you know, what are we
Speaker 2: gonna do? How are we gonna make this work? And
Speaker 2: I was at a point to where I was literally
Speaker 2: planning a bank robbery. I was looking online for real
Speaker 2: flesh silicone masks, realistic masks that looked like an old man,
Speaker 2: and like, like I was really like about to rob
Speaker 2: a bank. I thought about that for a while, but
Speaker 2: I was just like skeptical. I was like, man, I've
Speaker 2: got kids. The FBI is gonna kick in my fucking
Speaker 2: door if I got gone you know, with swat teams
Speaker 2: and stuff. Then it was just straight to counterfeiting. It
Speaker 2: was like, well, no, once I thought about that, I
Speaker 2: was like, yeah, what am I thinking? Counterfeiting is the
Speaker 2: way to go. I was all in with it. I
Speaker 2: was always honest with my wife, and I remember telling
Speaker 2: her I'm going to start counterfeiting, and I don't think
Speaker 2: she thought I was serious. You know, we were in
Speaker 2: a desperate situation, so she was kind of just like
Speaker 2: jokingly like go for it, and I was serious. So
Speaker 2: I was like all right, but in the back of
Speaker 2: her mind thinking like, oh, well, we have to figure
Speaker 2: something else out. It wasn't until a couple of weeks
Speaker 2: later that I printed out my first like a first
Speaker 2: twenty dollar bill, and she saw it and was like
Speaker 2: shocked at how real it looked. Then I think she
Speaker 2: kind of realized, like, oh shit, this looks good. I've
Speaker 2: always had this obsessive, compulsive attention to detail. Like I
Speaker 2: decided I wanted to learn guitar when I was twelve
Speaker 2: years old, and I literally sat in my bedroom for
Speaker 2: eight hours a day every day for years until I
Speaker 2: could sweep arpeggios and play any unaccompanied jazz song. I wanted,
Speaker 2: and basically, as a teenager, I was one of the
Speaker 2: few kids that could buy beer because I was printing
Speaker 2: fake IDs. They weren't really sophisticated or anything like. I
Speaker 2: literally started by just printing them, scanning my ID, changing
Speaker 2: some numbers, and printing it on a piece of paper
Speaker 2: and then just sticking the piece of paper into like
Speaker 2: the clear sleeve of my wallet. All my friends, of
Speaker 2: course wanted them, so then I'd start selling them to
Speaker 2: my friends for like fifty bucks apiece. But that kind
Speaker 2: of like made me realize, like, well, shit, you can
Speaker 2: forge things and you know, be successful at it. And
Speaker 2: then I read the book The Art of Making Money
Speaker 2: about Art Williams, who printed millions, and in that book
Speaker 2: it roughly explains how he did it. And that's you know,
Speaker 2: after I read that book, then it was like I
Speaker 2: wanted to try try to print money. Then. I mean
Speaker 2: I was just using basic printers, you know, like my parents'
Speaker 2: printer that they had, and you know they were they'd
Speaker 2: be gone for you know, eight hours a day or whatever,
Speaker 2: so you know, you just go into the little den
Speaker 2: with the computer and printer and print them out. It
Speaker 2: really wasn't like this huge money maker, but as a
Speaker 2: nineteen year old kid, every couple of weeks i'd make
Speaker 2: two hundred bucks. At first, I didn't really want my
Speaker 2: wife involved. She knew what was going on, but I
Speaker 2: kind of try to keep her away from everything. I
Speaker 2: wanted to insulate her. But eventually she became my partner
Speaker 2: in crime. You know. It kind of morphed into a
Speaker 2: Bunnie and Clyde type relationship. I knew I needed to
Speaker 2: find thin paper to sandwich two sheets together, and that
Speaker 2: was the main challenge. I read that you could coat
Speaker 2: the paper with matt nail polish, clear nail polish, like
Speaker 2: a top coat, and that would prevent the counterfeit pens
Speaker 2: from reacting to the paper. So I knew a way
Speaker 2: to beat the counterfeit pens. But I needed just paper
Speaker 2: that was thin enough to put two pieces together. And
Speaker 2: I found like tracing paper, tried like the wrapper to
Speaker 2: toilet paper. I found rice paper and vellum paper, and
Speaker 2: I just stumbled across Bible paper. It was perfect. It
Speaker 2: was thin enough, it was opaque enough. I hit it
Speaker 2: with a black light and it glowed a dull purple,
Speaker 2: just like money. So when I found this Bible paper,
Speaker 2: it was like a fucking light bulb that just went
Speaker 2: over my head. I knew this was like, I was like,
Speaker 2: this is fucking perfect. I was just like fucking esthetic.
Speaker 2: Like I knew. I was like, this is it? Like
Speaker 2: this is it. I looked online to try to buy
Speaker 2: Bible paper in bulk. The wholesalers that I found sell
Speaker 2: it in giant reams to like publishing companies that produce Bibles,
Speaker 2: and I was a little nervous to order a palette
Speaker 2: of Bible paper. In Knoxville, Tennessee. My wife was contacting
Speaker 2: churches and getting donations of boxes of bibles. Guy thought
Speaker 2: the best way to stay anonymous was just like I've
Speaker 2: just started going to bookstores and finding Bibles and just
Speaker 2: taking the blank pages out of them. There's usually one
Speaker 2: or two pages in the front that are just blank,
Speaker 2: and then there's usually like two three, four blank pages
Speaker 2: in the back. You know, I'd go to bookstores and
Speaker 2: basically just go stand in the aisle and pretend like
Speaker 2: I'm reading the Bible and pick up one find the
Speaker 2: blank pages, kind of rip out the four blank pages
Speaker 2: in the back and put them in the pocket, and
Speaker 2: grab another one and just kind of rip them all out.
Speaker 2: We went to every bookstore in Knoxville until there was
Speaker 2: no more Bible paper. We went to all the bookstores
Speaker 2: in Chattanooga. We went down to Atlanta and all the
Speaker 2: little cities in between Knoxville and Atlanta, and up to Cleveland, Ohio.
Speaker 2: By the time I was actively counterfeiting, we started staying
Speaker 2: at a hotels. We'd try to get like handicap accessible
Speaker 2: rooms because they had like a really big bathroom, and
Speaker 2: I would kind of set up shop in the bathroom,
Speaker 2: you know. I'd run a power cord from like the
Speaker 2: little power outlet by the sink and have a laptop
Speaker 2: and two or three printers. There was always one Bible
Speaker 2: in the nightstand, so every new hotel room might take
Speaker 2: the two or three blank pages out of the Bible
Speaker 2: because it was right there. And eventually we were in
Speaker 2: a hotel and there wasn't a Bible in the nightstand.
Speaker 2: We called a front desk and said it was not
Speaker 2: a Bible in the nightstand, and she said, oh, we'll
Speaker 2: send one up. Then this may that guy at the
Speaker 2: hotel knocked on our hotel room door and gave us
Speaker 2: a Bible. So I basically was like, hey, you have
Speaker 2: more of these Bibles, and he was like, yeah, there's
Speaker 2: boxes in the maintenance closet. We have them upon request.
Speaker 2: So I basically was like, listen, I'll give you one
Speaker 2: hundred dollars if you can give me all these boxes
Speaker 2: of bibles. So he brought us like three boxes full
Speaker 2: of bibles, and we went through, took all the blank
Speaker 2: pages out of all of them, and then gave him back.
Speaker 2: He was confused, like why the fuck did they want
Speaker 2: these three boxes of bibles? For two hours and then
Speaker 2: they gave him back, But I gave him one hundred dollars,
Speaker 2: so he didn't care. When I first started, I was
Speaker 2: working on him for thirty minutes, but eventually I got
Speaker 2: it down to where I could make one hundred dollar
Speaker 2: bill in probably five minutes. I would constantly edit the
Speaker 2: images and photoshop and sharpen them, and they just got
Speaker 2: better and better as time went on. Basically, like scanners
Speaker 2: and printers recognized the image of one hundred dollars bill
Speaker 2: and by recognizing that it knows that it's currency and
Speaker 2: it won't let you print it or scan it. So
Speaker 2: in order to get the digital images, I would simply
Speaker 2: take a photo of them, get a new crisp hundred
Speaker 2: dollars bill, lay it on a flat on the table,
Speaker 2: take a high resolution camera and just snap a photo,
Speaker 2: and then you can upload that photo and crop around
Speaker 2: it to take out the background and edit the image.
Speaker 2: I'd print the background color and then i'd put it
Speaker 2: back in the printer and print the green Treasury seals
Speaker 2: and serial numbers, and then put it back in the
Speaker 2: printer and print all the black hork And that was
Speaker 2: the front of the bill, and I would take the
Speaker 2: reverse side and just lightly missed on some gorilla glue spray,
Speaker 2: and I'd line it up just right and then squeegem together.
Speaker 2: And then after that I would spray on a thick
Speaker 2: coat of matt lacquer spray, which that would coat the
Speaker 2: paper so the counterfeit pens wouldn't turn black because the
Speaker 2: counterfeit pens basically are iodine ink, and the iodine in
Speaker 2: the ink reacts to starch in paper. So if I
Speaker 2: sprayed the bills with a Matte lacquer spray, it would
Speaker 2: coat the paper, so the ink in the pens couldn't
Speaker 2: react to the starch in the paper because it's not
Speaker 2: touching it because it's coated with Matt Lacquer. You get
Speaker 2: the muscle memory of just the right amount of missing on,
Speaker 2: you know, because if you spray too much gorilla glue,
Speaker 2: it'll be too thick. Just one little that that's enough.
Speaker 2: When I first was able to make a one hundred
Speaker 2: dollars bill, I thought, you know, this is it. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna be rich for the rest of my life, like
Speaker 2: money will longer be a problem ever again, you know.
Speaker 2: And at this point I wasn't considering that, you know,
Speaker 2: I get caught. You know, you don't really think you're
Speaker 2: gonna get caught until they kicked your door in. The
Speaker 2: first bill that I broke myself in a store was
Speaker 2: at a taco bell across from the Knoxville Airport. I
Speaker 2: was definitely super nervous going into it. I kind of
Speaker 2: broke this bill out of desperation. It was probably just
Speaker 2: before midnight. It was late. I parked my car a
Speaker 2: couple businesses down and I walked into this taco bell
Speaker 2: ordered a couple soft tacos. And it turns out that
Speaker 2: the cashier was the manager. And this manager basically just
Speaker 2: took the bill, held it up, looked for a strip
Speaker 2: in a watermark, and she put it in the register
Speaker 2: and gave me my change. I walked a couple blocks
Speaker 2: back to my car, and I just threw the tacos
Speaker 2: the bushes. I kind of thought, this is going to
Speaker 2: be easier than I thought. I knew that I was
Speaker 2: onto something. I was living at a hotels, so we
Speaker 2: needed visa cards to pay for the hotel rooms. So
Speaker 2: I started buying prepaid visa cards, and I realized that
Speaker 2: there's like a three dollar fee attached to a prepaid
Speaker 2: visa card, So to get one hundred dollars prepaid visa card,
Speaker 2: it would be one hundred and three dollars. So I
Speaker 2: would give them two kind of fie hundred dollar bills
Speaker 2: and I not get the one hundred dollars prepaid visa
Speaker 2: card and ninety seven dollars change. So that kind of
Speaker 2: doubled my income. And most big chain stores have multiple registers,
Speaker 2: so you know, me and my wife would go into
Speaker 2: one store and buy prepaid visa cards, but we'd go
Speaker 2: to multiple registers, so we could leave a Walmart with,
Speaker 2: you know, one thousand dollars just by going to different registers.
Speaker 2: And when your job is breaking one hundred dollar bills,
Speaker 2: Walmarts and stuff like that. Of course, my kids got
Speaker 2: pretty much whatever they wanted. And if they say, oh,
Speaker 2: can I have this toy, It's like, sure, I'll make
Speaker 2: fifty bucks off of getting you that toy. I would
Speaker 2: go to my children and specifically say what do you want,
Speaker 2: because I need to buy stuff. I mean, yeah, anything
Speaker 2: they wanted. I was eager to get them because that's
Speaker 2: how I made my money. I remember having Christmas in
Speaker 2: a hotel room and we had so many toys. It
Speaker 2: filled up like the whole floor of the hotel room
Speaker 2: with presents. And you know, we had a Christmas tree
Speaker 2: in the hotel room, so the kids had a great time,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. At this point, I was
Speaker 2: used to cashiers only marking the bills with the counterfeit
Speaker 2: detection pen. And like I said, my bills I sprayed
Speaker 2: with lacquer, so the pens were no problem. But the
Speaker 2: first time I went to break a bill out of CBS,
Speaker 2: the cashier pulled out the counterfeit pen marked it. It
Speaker 2: marked properly, but then she turned the pen around and
Speaker 2: shined a black light on my bill and the strip
Speaker 2: didn't glow red. So it was a real close call
Speaker 2: for me. I was like I thought, I was begin
Speaker 2: to get caught. So at that point I knew I
Speaker 2: needed to somehow make the strip glow red. Then I
Speaker 2: found these invisible ink UV pens online. They're basically marketed
Speaker 2: towards little girl's diaries, so the girl can write in
Speaker 2: her diary with this invisible ink pen, so no one
Speaker 2: can read her diary. So I googled that I found
Speaker 2: them in red ink. You know, I ordered them, and
Speaker 2: after I glued my bills together, I would take a
Speaker 2: ruler and put it over the strip and just draw
Speaker 2: a line with this invisible ink UV pen so when
Speaker 2: you shine the black light on it, they it appeared
Speaker 2: to glow red, just like a real bill. I'd normally
Speaker 2: wake up at about nine am and print for about
Speaker 2: three hours, usually make a couple thousand. At least by
Speaker 2: noon I had a couple thousand dollars in fake hundreds,
Speaker 2: and then you know, you spend the rest of the
Speaker 2: day just kind of breaking them, going to different stores.
Speaker 2: Some days, some heroin dealers I knew would put in
Speaker 2: an order for like ten thousand dollars, So some days
Speaker 2: I'd just print all day to give them ten thousand.
Speaker 2: They'd give me like twenty five hundred for the ten thousand,
Speaker 2: and I'd probably print a couple thousand for myself to
Speaker 2: break as well. A big part of it was buying
Speaker 2: heroin from dealers with counterfeit money. This one dealer I
Speaker 2: was buying like an eight ball of heroin off of
Speaker 2: him every day for like a month straight. We'd go
Speaker 2: up to Cleveland together. He'd re up and I'd drive
Speaker 2: around Cleveland, breaking bills and getting Bible paper and doing
Speaker 2: the whole routine. He went up to Cleveland without me,
Speaker 2: and he got arrested while he was up there. A
Speaker 2: day or two goes by and he calls me. I
Speaker 2: figured the FEDS were listening to that conversation, but I
Speaker 2: also said I wasn't a drug dealer, but I didn't
Speaker 2: expect anything to come of it. I was in a
Speaker 2: hotel room at the time of that phone call, and
Speaker 2: about thirty minutes later, I hear a knock on the
Speaker 2: door of the hotel room, and I kind of peek
Speaker 2: out the window of the hotel and I see the
Speaker 2: corner of a Knox County sheriff. So at that point,
Speaker 2: fucked fucked. I threw about ten thousand roughly into the
Speaker 2: toilet and flushed it. Took another probably five ten thousand
Speaker 2: threw it in the toilet, but when I went to
Speaker 2: flush it the second time, just kind of bl bl
Speaker 2: blah blooh. If water was shut off at this point,
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of counterfeit money just floating in it
Speaker 2: or like stuck to the rim of this toilet. I
Speaker 2: heard people yell, multiple people yelling through the door knocks,
Speaker 2: kind a sheriff Us Secret Service, and then they just
Speaker 2: started kicking it in. But the hotel room door was
Speaker 2: like reinforced with steel. It was like a thick metal door.
Speaker 2: They just you know, boom boom boom, over and over again.
Speaker 2: There was nothing I could do. There was nowhere I
Speaker 2: could go. So I did a line of heroin and
Speaker 2: lit a cigarette and just sat on the bed and
Speaker 2: smoked a cigarette while they were kicking the door. When
Speaker 2: they offered me that deal to not charge my wife,
Speaker 2: I always planned on taking it, whether the deal was
Speaker 2: good whoorbad, Like I wouldn't have let my wife go
Speaker 2: to prison. We went to a meeting with my lawyer
Speaker 2: and the Secret Service was really like impressed, and they
Speaker 2: wanted me to explain to them how I did everything,
Speaker 2: and he's like, we want you to make a training
Speaker 2: video for Secret Service agents as a part of cooperation.
Speaker 2: As soon as I walk into the room, there's like
Speaker 2: lights and tripod with cameramen. There was like a sound
Speaker 2: guy that put mic on me. I was like shocked
Speaker 2: at first. I'm like, oh shit. They had all the
Speaker 2: evidence that they seized from my hotel room. They had
Speaker 2: my computer and my printers and a suitcase I had
Speaker 2: with all these different pens and sprays, so they had
Speaker 2: everything I needed to make money. He kind of was
Speaker 2: just like go and I'm like, what do you mean? Go, Like,
Speaker 2: what do you want me to do? And he's like,
Speaker 2: make two counterfeit bills, explain every step of the process.
Speaker 2: They kept saying, who taught you? I mean, I really
Speaker 2: just caught myself, you know, I mean trial and error.
Speaker 2: The Secret Service. They kept saying, this will really help
Speaker 2: train Secret Service agents. You know, I spent a lot
Speaker 2: of time and effort into really perfecting this recipe. And
Speaker 2: the Secret Service what they said like they were super
Speaker 2: excited to meet me. So I guess in a way
Speaker 2: it made me feel.
Speaker 1: Good in return for cooperating with the government and making
Speaker 1: that impressive instructional video. Jeff served just three years in
Speaker 1: prison and his wife served none. Today he's a changed man.
Speaker 1: He's been drug free for years and has a steady job.
Speaker 1: He calls himself a professional printer. He and his wife
Speaker 1: are divorced. The creator and host of Lives of Crime
Speaker 1: is Steve Fishman. Executive producers Steve Fishman and Kevin Wardis,
Speaker 1: Senior producer Michael Epstein, producer and engineer Austin Smith, Story
Speaker 1: editor Dan Bobkoff. Our sound designer is Bianca Salinas. Assistant
Speaker 1: producer Eric Axelrod. Special thanks to the inimitable Fisher Stevens,
Speaker 1: the Glamorous Ria Julian and our agents at WM e
Speaker 1: Evan Crasseik, Marissa Hurwitz, Ben Davis. Lives of Crime is
Speaker 1: a production of Orbit Media in association with Signal Company
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