How a pensioner became the most moral counterfeiter in the US (5 photos)

They couldn't catch him for 10 years and the detectives had already decided that he was elusive.





It all started in 1938, when the US Secret Service received a counterfeit dollar for examination. At first, they didn't even want to deal with it and decided that it was a one-off counterfeit. Who would mass-produce one-dollar bills?

And then there were more and more of these bills... eventually, the detectives realized that someone had set up the production of such counterfeits. Moreover, they looked pretty pathetic: printed on low-grade office paper, and President Washington, according to eyewitnesses, “looked like death.” On some bills, his last name was even misspelled - Wahsington.



Washington or Badminton - it doesn't matter. They had to get down to business and find the counterfeiter. But there were no leads.

The detectives only knew that counterfeits were only found in New York. So they took a map of the city and began placing a red flag where another counterfeit appeared. Over time, the entire map turned red, and the security forces were as far from solving the case as they were at the very beginning.

The mysterious swindler was called "Mr. 880" - after his case number in the journal, and they kept trying to find at least some kind of system in his actions. Over time, they realized: he never spent more than 12-15 counterfeit dollars a week and never spent them on entertainment, only on food. And one more thing: the criminal spent only one dollar in one place, so all his purchases were paltry.





They chased him for 10 years. And chance helped to detain him: a fire broke out in a New York apartment building. And when they were putting it out, the firefighters threw furniture and other things out of the windows. Then local kids started digging through this trash and in a pile of garbage they found several poorly printed dollars and the cliche with which they were made. The kids told their parents, and they handed the find over to the police.

The next day they came for the counterfeiter - he was one of the fire victims, he spent the night in a hotel opposite his former home. It turned out that he was a 73-year-old sick grandfather, he was not even going to resist and honestly told his story.



At the age of 14, Emerich Juttner came to the United States with his parents from Austria. There he got married, his wife gave birth to two children, and then died during the Spanish flu epidemic. This was at the height of the Great Depression. By that time, the children had already grown up and were living independently, and the man had grown old and was fired from his job. For a while, he got a job as a garbage man, but then he was kicked out of there too, at that time the poor guy was 63 years old.

That's when he started making counterfeit dollars.

During interrogation, the old man said that he didn't want to commit a crime and deceive ordinary merchants - the same hard workers as he was. But there was no way out - either lie or die of hunger. Then he decided to counterfeit only dollar bills and never bring them to the same place.

The court treated him very favorably and the sentence was: 1 year of imprisonment and a 1 dollar fine. Four months later, Juttner was released on parole for exemplary behavior.



Well, at the end of his life, fortune smiled on him: the old man sold the rights to the script and the film “Mister 880” was made based on it. The film thundered in the USA, received a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. And Juttner - decent money, which he always needed. He lived on this amount for the last five years, and bequeathed the rest to his children.