La banda que va falsificar 50 milions de lliures amb una impremta de jardí

Tonight, this man's cash will end up in a London casino, a dog track in Essex, and the till of a corner pub in Hackney, all without him leaving the garden shed where it came from. He won't break into a vault or steal a password anyone has heard of. There will be no alarm. By morning, the money is already moving through the British economy. And not a single bank, not a single cashier, not a single Bank of England detector will be able to [music] tell it apart from the real thing. Within a week, some of it will be counted, stacked, and stamped genuine inside the Bank of England's own sorting room. room. He's done this for years. The Bank of England knows the fakes and cannot work out how. Look at him. Mid-40s, wire-rimmed glasses, ink on his fingertips, a magnifying glass on the workbench beside him. A little efficient businessman from a quiet corner of Essex. The kind of man you'd ask to mind your bag at the train station. But, he's understood one thing the engineers at the Bank of England have missed. The National Crime Squad, Scotland Yard, the Bank of England's own forensic team, the printers at De La Rue, the largest counterfeit investigation in British history. [music] [music] And at the center of it, one man in a shed. shed. So, how does a suburban businessman out-print a 300-year-old central bank? And how long can he stay ahead while his fake notes keep turning up in pub tills, betting shops, and even the Bank of England's own machines? Because the 20-pound note was never the most dangerous paper in this story. The man in the shed is Kenneth Noye. But, the man you really need to meet first is the one who walked into his daughter's life four years before any of this began. His name was Stephen Jury. In the late 1980s, Jory was running a small criminal operation out of North London. He was not a gangster. He was not violent. He had never held a gun. He

was, by his own later admission in his 2005 memoir, Loads of Money, a chancer, a working-class East Ender who had figured out that the cheapest way to make money in Britain was to copy something rich people already wanted. His first business was perfume, specifically fake Chanel No. 5. He bought generic scent in bulk. He bought empty bottles. He printed counterfeit Chanel labels in a small [music] shop, applied them by hand, and sold the result through street markets across the south of England. The trade was profitable. It was also [music] illegal. Customs and Excise caught him. The stock was crushed. The operation closed. >> [music] >> By the early 1990s, Jory was a man with a conviction record, a working knowledge of how to fake premium goods at low cost, and an ambition to move up. He was also dating a woman whose father owned a small commercial print shop in Essex. The shop was called Intec Graphics. The owner was Kenneth Mainstone. Jory began visiting his girlfriend's parents at home. He was charming. He brought wine. He helped clear the table after lunch. He asked the father about his career. Mainstone had two decades in the trade. He understood paper. He understood ink chemistry. He understood the four-color separation and offset press needs to reproduce an image faithfully. His own shop specialized in commercial print, business cards, shop fronts, advertising leaflets. Nothing exotic. Nothing illegal. >> [music] >> What Jory said to him, what Mainstone first agreed to, what the daughter [music] knew at the time, none of this is in the court record. Mainstone's own defense, years later, would be that he believed the press was being used to print pornography. The court would reject it. What the court did establish is this. By early 1994, Kenneth Mainstone, [music] the father, the husband, the

businessman with no criminal record, was the technical center of a counterfeit currency operation that would, over the next four years, produce more fake British money than anyone [music] in history. He was not the only one involved. He was the most important one. And he had been recruited, sitting at his own kitchen table, by the man his daughter was bringing home for Sunday lunch. To understand what they were about to do, you have to understand what they were up against. In 1991, the Bank of England issued the Series D 20-pound note. The face on the front was Michael Faraday. The face on the back was the lecture [music] theater at the Royal Institution. And the paper between them was, at that moment, the most engineered piece of legal tender in the world. The Faraday 20-pound had four defenses. One, the paper itself. 75% cotton, 25% linen, made at Portal's Mill in Overton, Hampshire. A single approved supplier printing currency paper for the Bank of England since 1724. The composition gave the note its distinctive feel. Crisp, dry, almost cloth-like. cloth-like. Under ultraviolet light, ordinary paper fluoresces white from optical brighteners. brighteners. Bank of England paper does not. Two, the print process. Not offset, not lithography, intaglio. Engraved metal plates pressed into paper at extreme pressure, leaving the ink raised in microscopic ridges. Run your thumb across a real Faraday 20 pound note and you can feel the [music] relief on the portrait and the lettering. An inkjet cannot do that. An offset press cannot do that. Only De La Rue's intaglio facility at Debden, Essex could. could. Three, the watermark. Faraday's face appears inside the paper. Not printed onto it, but formed during

paper manufacture by varying the paper's thickness as it cured around a cylinder mold. You cannot photocopy a watermark. You cannot inkjet a watermark. [music] You can only make one if you control paper manufacture. Four, the metallic thread. A continuous strip of foil woven into the paper at the mill carrying [music] the words Bank of England in microscopic negative print. The thread had to be inside the paper from the moment the paper was made. The Bank of England's design philosophy was simple. A counterfeiter would need to beat all four at once. To beat all four, [music] you would need a specialist cotton linen paper mill, a multi-million pound intaglio press, a watermark manufacturing line, [music] and a metallic thread weaving facility. Which is to say, you would need to be the Bank of England. In any given year, the bank's internal estimate was that around two notes in every 10,000 in circulation were counterfeit. Fakes obvious enough to be caught by cashiers under UV light, by sorting machines at Debden, by anyone trained to look. The system worked. It worked, that is, until sometime in 1995. That year, the sorting machines at Debden began doing something they had never done before. They stopped flagging certain 20s. Not because the 20s were real, because they could not tell. The first thing Mainstone needed was a press. press. A Heidelberg four-color offset is the kind of machine you find in mid-size commercial print shops across Britain. The workhorse of magazine printing and high-end marketing material. Secondhand, it cost between 30 and 50,000 lb. It is roughly the size of a Range Rover. It weighs 4 tons. It is also, in the right hands, capable of producing print quality nearly indistinguishable from intaglio. Mainstone bought one. It was installed

in an outbuilding behind his property in Essex, disguised, by all accounts, as the kind of small private workshop a commercial printer might realization keep on his land for occasional contract work. work. The press alone, however, was not enough. The Bank of England's 20-lb note was a print job that took De La Rue 17 separate color plates to reproduce faithfully. faithfully. Mainstone separated the design into 17 plates by hand, [music] working from a genuine note bought from a corner shop till. till. The print was the easier problem. The harder problem was the paper. The team, by now growing to include Bernard Farrier, a Cowes-based intermediary, and a small number of others, needed paper that would behave like Bank of England paper. Specifically, [music] paper made without optical brighteners. Optical brighteners are the chemical additives that make modern domestic paper appear bright white under fluorescent light. Under UV, they glow. Bank of England paper, made from undyed cotton and linen, contains no optical brighteners. It does not glow. Every cashier with a UV [music] pen in Britain is trained to look for this single tell. A counterfeit note flares blue. A real note [music] stays dark. Mainstone had to find paper that stayed dark. dark. He found it. The exact supplier has never been made fully public. The assumption in the trade is that he sourced specialty rag paper from a non-currency industrial supplier, paid through small, geographically [music] dispersed, legitimate channels under unrelated business names. By late '94, he had paper. He had a press. [music] He had Jury, who knew how to put fake currency into the British economy without leaving fingerprints. He had not yet solved the hardest problem. He had not yet solved the metallic thread. The thread inside a real Bank of England note is not printed on. It is woven through the paper during manufacture, placed at the moment the cotton and linen fibers are still wet. By the time the sheet dries, the thread [music] is part of the paper itself. You cannot apply it afterwards, unless, the team realized, you do something nobody had tried before. Their method was a variant of a commercial process [music] called hot foil stamping. The same technique used to apply gold lettering onto luxury packaging and hardback book covers. They acquired a hot foil stamping machine. They sourced metallic foil [music] strips. And they developed a procedure that, in

court testimony, was described as a small piece of engineering brilliance. They printed each 20 pounds in two passes. passes. Between the two passes, while the first ink was still drying, they pressed a strip of metallic foil along the position where the Bank of England thread should appear. Heat bonded into the paper. Then, they overprinted the foil in white ink with a precise dashed pattern. From the front, the foil appeared as the broken silver bands of a windowed thread. thread. Held up to the light, the strip became continuous, indistinguishable from the genuine. It was not, however, perfect. Mainstone was a perfectionist by his own standards. The team would print hundreds of notes at a time, examine each one against a real 20 under magnification, and destroy any sheet with a misregistered color, a faint imperfection, a thread that did not line up. up. up. Investigators who later cataloged [music] the surviving notes estimated that for every counterfeit that made it into circulation, two or three were burned in Mainstone's outbuilding. >> [music] >> By 1995, the Faraday £20 coming out of the shed in Essex was passing [music] every test the Bank of England's standard detection regime could throw at it. it. The paper held the UV test. The intaglio simulation held the touch test. The hot foil thread held the light test. The watermark was so convincingly placed that BOE sorting machines that Debden begin registering the notes as genuine. By the time the Bank of England's forensic team understood what they were looking at, the operation had been running for over a year, and they had no idea who was making the notes. The distribution network was Jory's domain. By 1996, >> [music] >> fake Faraday £20, and by mid-1997, fake £50 as well, were entering the British economy through a network of

distributors across South London and the home counties. Bookmakers, casinos, pubs, petrol stations, bureau de change kiosks. None of them knew where the notes came from. from. Most of them did not know they were taking fakes. Bernard Ferrier, operating from a property in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, became the primary intermediary, buying bulk batches [music] at a fraction of face value, distributing onward to street-level handlers. By the time the Bank of England put a name to the wave of fakes coming through Debden, it was already too late to be quiet about it. Internal estimates would later place the operations total output at approximately 50 million pounds in face value. By Jewry's own admission and by the calculation of the Crown Prosecution Service at trial, this represented roughly 2/3 of all counterfeit paper currency in circulation in the United Kingdom between 1994 and 1998. In any given British till during those four years, two out of every three fake notes had been printed in a garden shed behind Kenneth Mainstone's house. The Bank of England's response internally was close to panic. Their sorting machines at Debden were authenticating the notes as genuine. Their cashier level detection was failing. failing. Their high street UV protocols were failing. The forensic team assigned to counterfeit [music] analysis was hand microscoping every recovered sample and finding, again and again, that the Mainstone-Jewry notes were closer to a real 20 than anything they had ever seen. seen. The decision was made at the highest level that the Series D Faraday 20 pound might have to be withdrawn from circulation and replaced [music] entirely. entirely. This was not a small decision. Withdrawing a currency series cost the bank tens of millions of pounds in design, in printing, in collection, in disposal, in the logistical exercise of

replacing every till in Britain. To withdraw the Faraday meant publicly admitting that the Bank of England had been beaten. By early 1998, they were preparing to do exactly that. They had also, [music] by then, given the investigation a new name. They called it Operation Mermaid. The thing about a perfectly clean operation is that it depends on the man running it being perfectly disciplined. The thing about a real human being is that they almost never are. By 1997, Scotland Yard had given up on tracing the money. The cash was a maze. The distributors >> [music] >> were ghosts. The pubs and bookmakers where the notes appeared were a map of where the fakes had been, not where they came from. So, Operation Mermaid pivoted. If the money was a dead end, then the materials had to be the answer. Somewhere in Britain, somebody was buying the specific things this operation needed. Paper without optical brighteners, [music] brighteners, [music] hot foil stamping foil, very specific industrial ink. These were not supermarket items. >> [music] >> They came from a small number of specialist suppliers. The investigation took over those suppliers' customer [music] records. Hot foil stamping foil, specifically, was sold by only a handful of merchants in the UK. Mainstone's team had purchased their foil through a paper-thin cover identity, a fake name, a rented warehouse address, paid in advance. The order had been clean. Every operational standard had been [music] followed. But the merchant who sold them the foil did one thing the team had not planned for. The merchant put their customer name into a marketing database, a trade catalog, junk mail. The kind of glossy brochure that arrives unsolicited at every commercial buyer of specialty foil in Britain. Mainstone's team had given a fake name, and the catalogs began arriving at the fake address. Months later, [music] when the team

moved to a different premises, the catalogs kept arriving at the old one. The new tenants of the warehouse threw them in the bin. A Scotland Yard officer going through commercial waste as part of a separate stage of Operation Mermaid found one of those catalogs. It carried a customer reference number printed on the address label. The reference number, traced backwards through the supplier's database, led to the original payment record for the original foil order, a credit card transaction paid before the operation had learned to use cash exclusively. It pointed at a real account, a real address, a real name. At roughly the same time, a separate breakthrough happened independently. Investigators sifting through a recovered bundle of counterfeit 20 lb found a small piece of paper folded inside the bundle. It was a promotional flyer, a flyer for a small commercial printing firm in Essex. The firm's name was Intech Graphics. A handwritten note on the back of the flyer carried a pager number, Stephen Jory's. Jory's. The investigation had its name. The raids took place on the 14th of August 1998. 1998. At Bernard Farrier's house in Cowes, Isle of Wight, officers from the National Crime Squad recovered approximately 1 and 1/2 million pounds in uncut 20 lb and 50 [music] lb sheets, a printing press, and the operational records of an entire distribution [music] network. At Mainstone's garden shed in Essex, the Heidelberg was still in place. The foil, the plates, a folder of 17 color separations indexed by hand. Stephen Jory was arrested separately. He did not resist. Jory, Farrier, and a co-defendant confessed and pleaded guilty. guilty. Farrier died of cancer before completing his sentence. Kenneth Mainstone went to trial. His defense was that he had believed the press was being used to print pornography. He had thought, [music]

he told the court, that the color separations, the foil, the specialist non-brightened [music] paper were for high-end glossy magazines. He had not, he said, made the connection. The court did not believe him. He was identified as the technical leader of the operation, [music] the only person on the team capable of designing the 17 plate separation. The only person who could have engineered the hot foil thread. The only person whose decades in commercial printing made the whole thing possible. He was sentenced to 12 years. Four years more than the man who had recruited him. [music] The Bank of England's response on the other hand was not measured in years. It was measured in money. In June 1999, 10 months after the arrest, the bank issued the series E Edward Elgar 20 pound note. It carried a windowed metallic thread, a foil hologram patch, a UV reactive numeral, >> [music] >> micro printed lettering across the back. Every feature on the new note was a direct answer to a specific defeat the old note had suffered at the hands of the Lavender Hill mob. The cost of withdrawing the series D Faraday and issuing the series E Elgar in design, in printing, in collection, in distribution, in the logistical [music] exercise of changing every till in Britain was estimated at well over 100 million pounds. The Mainstone jury operation had cost the British economy approximately 50 million pounds in face value counterfeit currency. The cost of beating it was more than twice that. The men in the garden shed had not just printed money. They had forced a 300 year old central bank to redesign its own currency from scratch. The bank did not call this what [music] it was, but everyone in the trade knew. The Bank of England had spent 300 years protecting one piece of paper. The men in the shed spent four years beating it. In the end, the paper that caught them was their own. A promotional flyer, a junk mail catalog, the same kind of advertising leaflet [music] Kenneth Mainstone had spent 20 years printing for other people. He was undone by the only paper he never engineered. The one that came through the letterbox.