The One Dollar Counterfeiter

In 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.

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.

Large-denomination counterfeits attract scrutiny because people expect fraud where substantial sums are involved. A suspicious twenty-dollar bill may be held to the light, checked for texture, or compared against a real note. But a worn one-dollar bill passing quickly between customers in a busy shop? Few people cared enough to look carefully.

Juettner exploited that indifference brilliantly. He also operated on an extremely small scale. Instead of flooding the market, he released only a handful of fake bills at a time. The notes circulated quietly through diners, bars, street vendors, and small stores, disappearing into the immense ocean of American currency.

The Secret Service became aware that poor-quality counterfeit dollar bills were appearing in New York, but the case puzzled investigators. Professional counterfeiters usually aimed for large profits. These bills, by contrast, were amateurish and limited in number. Whoever was making them seemed content merely to survive.

The United States Secret Service, which investigates counterfeiting, opened a file on the mysterious forger. The investigation was assigned case number 880. Over the years, agents tried in vain to locate the culprit. They handed out some 200,000 warning placards at 10,000 stores. They tracked down dozens of folks who’d spent the bills and interviewed them.

But Juettner remained elusive. He was careful not to draw attention. He never attempted large transactions. He worked alone, and he printed only tiny amounts.

10 years went by and the search for Mister 880 turned into the largest and most expensive counterfeit investigation in Secret Service history.

Then in January of 1948, some schoolboys playing around in a vacant lot in the Upper West Side uncovered a couple of zinc engraving plates buried in the snow. They also found “30 funny-looking dollar bills.”

A week later, one boy’s father caught him playing poker with a strange bill and turned it into the police, who handed it over to the Secret Service. They soon tracked down the lot where the boys found the plates and learned that a few weeks earlier, there had been a fire in a bordering apartment. The firefighters had entered to find the place full to the brim with junk, and had thrown them out the window into the alley to make room. The Secret Service had found their mystery man, Mister 880.

Emerich Juettner was arrested. When questioned about his crimes, he nonchalantly admitted to them. Juettner said that he had been making them for 9 to 10 years, and that he never gave more than one bill to any one person, “so nobody ever lost more than $1.”

Under ordinary circumstances, a federal counterfeiting arrest would have generated little sympathy. But the story of Emerich Juettner struck the public imagination immediately. Here was an old man surviving in poverty by printing crude one-dollar bills one at a time. He was not violent, greedy, or glamorous.

At trial, Juettner admitted his activities openly. The judge sentenced him to only a year and a day in prison, and he was paroled after 4 months. He was also made to pay a fine of $1. It has been agreed that Juettner’s complete lack of greed was the rationale behind the light sentence.

After his release, Juettner briefly achieved celebrity status. His notoriety became so widespread that Hollywood adapted the story into the 1950 film Mister 880, directed by Edmund Goulding. Eventually, Juettner made more money from the release of Mister 880 than he had made by counterfeiting.

Juettner returned to a life of normalcy, and lived out the rest of his days in the suburbs of Long Island, where he died in 1955, at the age of 79.