In a newspaper article in March of 1933 the Guelph police department warned readers of counterfeit money that was being circulated in the Royal City. “Police Issue Warning to Beware of Bogus Currency Here,” said the headline. Guelphites started checking their cash.
The crime of counterfeiting is as old as money. The victims are not just those who get stuck with phony currency. Counterfeiting undermines the very foundation of the economy and therefore hurts everyone. It has, in fact, been used in times of war to sabotage an enemy’s economy.
In the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans, when all money was in the form of coins, counterfeiters would shave bits of metal off the edges of gold and silver coins. When they had enough, they’d melt it down. Then they could pour the molten metal into a forged mould to make a new coin, or they could dip counterfeit coins made of a base metals like iron or lead into it and make what appeared to be coins of gold or silver.
Of course, this practice had its dangers. Counterfeiters who were caught could be crucified, thrown to the lions in the arena or be worked to death as slaves in the mines that the gold and silver came from in the first place. This form of counterfeiting continued into the Middle Ages, but the punishments changed. Male counterfeiters were hung, drawn and quartered. Female counterfeiters were burned at the stake. Later, the penalty was reduced to the chopping off of hands.
Resourceful people such as Sir Isaac Newton, who at one time was England’s Master of the Royal Mint, looked for ways to thwart counterfeiters. One development was the slight ridge around the edge of a coin which made it easy to see if the coin had been shaved.
With the arrival of paper money, counterfeiters adopted new means of fakery. Through trial and error (which in Canada meant a prison sentence or deportation to a penal colony) they learned to make copper plates that could be used to print stacks and stacks of worthless money. In underworld slang, counterfeiters were called “coiners”, “cooney men” or “koniackers.” Fake money was called “boodle” or “the queer.” Circulating counterfeit money was known as “passing the boodle” or “pushing the queer.”
Lowest in the hierarchy of the counterfeiting fraternity was the “shover” who put the boodle into circulation on the streets. At the top was the engraver who turned a copper plate into a money-maker. One of the most notorious of the counterfeit engravers was Edwin Johnson, who operated in both Canada and the United States in the 19th century. Johnson’s criminal colleagues regarded him as a master artist. He made funny money that was so much like the real thing, it fooled even sharp-eyed bank clerks. Johnson trained his sons and daughters to follow in his footsteps.
The Johnson family travelled a lot – necessary when you were trying to keep a step ahead of the police – so their boodle was spread all over Southern Ontario and parts of the US. Some of it very likely reached Guelph. In June of 1880 Ontario Provincial Police investigator John Wilson Murray, known as “Canada’s Great Detective,” tracked Johnson down and caught him passing a phony bill in a Toronto saloon. By that time the old cooney man was in his 70s. Some of his counterfeit bills can still be seen in the Bank of Canada’s Currency Museum in Ottawa.
The counterfeit money the Guelph police warned the public about that March wasn’t paper, but coins: dimes, quarters and 50-cent pieces. To people today it might seem hardly worthwhile to go to the trouble of counterfeiting coins. After all, the change Guelphites carried around in their pockets and purses wasn’t the gold and silver of past eras. But we must keep in mind that a dollar in 1933 was the equivalent of more than $24 today. You could buy a lot of merchandise with those quarters, dimes and half-dollars, not to mention getting real money back in change. A gang moving around Southern Ontario working small communities like Guelph could accumulate a pretty good haul. Moreover, Guelph was in the depths of the Great Depression, and desperate people were often willing to try almost anything in order to survive.
The counterfeit quarters and 50-cent pieces circulating in Guelph were made of lead. The police said they were not much harder than solder, dull in colour and “very noticeably lack the true ring of the mint-coined pieces.” The Mercury said the fake 10-cent pieces were actually “small coppers dipped in some material to represent silver. The ‘one-cent’ legend has been filed off, and all that can be seen is the King’s head and the ‘Georgius Dei Gratia,’ etc.”
We should keep in mind that the sizes and appearance of Canada’s coinage has evolved over the decades. In 1933 the dimes in circulation were 18.034 mm in diameter. Today’s dime is 18.03 mm.
Since 1920 the penny had been 19.1 mm in diameter. That was close enough in size to deceive anyone who didn’t take a good look at their coins. Moreover, there was still a lot of coinage of various sizes and denominations in circulation from the reigns of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and the early years of King George V. One’s pocket change might still include some of those big pennies that are collectors’ items today, so it’s not surprising that “small coppers” disguised as dimes could go unnoticed.
There was also a rash of paper money counterfeiting plaguing Canada and the US at that time. It seemed to be part of a crime wave that included armed robberies committed by the likes of John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, and kidnappings by hoodlums like George “Machine Gun” Kelly. Criminal gangs in Chicago and Detroit were making most of the counterfeit American money, but authorities in Windsor and Hamilton were also conducting investigations into counterfeiting.
Police in London arrested two known criminals who confessed to spreading fake money and bootleg liquor throughout southern Ontario. What was happening in Guelph was part of an underworld big picture, even if it was what some might have called “small change.”
