Notorious Counterfeiters-Part 8-Stephen Jory and the Sweet Smell of Money

People come to counterfeiting money in many ways, but none more unusual than the path taken by Englishman Stephen Jory. After a prison term for making and selling bogus designer perfumes, Jory turned his attention to printing funny money.

He was so good at it that he became the most successful counterfeiter in British history and caused the Bank of England to redesign its banknotes.

Fragrant Fortunes

Stephen Jory admitted he chose to be a criminal. Born in 1949, by his twenties he had a thriving business making and selling counterfeit designer perfumes, one of the first to do so. He bribed a perfumer to get formulas for best-selling brands and set up locations around London to make, bottle, and package them, selling the fake fragrances as the real thing. Business was so good that he and his partners set up a factory in Mexico where his now thriving enterprise was less likely to be noticed.

But Jory’s operation was ultimately uncovered, and in 1985 he was arrested and began serving time on several counts associated with his perfume business. At the time of his arrest it was claimed he had sold £300 million (400 million US dollars) worth of the pretend perfume.

Not content to sit idly in prison, Jory wrote his first semi-autographical crime novel, Supergrass, the book that would lead to his next extralegal business.

From Perfume to Pounds

After his release from prison, Jory began dating the daughter of Kenneth Mainstone, a prominent retired printer with a roguish reputation. Mainstone agreed to publish Supergrass for his daughter’s beau and as the two men became better acquainted, Jory approached Mainstone with a proposition. With Jory’s underworld connections and Mainstone’s printing acumen, the men could make a tidy sum making counterfeit currency.

They enlisted the talents of three other underworld figures and began printing fake £20 notes, selling and distributing them at a deep discount through their criminal connections in 1994. Known in England as The Lavender Hill Mob, after a popular 1951 movie of the same name, the partners also printed counterfeit postage and tax stamps and were looking into making fake £1 brass coins when the operation was halted in 1998.

“The Most Convincing Forgery I Have Ever Seen”

Using a video disc image, Mainstone separated the elaborate £20 note design into the 17 different colors in the bill and reproduced them on a top-of-the-line Heidelberg four-color printing press in an outbuilding on Mainstone’s estate. To replicate the metallic security strip on the genuine notes, they bought foil strips under false pretenses, added them to the sheets of paper, and overprinted them with white ink to mimic the perforation pattern on the real bills. Other details like the watermark of the Queen’s portrait were so convincing that even ultraviolet counterfeit detectors used by merchants often failed to detect the fraudulent notes.

In four years of operation the Lavender Hill Mob is estimated to have placed roughly £50 million worth of bogus twenties and fifties in circulation, accounting for as much as two-thirds of all counterfeit money circulating in England at the time. It’s likely that some remain in circulation today. Inspector Clive Merret, the Scotland Yard lead detective assigned to finding their source later said they were “the most convincing forgery I have ever seen.”

Caught by a Mermaid

Scotland Yard began an investigation called Operation Mermaid to look into the large numbers of high-quality bogus notes turning up in circulation, examining 16,000 counterfeit notes in the process. When Bernard Farrier, one of the gang’s members, was arrested by London police with a bag full of counterfeit notes and stamps, his links to Jory raised suspicion that there was a connection. The big break came when a scrap of paper bearing an advertisement for one of Mainstone’s businesses was found in a bundle of counterfeits. They eventually raided the Mainstone printing plant and other locations where they found millions of pounds in fake notes, plates for making them and bogus tax stamps, and enough brass discs to make 40,000 phony £1 coins.

Paying the Price

Jory and co-conspirators Bernard Farrier and Martin Watmough confessed their involvement and did not stand trial. Jory was sentenced to eight years in prison. Mainstone and another accomplice pled not guilty, Mainstone claiming he thought the press was being used to print pornography. But the court didn’t buy his story and Mainstone was sentenced in 2000 to 12 years imprisonment as the head of the counterfeiting ring. Mainstone’s and Jory’s assets were also seized. The others received sentences of roughly three years, all of which were served with the exception on Farrier, who died of cancer before beginning his sentence.

In the Mermaid’s Wake

As a result of The Lavender Hill Mob’s success, the Bank of England redesigned the £20 note, adding more security features.

Like his earlier incarceration, while in prison Jory wrote, this time an autobiography entitled Funny Money, published in hardback in 2002 and reprinted as Loadsamoney in paperback in 2005. It was a bestseller. At the time of his death in 2006 Jory was writing another novel recounting his earlier exploits to be called The Perfume Pirate and had just completed a film script based on Funny Money.

Tom Willis, a writer for The Independent, a London newspaper, met Jory while working on a crime series for Britain’s Channel 4 television. He says that Jory seemed to be “a lovable rogue” who was witty and doted on his two children. According to Willis, even the police had a grudging respect for Jory’s talents.

We’ll continue our series on Notorious Counterfeiters in the coming weeks. And we’ll follow with how collecting counterfeit money has become a specialty of its own.

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