Some Guy!

In two dingy printing shops in lower Manhattan, U.S. Secret Service agents last fortnight "discovered" the work of a most gifted artist. The artist himself was not on hand; indeed, he will prefer to remain nameless as long as he can, for he is responsible for one of the prettiest feats of counterfeiting since Jim the Penman.

This remarkable draftsman, the agents found, had made the cleverest copy of the Great Seal of the United States that they had ever seen. He had made his almost perfect copy of the U.S. spread-eagle not once but 90 times, on a 10 x 18-inch sheet of cardboard. The sheet was photo-engraved into a zinc cut of the same size.

The artist then drew 52 "airplane" stamps on a sheet ten inches wide, two inches long. SS-men interrupted at the plate-&-proof stage. The seal was to have been printed, they learned, on the same sort of grey-blue paper used by the U.S. Government, by the "kiss-impression" method, a light blue application of the cut which would make the outline of the eagle faint but discernible. The airplane cut would be superimposed. The completed work of art would have been so nearly exact a duplicate of a sheet of legitimate ration stamps that, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas F. Murphy "only the very expert and suspicious" could tell the difference.

The agents found that there were plans to unload, on the unsuspicious and in expert, some 5,120,000 gasoline ration "A" stamps, representing 15,360,000 gallons, and 1,560,000 shoe coupons, representing as many pairs of shoes. They arrested the printing shop proprietors, naturalized, Russian-born Harry Dubitsky, and naturalized, Austrian-born Max Spiegel, who had tangled with the law once before (1926) as a printer of indecent literature.

This was the first step, Attorney Murphy told reporters, toward the cracking of a powerful counterfeiting syndicate which "could have almost wrecked the nation's anti-inflationary ration system." Pleased as the agents were with their first step, and eager as they were to break the ring and discover its backers, nothing interested them more acutely than the artist who had made the whole business possible.

Counterfeiting has always required the services of an artist, of sorts; no camera has ever been made with lenses sensitive enough to capture the fine lines on a bill without so running them together that they look broken and blurred. Asked what sort of artist might have done the ration-stamp job, Keystone Photo-Engraving's J. S. Kellogg figured he must be what is known as a "label artist," an oldtime lithographer or a steel engraver. Mr. Kellogg also accorded the retiring genius a craftsman's accolade. The man who made his all-but-perfect copy 90 times over, said Mr. Kellogg, "is some guy!"

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