Thanks for this good old fashioned article. A very great find. I too never read of that detail of exactly how they did their counterfeiting. That's almost like money laundering through an unwilling partner. If they thought they could continue to get away with that, they were truly primitive brutes.
Yes, or as Flynn asked, why bother counterfeiting at all? Why not just extort money. I guess it was just that they invested in counterfeiting and even though the results were bad, they weren't going to let that investment go to waste. In First Family I remember reading that they did have a whole crew of sicilians spreading the fake money around the city, so maybe the neighborhood shop owners were just the lucky ones to get the absolutely worst bills. It probably can't even be called money laundering, since the victims surely wouldn't risk their freedom by using these counterfeits for anything.
