WHEN YOU GET RIGHT down to it, even a mega-million-dollar international criminal caper is mostlyboring shitwork. As Frank Bourassa tells it, his own criminal masterpiece hinged on the events ofone morning in early December 2009, a morning he says he spent freezing his ass off in a parkinglot, staring through binoculars at the Port of Montreal. On the face of it, the shipment he waswaiting for was also dull stuff: boxes of blank paper, nothing more. If the customs agents were tocrack into the cartons, Frank was praying that mere paper was all they'd see.

Frank's buddies, in two separate cars, had been surveilling the parking lot for two days,and though they didn't see anything out of the ordinary, he says he was uneasy, knowing that atany time, a bunch of law-enforcement people might swoop down out of nowhere and snatch him up.Frank was right to be paranoid. Indeed, a day would come when a bunch of law-enforcement peoplewould swoop down out of nowhere and snatch him up-but not today. Sensing the moment was right,Frank made a call to another of his guys, a runner he'd hired, and gave him the green light topull his box truck through the security gates and into the port to load up the shipment.

Before long, the vehicle came rumbling out through the exit lane, and Frank, watching from adistance, got about as excited as a person can get at the sight of a box truck. He had beenanticipating this day for nearly two years, though in a larger sense he had been anticipating itsince adolescence, when Frank Bourassa launched his varied and profitable career in the lawbreakingsector. His résumé so far, he says, included but was not limited to petty larceny, grand larceny,and grand dope smuggling. But this day marked the real beginning of the grandest, riskiest, mostpotentially enriching scheme of Frank's life. The convoy now on the move, he and his crew fellin behind the truck.

Frank says he called another friend of his who showed up with scanners and radio wands to checkthe shipment for bugs. The crew opened the truck. On five wooden pallets sat the future ofFrank's criminal enterprise. It was paper of a special kind, made with the same rarecotton-and-linen recipe used for printing American currency. It also bore watermarked images ofAndrew Jackson's face and security strips reading USA TWENTY in minuscule type.

The paper was the essential ingredient for fabricating high-grade counterfeit bills that theCanadian police would later describe as "basically undetectable" from the real thing. Assoon as the security sweep pronounced the shipment clean, Frank welled up with optimism."There was no way to stop me from there. I knew I was rich," Frank recalled. "It wasthe best day of my life." Frank now had what he needed to print hundreds of millions ofdollars' worth of fake U.S. currency-and to soon become the most prolific counterfeiter in thehistory of the trade.

To read the complete article, see:
The Great Paper Caper(www.gq.com/long-form/the-great-paper-caper)

To watch a great video, see:
This Man Made $250M in Counterfeit Money and Got Away with It*(video.gq.com/watch/gq-features-this-man-made-250m-in-counterfeit-money-and-got-away-with-it)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
COUNTERFEITER FRANK BOURASSA(www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n21a30.html)