![]() "How could they get that much bass out of a speaker the size of a shoe box?" So he bought himself a Bose set-up for $2,500, went home, and took it apart. "I was amazed," he says from the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, California. In 1987, when Bose was manufacturing a new type of speaker system, Talton wanted to know how it worked. Yet he also studied electrical engineering at California State University and is a man of considerable ingenuity. For ten years he was in and out of jail, and in 2001 he was convicted of bank fraud and sentenced to five years. Born and raised in southern California, he has been a criminal for most of his life. Albert Talton, 46, is charming and soft-spoken, a big, fastidious man with a taste for expensive cars and high-end audio equipment. By then Albert Edward Talton, of Lawndale, California, was responsible for putting more than $7 million in phony currency into circulation he made much of it using kit bought at his local Staples office-supplies store. Despite the best efforts of the Secret Service, the printer of these notes evaded capture for more than three years. Most of the bills spent - or "passed", in the law-enforcement jargon - were created decades ago by skilled artists familiar with the fine engraving techniques and heavy machinery of the printing industry, career criminals who churned out thousands of dollars at a time.įour years later in the specimen vault Kelley Harris, counterfeit specialist with the Criminal Investigative Division, hands me a Ziploc bag containing 14 bills which appear genuine. It holds an example of every fake US tender confiscated since the end of the 19th century. The specimen vault is the reference library of the Secret Service's counterfeit investigators. But the money in the drawers is worthless. The face value of the cash runs to millions of dollars. In each sleeve is an individual note of US currency - a single, five, ten, 20, 50 or 100. ![]() ![]() Lining the walls are dozens of filing cabinets filled with narrow steel drawers, containing scores of transparent plastic sleeves. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing onlineīehind an anonymous-looking door on the fifth floor of the United States Secret Service headquarters, on H Street in Washington DC, is a small, windowless room known by the agents who work there as "the specimen vault". This article was taken from the November issue of Wired UK magazine.
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