“While on a hike in a snow-covered forest, Policeman Jack found a lonely girl in serious trouble. He could have exposed her there and then, but what he chose to do instead shocked everyone. Alicia Coz had been fearing for her life for a while. It was all about her late husband’s business. She never wanted anything to do with the way he made his living, but somehow she got dragged into it. Now he was dead, and she was running for her life.
Ironically, it had all started when one of her late husband’s friends had just been released from prison. They were all sitting around a barbecue to welcome him back. That’s where he started telling them about the ingenious method he had devised to counterfeit American currency. Initially, everybody entertained his ideas just for fun, but then the conversation turned serious, and some in the circle of friends started talking about turning the ideas into reality.
Alicia struggled through the snow, pushing deeper into the mountain. She tugged the large gym bag free from the underbrush and headed higher up the slope. The bag was her only lifeline—everything that could possibly keep her alive and out of jail was in that bag. Right now, it was her most valuable possession; it was evidence.
The counterfeiting method was based on a few simple premises. Firstly, Keith’s friend had explained that the most difficult part of creating a counterfeit note was replicating the paper. Most bills go through a molded process where a watermark and a thread are added while making the paper. Though the thread seems simple, it’s actually quite intricate. It has all kinds of fluorescent, magnetic, metallic, and microprint elements to enhance security. It is virtually impossible to replicate. But Keith’s friend had come up with an ingenious way to sidestep this complicated process.
All American bills are the same size. If you place a $10 bill on top of a $100 bill and switch the lights off, you won’t be able to tell the difference. So, he had proposed to collect all the $1 bills they could possibly get their hands on, use a chemical process to wash all the ink off the bills, and then use the blank bills to print $100 each. Every $1 bill that went into one side of the process came out the other end as a newly printed $100 bill.
Just above Alicia, a gully opened into a lower section of the pine forest, and she could see a rock overhang hidden behind fallen branches. She could hide out here. Exhausted, she gripped the canvas handles of the bag with both hands and dragged it up the gully toward the cave. It was full of the banknotes Keith had eventually managed to print. Alicia dragged the bag to the rear of the rocky overhang and covered the opening with leaves and branches.
She’d be safe here, at least for a while. She looked at the bag and all it represented and cussed under her breath. While nobody was taking Keith’s suggestion all that seriously, he’d gone ahead with his plan anyway. A contact had provided him with a remarkable set of plates to print the notes with. Through contacts with the mob in Philly, he had managed to put together a team of 20 people whose only purpose was to collect as many $1 notes as they could. These came from corrupt banking officials, co-conspirators, supermarket chains, and even one guy at the Federal Reserve.
If everybody hadn’t suddenly become greedy, they might well have managed to get away with their operation for years to come. But then the unexpected happened. It seemed like a blessing at first but quickly became a curse. The mob had hijacked two transit trucks transporting old and worn banknotes to the FED to be destroyed. Suddenly, there were enough blanks to turn a fairly modest operation into a multi-million dollar enterprise. And with that kind of expansion came a huge risk, and that’s where she came in.
What they made her do became the reason Alice was now running for her life. She let herself sink to the ground and tried to breathe, but her chest seemed to be made of lead. She was terrified, and her head was spinning, and worst of all, she suddenly started hearing noises she’d been dreading all along—a man walking in her direction.
Jack Baker had taken a different route for his hike up the mountain today. Usually, when the snowfall was heavy, he skirted the pine forest and stuck to the open areas. But today, he headed straight into the trees and navigated his way to the top under the green canopy. He had a week off, a rarity in an under-resourced police department, and he fully intended to make the most of it.
His hike took him up a gully and to a patch of pines higher up. As he walked out of the gully, he noticed something unusual in the snow. He wasn’t alone on this part of the mountain; there was a set of footprints, and whoever made them was dragging something large. Jack studied the signs carefully. The bootprints weren’t big enough to have been left by a man, and from the drag marks, he imagined the person pulling a heavy bag of some kind along with them.
Jack slowed down and focused. If it was a woman, as he surmised, she may be in trouble. They were high up on the slope, and it certainly wasn’t a hike for an amateur. He started following the tracks. They led him through the gully and into the fringes of the pine patch he’d seen earlier.
Here, Jack sank to his haunches. He studied the lay of the land and listened intently for any out-of-place sound. Nothing.
Alicia had heard the man before she saw him, sitting deep in the back of her overhang. She heard whistling first, then a cough. It all seemed to come from the mouth of the gully below. The sounds of crunching snow became louder, and she realized a man was following her. She had no idea who it was and had to assume it was one of the mob’s henchmen who had picked up her trail.
There was no way out; the man was too close for her to slip out of the opening of the overhang. He would spot her or hear her, and then it would all be over in a matter of minutes. All she could do was pull back deeper into the semi-darkness of her hidey-hole. She sat back against the rock face, and her fingers curled around a solid branch. If push came to shove, she’d be able to use it as a club.
Jack almost missed the opening to the rocky overhang. It had been hidden behind clumps of underbrush, deliberately camouflaged. He thought this piqued his curiosity. He tugged on one of the bigger branches, and it all came tumbling down in a shower of pine needles, dead branches, and snow. Out of the underbrush, under the overhang, a woman came at him, screaming like a banshee. She was in full attack mode, holding a four-foot length of pine above her head, ready to pulverize his skull.
Jack sidestepped her neatly and grabbed her wrist. On the way down, he twisted it until she dropped her club and then used the leverage to push her onto her bottom. “Whoa there,” he said. “Do you always attack friendly strangers?”
He didn’t think he’d
ever seen so much mistrust in anyone’s eyes. The woman looked him up and down, her lips curled into a vicious snarl, and her breathing was rushed. Still too much adrenaline in her for him to relax.
Jack thought Alicia wasn’t sure what to make of this man. He didn’t look like the typical mob type Keith’s friends had been hanging around, but he could be a henchman, a freelancer hired to kill her and dispose of the body. She was trapped with nowhere to go, and he was built like a quarterback. She’d have no chance if she had to go toe-to-toe with him. This would have to be a battle of the wits. The strange thing was, he didn’t appear to be carrying a gun.
Jack tried to speak to the frightened woman again. “Let’s start over,” he said. “I’m Jack. I was on a hike when I came across your tracks. I figured you may be in trouble, so I followed them, and they led me here. Now, your turn.”
Alicia wasn’t ready to believe a word the man said. If he was a mobster, it stood to reason he was a liar. She was a little surprised that he didn’t just go ahead and kill her, but maybe he had a more diabolical plan. Maybe he wanted to keep her alive for some reason. They were high up in the mountains, far from any form of civilization. He could keep her captive here for as long as he wanted.
Alicia decided to throw caution to the wind and started telling him about the counterfeiting operation, without going into too much detail. She told him that it had all gone south and that she was now running for her life.
“I need more,” Jack said. “Why are you in trouble?”
Alicia hesitated, then decided, ‘What the hell?’ “When the guys started to make big money, when the counterfeit notes became more than any person could spend in a day, they needed a way to get the counterfeit currency into the mainstream,” she said. “And that’s where you came in.”
Jack asked, “You swap the fake notes for real ones?”
Alicia nodded. “The mob guys organized a job for me at a big store. I was responsible for preparing the daily cash-up for three of the biggest branches in the country. My sole purpose was to switch cash.”
“You’re the only one I’ve got. Let’s do it.”
Back in town, things happened fast. A doctor friend of Jack took care of Alicia’s wound in his house. He kept her presence a secret and made the necessary calls. Three Secret Service agents were on their way; he was assured they would arrive tomorrow. In the meantime, Jack made certain security provisions. He moved Alicia into the basement of his house and kept her away from all the windows.
The following afternoon, the Secret Service agents arrived in town. They drove straight to Jack’s home and, at his direction, parked the nondescript government sedan around the back of the house. For three days, they interviewed Alicia, looked at her notebooks, and listened to her explanations. Phone calls were made, and an operation was put together. Finally, they left.
At the car, one agent turned to Jack and said, “Could you keep her here for a couple of days? We’ll be initiating a takedown within the next week. This is probably the safest place for her while that goes down.”
The Secret Service takedown of one of the most effective and elusive mob-connected counterfeiting operations in US history made national news. A week later, the arrests included the who’s who of organized crime. The names read like a list from a gangster movie, and the dominoes started falling almost immediately.
Alicia’s greatest fear was that she would have to testify. The Secret Service suggested that if it came to that, she could do it via camera without even leaving town. And with Jack’s hand firmly clutched in hers, she was able to deliver her testimony without risking her life.
The court case concluded four months later. Hefty prison sentences were handed out, and the Secret Service sent word that Alicia was no longer in immediate danger. When Jack broke the news, he added, “That means you can go your own way now. You’re no longer a prisoner.”
Alicia bit her lower lip. “Do you want me to go?”
Jack shook his head slowly. “Now I don’t,” he said. “What I want is to take you out to dinner. And perhaps when we get back, we could move your stuff from the basement.”
Now, that’s a story where things went from seemingly hopeless to completely victorious. As for whether a cop should never become entangled with a criminal, no matter their feelings? Well, that’s a complicated question. Sometimes, circumstances blur the lines, and it’s not always black and white. If you’ve ever come across a stranger with a fantastic story, let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear it. Thank you for watching, and catch you in the next video!”
