They seem to have fallen into counterfeiting almost by accident. Anton hoped to open his own photoengraving shop, and racked up debt buying machinery and other materials. He claimed that a house fire consumed all of the family’s possessions; Anton had no insurance and fell deeper into debt. When he lost the lease on an apartment, he later wrote, “it was then that the idea entered my mind” to forge treasury notes.
He chose the two-dollar bill because it was the highest denomination he had on hand. Although Agent Gammon later portrayed Anton as a skilled engraver, his counterfeits were shoddy: he made lithographic prints of the front and back of a real two-dollar certificate, glued them together, and then added red and blue ink marks. The bills would not have had the same weight and tactile quality as genuine certificates, which were made under the immense force of a steel intaglio press, giving the paper a subtly grooved texture.
Even if Anton and Selma’s counterfeits had been more convincing, it’s unlikely that they would have eluded the Javert-like Gammon and the small-business owners of Rochester for very long. Commerce at the time was highly localized; Selma’s daily shopping orbit would have run to family-owned stores within a few blocks of her home. “No one knew her, which would have been helpful in terms of passing the notes initially,” Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters,” told me. “But then everyone would remember the stranger who came in.”
Some women shovers would bring babies or children with them, “so that they would seem like harried, overwhelmed mothers, and perhaps authentically so,” Mihm said. “The children oftentimes functioned as a kind of diversion.” My great-grandmother had four little boys at home, ages eight, six, four, and two. But she worked alone.
When Selma did not return home on the evening of December 22, 1906, Anton panicked and burned the printing plates and the remaining counterfeit bills. The following day, Agent Gammon conducted a search of the Winter home, where he “found no counterfeit money or plates but a very large amount of machinery and cameras” that filled an entire room.