The Counterfeit Artist

The Counterfeit Artist

His neighbors wondered how the recent immigrant always seemed to have so much cash. Some of it was in big bills. His small farm in New Jersey couldn’t produce enough to give him that kind of spending money. When they asked the distinguished gentleman, he would demurely reply in a heavy German accent that he was receiving a pension from the Prussian army.

When he entered a small neighborhood grocery store to purchase some turnip greens, he handed the clerk a twenty-dollar bill. In 1887 not many people paid with bills that large. It wouldn’t be easy to find change for twenty-five cents’ worth of greens. Then as the clerk rummaged through her drawer looking for change, she noticed ink on her fingers. She was shocked. The German was a longtime friend. Surely he wouldn’t give her a bill that wasn’t genuine. The clerk shrugged off her suspicions and handed the man his change.

Later she had second thoughts. Twenty dollars was two weeks’ salary in 1887. So she reluctantly summoned the local police. As it turned out, treasury officials had spent eleven years trying to track down the mysterious forger who had been circulating counterfeit bills in the Northeast. Having no clue as to his identity, agents nicknamed him Jim the Penman.

Nine years later, the German tried to pay a bartender with a fifty-dollar note. When the barkeep’s wet hands smudged the ink, he called the authorities. Secret Service agents arrested Emanuel Ninger. When they searched his home, they found expensive paper and sophisticated paintbrushes. Ninger had taken weeks meticulously, painstakingly hand painting each bill. He may have created seven hundred counterfeit bills in eighteen years—many works of art, highly valued by collectors today.

Though the public admired him as a Robin Hood figure, the Feds weren’t amused. Ninger spent six years in the penitentiary. When he got out, he took a stab at counterfeiting British pound notes. He just couldn’t go straight. But his isn’t the usual story of crime that doesn’t pay. It’s much more tragic than that. His is the story of a life and talent wasted.

When the Secret Service agents confiscated his counterfeiting paraphernalia, they also seized three portraits that he had painted. After his arrest, they were sold at public auction for $16,000. That averages out to more than $5,000 a portrait—a fabulous sum in 1896. Ninger later admitted that it took the same amount of time to paint a twenty-dollar bill as it did a $5,000 portrait. Yet when he got out of prison, he went back to counterfeiting! Emanuel Ninger’s story of a wasted life begs a question of us all: Are we misusing our energy and talents in pursuit of lesser things when God has made us to create eternal things? Here’s a contemporary take on something Sidney J. Harris once said:

People make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit people.

Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal. Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal.

Matthew 6:19-20