In the tradition of Catch Me If You Can and The Wolf of Wall Street comes a new true-to-life thriller by a Quebec con man

On an early morning in May 2012, dozens of agents from the RCMP and the United States Secret Service converged on the home of Frank Bourassa in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, to arrest him on suspicion of counterfeiting. While they did find a million dollars on the premises, they could have had no idea just how much money Frank had created by hand. Frank Bourassa had carefully crafted and distributed $250 million in US twenty-dollar bills that were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

For years, Frank Bourassa had run a perfectly legitimate manufacturing company alongside a less legitimate drug enterprise. When the pot market collapsed, followed by a series of panic attacks, Bourassa became desperate to find a new way of making a dishonest living. That’s when he decided that instead of earning money, he would print his own. He spent an entire year as a student and scholar of the world’s currencies to the exclusion of all else. He mastered inks, fibres, papers and chemical processes, changing his identity as often as it took to persuade paper manufacturers, printing shops and others to help him produce, transport and market his highly discounted merchandise. When all was said and done, authorities called Bourassa’s the best counterfeit bills they had ever seen.

Frank Bourassa's profile page

Mark Warren is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

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