How I Caught The World's Best Counterfeiter | Secret Service Agent Brad Beeler
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What motivates individuals to counterfeit money?
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We were chasing a ghost. He's the best counterfeiter in the world. Grabbed the Rolling Stone. I opened it up, and there is his face on a $100 bill. The king of counterfeit. Went to college and grad school for criminology, and when I did that, did an internship with the Secret Service. It just seemed like an interesting career. So it was one of those things where I tried out for it. After a couple years, after I got my master's degree and was blessed, had kind of a square life, I guess, so to speak. I always was staying out of trouble, not using drugs, those types of things. And I was blessed to start in Chicago.
They just write you a letter?
Uh, yeah.
You get a phone, no phone call. Two guys don't show up at the door.
Well, if they did, they showed up at the door, uh, basically read me the, Hey, this is going to be, you're going to be traveling. You're probably going to get divorced X, Y, and Z. They, I mean, really kind of try to talk you out of it. Uh, you had a, I had to do a polygraph. The background check was crazy. Um, so it was one of those things where I was blessed to be able to kind of navigate that process, but it was something that I've been married for 27 years. So my wife at the time knew that that's what I wanted to do. So she was, uh, on board on the front end of it.
And you went to, you said Chicago, right?
Yeah, so six months of training, half down in Georgia and then half up in Beltsville, Maryland. And then after that, my first duty station was Chicago, where I got assigned to counterfeit.
Okay, off the bat, like, do they give you a guy? Like, they don't just put you at a desk. Don't you have, like, a partner or somebody to show you the ropes?
Yeah, luckily, I had a field training officer that was a third-generation Chicago cop, and so luckily, being a snot-nosed kid, I didn't know much when it came to the streets of Chicago. So he really did, and that was wonderful for me to be able to kind of start out in that regard. I mean, we'd still do protection. I think a lot of people, you know, they hear Secret Service, they think, oh, all you do is protection, right? We were started in 1865. It was the actual—the last act— that Abraham Lincoln signed into law before he went to Ford's Theater, one of the great ironies of history is he got together with Alan Pinkerton and said, hey, the Confederate States of America are literally counterfeiting half the money supply, so they used it as an instrument of a war.
So we need people that can go work undercover cases, that can go in there, work informants, and try to stop this. And they did a really good job of that. After that, after a third assassination in 1901 with McKinley, they said, hey, we need to have somebody step in here and kind of stop this type of stuff. So up to that point, they worked against the Ku Klux Klan. They worked civil rights. And nine of our agents actually started, were the first agents to be what ultimately became the FBI. So it was really investigative-driven work. up until you know the 1900s when we started taking over protection is mckinley the one that got shot and it was at his speech or a bible or something so that bullet hit yeah so that i believe that was uh peter roosevelt oh yeah and that was an attempt he had an attempt yeah i just happened to be in the right spot to save him yeah
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What motivates individuals to counterfeit money?
0:00–4:22
2
How did Art Williams become the world's best counterfeiter?
4:22–8:29
3
What challenges did Secret Service agents face in catching counterfeiters?
8:29–47:43
4
What led to Art Williams' eventual arrest and case closure?
47:43–59:20
5
What humorous incident occurred during the polygraph process?
59:20–59:47
6
How do psychological factors affect polygraph results?
59:47–1:00:34
7
What strategies can be used to build rapport during interrogations?
1:00:34–1:01:06
8
What insights does Brad share about the importance of communication?
1:01:06–1:55:38
Speakers
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