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Details the story of Artur Virgilio Alves Reis, who developed an ingenious scheme to legally counterfeit Portugal's currency
Genre: non-fiction
Publication date: May 1992 (I read the most recent Portuguese translation of this book, published in March 2002)
Mature content: no
Review: This book contains a very detailed account of what is still considered today one of the biggest financial frauds in the world - when one man managed to deceive a country, a central bank, one of the most renowned printing houses in England, several diplomats and a host of other people and entities in the 1920s
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Overall, Alves dos Reis genius idea was not to counterfeit money - but to counterfeit the contracts that allowed him to have that money printed (at a time when central banks of a lot of countries outsourced the printing of bank notes) in the same printing house the Portuguese Central Bank used. So, in essence, those bank notes were equal to the original ones and even the central bank missed the differences when confronted with the first suspicions that there was counterfeit money circulating in Portugal.
The last part of the book is a bit confusing, because there are lots of transcriptions from the trials both in Portugal and in England and it's easy to lose track of who said what. Also, there were a few geographical inconsistencies here and there - which will only be noticeable to those of us born and bread in Portugal and which are familiar with the towns and locations being mentioned.
Overall, a nice book if you love the genre, though I'm guessing I may be a bit biased here since I was already partly familiar with the story (also, the Portuguese cover is much nicer than the English one...)
Happy readings,
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