“The green goods game worked like this: Operators sent out letters or “circulars” throughout the United States claiming that they possessed stolen or discarded currency engraving plates from the U.S. Treasury. The circular offered genuine-looking counterfeit money, or “green goods,” to prospective buyers at cut-rate prices. For one hundred dollars one could purchase twelve hundred dollars in counterfeit notes; six hundred dollars bought ten thousand dollars of the same. For purchasing the maximum, the individual was promised “states rights,” or a monopoly on the green goods in his region. . . .

The most successful green goods operations required considerable finance, thoughtful planning, elaborate hierarchies, and police or political protection. Leading financial backers, or “capitalists,” supplied bankrolls of three thousand to twenty thousand dollars to display before potential victims, a huge sum of money in an age when unskilled workers earned less than one thousand dollars annually. . . .

The best defense . . . was that the green goods game was legal. Since such swindlers displayed genuine currency during their transactions, they were not guilty of fraud, counterfeiting, or any other statutory crime. . . . A cunning green goods operator used only legal tender . . . ‘which he pretends to be counterfeit.’”

—Timothy J Gilfoyle, from A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York, 2006.