Who would look at the container itself while searching the contents for bogus bills?

They began scattering their bogus bills on streets about three months ago - money-side up.

The bogus bills are designed to look like money so people will pick them up and see the X-rated ads on the other side.

In fact, the devices exist to reject bogus bills.

Trashvertising is not limited to bogus bills.

Bogus bills passed easily.

In addition, he said, the county is only a couple of train stops from New York City, where many of the bogus bills probably originate.

When counterfeiters began producing excellent copies several years ago, Washington realized that in time there could be enough bogus bills to undermine trust in the dollar.

He worked at the Electric Boat Company in Groton and had purchased the bogus bills from a co-worker in Rhode Island.

The euro, which goes into circulation in 12 European countries on Jan. 1, has been shielded from the public until now for fear that counterfeiters would make bogus bills.

Cotton smugglers in the south quickly began buying Upham's novelty notes, trimming off the notice at the bottom and flooding the Confederate economy with the bogus bills.

Metro-North officials said the commutation-pass counterfeiter worked differently from old-time bill forgers like the one in the movie "Mister 880," who made bogus bills and gave them to the poor.

But the story of the bogus bills also reminds us just how bad an idea that tax cut - originally offered, say the political reporters, to ward off Steve Forbes - really is.

Mid-sentence, he suddenly scanned the walls around him, all hung with bogus bills, and commented, "There may be a few of those fellows painting pictures like these fellows, in a few years."

But the conspirators are not concentrating on any specific companies; indeed, industry executives said, virtually every insurer that does business in states where the scheme has emerged, like Florida, has been deluged with the bogus bills.

Rodriguez could be the target for every fan's venom over today's strike date because he makes more money than any other player in baseball, but he has not had hundreds of bogus bills floating in his face.

"This is very detrimental to the consumer," said Joyce Hansen, an executive with Integrity Plus Services, an insurance fraud detection company in Minneapolis that has uncovered millions of dollars in bogus bills since last spring.

The bogus bills were to have been exchanged for foreign currency through an intermediary, an Irish national, and the foreign money was then to have been exchanged for American money on the legitimate exchange market, the authorities said.

But the presses must be close, the vision of The Shadow could not be surpassed on Earth, he would have seen any unusual signs, and an operation as large as the counterfeit ring that could flood the world with bogus bills had to leave signs.

Although McBain is attentive to all these clowns, he is especially solicitous of Alice's ex-con brother-in-law, a long-distance trucker improbably named Rafe, who drops by, parks his rig and decides to get in on the action by stealing the bogus bills from the kidnappers.

The 43-count indictment charged a soldier in the Gambino crime family, Edward Garafolo; his son Mario, a union business agent for Local 79 of the Laborers union; and a fourth man with fraud for the bogus bills and extortion that took place at the agency's headquarters project.

They also like cities with big casinos, which means Atlantic City and Las Vegas, where they hope no one will notice that they bought a stack of chips with a few thousand in lunch paper, as the bogus bills are sometimes known, and then cashed the chips out for real currency.

In announcing the breakup of the ring, the Suffolk County District Attorney, James M. Catterson, was joined by Samuel Zona, resident agent in charge of the Secret Service on Long Island, who rated the quality of the bogus bills as 6 on a 10-point scale.

For example, some bogus bills used a series of names - Cedars Medical Imaging, General Medical X-Ray Inc., Mercy Medical Center Inc. and X-Ray & Lab/Tech Medical Groups - which all reported the same Miami address, which was a postal box.