The Counterfeiter Chap 4: Cliff Was Dying To Be A Criminal

He made sure everyone at Columbia knew

Continuing the story of Cliff Evans the counterfeiter I knew—we met in high school. Evans has made it from the streets of Chicago to the ivy-covered walls of the famed New England prep school Milton Academy. But he still clings to dreams of being a criminal…

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The vast majority of the Black kids who went to Milton, and schools like it, graduated and became successful in a wide variety of fields. For a tiny group of people, however, things went sour. The street knowledge they had before prep school mixed with what they learned while in school created a dangerous concoction. Take the story of John Forte.

John was a child of rough Brownsville, Brooklyn, who won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of the most prestigious prep schools in America. He fit in well, graduated from Exeter, went on to NYU, and left after a year to pursue his dream of making it in the music industry. He got close with Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill. He released an album that was solid but went nowhere. He was in his mid-20s and wasn’t setting the world on fire like he’d expected. Forte wasn’t making a ton of money, but he had some fame and he felt a need to keep up appearances and to continue living in a style befitting the two very exclusive worlds he straddled—famous rappers and Exeter grads.

But how?

One night, he met a man with no day job who thought nothing of buying several multi-hundred dollar bottles of champagne at dinner. Forte was impressed. The two began talking about helping one another out. In 2000, a pair of girls from New York, friends of Forte’s, traveled to Mexico to pick something up for him. On their way back, they were arrested. They called Forte repeatedly from a motel near Houston, never telling him that the phone was tapped. He told them, “Put the ice cream in the tub.” The federal agents listening took that as proof that he knew they were transporting cocaine.