The Counterfeiter Chapter One: Busted

Cliff gets arrested

Cliff Evans sat in his Harlem apartment smoking a blunt near stacks and stacks of counterfeit 20s unaware that in the hallway outside his apartment, several plainclothes federal officers were in position just waiting for the moment to bust in and arrest him. It was November 1996 around 2pm and life as Cliff knew it was over but he didn’t know that just yet.

Cliff called the apartment at 140^th street and St. Nicholas Avenue “the Chop Zone” because, he said, “That’s where all the money got chopped up.” He meant counterfeit money. There was about $80,000 in fake currency in the apartment that day. Cliff and his crew had been making counterfeit money for months. Now he was sitting in a back room, waiting for his partner Teddy Olulenu to arrive. The dude was late but Cliff barely noticed because he was so high. The reason Olulenu was late was because he'd been arrested. After confessing to law enforcement, Olulenu called Cliff to say he had to see him right away.

Cliff was a young Black man who’d finished at Columbia University months earlier. His older brother Joe was back home in Chicago after doing five years in federal prison and many had thought that Cliff going to Columbia meant he would not end up in prison like his brother. When Olulenu called, though, the feds were listening. For a decade, Cliff had been molded by teachers at one of America’s greatest prep schools and an Ivy League university, but all of their work was flushed down the toilet the night he'd decided to run a criminal enterprise built around distributing money that came from a photocopier.