July 30, 2019 • 34 mins
Artur Virgilio Alves dos Reis had a gift. He wasn't the smartest kid growing up, nor was he the most athletic -- he was, however, one of Europe's most talented forgers. After a string of various cons, he decided to go big. How big, you ask? Tune in to learn how one lucky conman almost single-handedly brought down the entire Portuguese economy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to Ridiculous History, and thank you so much for tuning in. Today.
We're talking a little bit about money, and money when
you think of it is a very strange, strange thing. Hi,
I'm ben, Hey, I'm remember that every time I got money,
I always bring up the r M song strange Currency's like,
I don't know why you mean to me when I
called on the telephone, so I remember, um, but it's
(00:50):
called strange currency. And today it is definitely about some
strange currency. Um. It's sort of about forgery, but not
really about forgery. It's about manipulating a monetary system to
one's own personal gain. It's about a very very slick huckster. Um.
I was pretty impressed by his work here. Uh. And
it's about the country of Portugal. Yeah, it's Uh. It
(01:11):
is indeed relating to all of those things I was.
I was quite excited as always to look up the
currency of foreign countries, and our super producer, Casey Pegram
can attest to this fact as well. Casey, wouldn't you say,
in general, US money is pretty boring compared to the
(01:31):
currency of other countries. I think so but you know,
part of that could just be because we're used to it,
so if anything else seems kind of exotic. But yeah,
I will agree that in general, foreign currencies didn't have
a little more going on. Yeah, they've got like some
some shiny hologrammatic parts, which may be a word I
just made up. Uh, they've got a richer color palette,
(01:53):
you know, and sometimes they're different sizes depending on the amounts.
I believe hologrammatics is the language of telegrams. Oh okay,
that's what that is. Now I'm kidding. I think that
that's you just coined a new a new term. Um.
But remember when um, the US mentor whatever you want
to call it, the Federal Mint, the Federal Mint, the Reserve, whatever, Yeah,
re issued all of those kind of flashier, harder to
(02:15):
counterfeit notes, and everyone was like, these look just wrong.
But what they were doing was kind of trying to
make them a little bit more like European currency or
like currency from abroad. It was a little more colorful.
It had like the heads were bigger. There was things
about the design of them that were a little less drab.
The security stripped in there for everything over a five
(02:36):
dollar bill. Yeah, those those are pretty neat. Look, it
shouldn't surprise any of us to learn that there is
a huge industry dedicated to preventing counterfeit notes bank notes. However,
there is an equally huge industry dedicated to creating counterfeit
bank notes. And the war goes on and on tail
(02:57):
as old as time. Today's story is about something called
the Portuguese bank note crisis of nineteen five. Now, it's
no secret here on Ridiculous History we tend to I
don't know if I would say we we love a
good con but you have to respect a good hustle,
you know. Maybe maybe it's because we're far enough away
(03:18):
from this disaster that it hasn't directly affected us. But
tell us what you think. Tell us if you think
this is a clever plot, tell us if you think
this guy got lucky. Who is this guy, you may ask,
We're so glad you asked. His name is Alvis dos
Race born Arto Virgilio Alvis Race in Lisbon in September.
(03:42):
Another thing we love on Ridiculous History is a just
the perfect sucker, and the story is full of them.
Um as a couple of players that we should have
been aware of what Rays was doing, but they just
seemed to to not be for for just pure ignorance
or laziness or whatever. We'll get to that. Uh. So
Reyes was born, as you said, been eight in Portugal.
(04:05):
He was born into a poor family, but he had moxie. Been.
He had moxie. He had that entrepreneurial spirit because he
was born on the lower financial side of things and
maybe didn't have as many opportunities. He had to make
his own opportunities in the form of things like passing
bad checks, um, little you know, money laundering schemes. And
(04:27):
then he gradually worked his way up to the big show,
which we're going to get to uh in today's episode. UM.
He studied initially to be an engineer, UM, but decided
to give that up and instead he got married. And
then in nineteen sixteen, UM, he decided to go to
Angola rather than France, UM to serve in the army.
(04:49):
And this is my favorite part, this is where the
hustle really begins. We we already said he didn't graduate
from university, but he did have something with him that
he carried along to Angola that was a diploma, a
certified diploma that qualified him and like an ungodly absurd
amount of disciplines. Right, then that's right. Let's talk a
little bit about this degree that seems perhaps uh too
(05:14):
good to be true. And then well, and then I
want to jump back to his earliest known work in
this regard. Okay, So he has this signed diploma from
the Polytechnic School of Engineering, Oxford University. He is, according
to this diploma, an expert in no less than twenty
one subjects all the engineerings the cavalcade of engineerings, uh, geometry, physics, yeah, yeah,
(05:39):
And this diploma was not just signed, but it was
notarized in CenTra. Now, who in Angola would dare to
question such an authentic document, especially when it was notarized
by someone in the Portuguese bureaucracy. This makes it a
confidence job, full disclosure. He made the diploma and this
(06:03):
is actually not his first forgery. Earlier he had used
a bad check to buy part of a company somewhere
in Portugal and make himself, if not independently wealthy, a
man of comfortable means. And in Angola he takes a
job working on the railways. He has a desk clerk
(06:25):
basically because he did actually have some aptitude for engineering
and he always wore overalls. He quickly became known as
the monkey engineer and people said, you know what, maybe
he's a weird dude, but he makes the trains run
and using his duplicity is manipulative tactics. He soon became
(06:49):
the acting Chief Engineer of the Angola Railways again on
the basis of this entirely uh, this entirely fictitious diploma.
So fast forward to nineteen twenty two. At this point,
Reyes has been able to kind of parlay his political
standing within the Angola Railway Company into UM, a position
(07:13):
of much more social prominence where he has a rented
home in Lisbon for his family, very stylish in a
good part of town. UM. He has a car dealership
that sells us cars, and he also has set up
a company that is in shipping and receiving goods to
and from Angola where he's made those important connections. But
he needs fresh capital for this company to keep it going,
(07:36):
doesn't he, And he finds another company that is ailing.
It's called the Royal trans African Railway Company of Angola
or Embaka, and RIAZ becomes incredibly interested in Embaka because
he knows there's the equivalent of one thousand dollars in
US currency laying around in the company accounts. And we
(07:57):
have a quote from yas some help about this. He
says in the Materialistic Will, there are neither honest men,
no rogues. There are only victims and the vanquished. So
I had no hesitation and gaining control of the company
and making use of this shareholders money. Spoken like a
true rogue ish um fiend. He's like a seinestro to me.
(08:20):
If you're familiar with Green Lantern or one of the
cartoon bad guy, the type who ties people to train tracks.
He's got like a a picture. This is not true.
You can find pictures of him. I picture him having
a really sharp, pointing mustache that he sort of curls
around with when he's doing evil. You know, totally exactly.
So we're a theme in the story that we keep
(08:40):
seeing is people not calling this guy on his bs
or him presenting people side unseen with documents or checks
or um anything like. You know, it goes all the
way back to the college degree. It's him passing these
things off as being real and nobody bothering to do
their due diligence and checking behind it, and that continue
is exactly he says. You know, I see Ambaca and
(09:06):
he's twiddling his mustaches and so on, and he writes
some checks out of his New York bank. These checks
take eight days to get across the pond, and he
he kind of lies, does a little bit of showman
ship to wrangle a month's free credit, and he uses
that free credit to buy control of Ambaca, making the
(09:28):
US checks good with Ambaca money, and then he also
buys control of the South Angola Mining Company. At this
time he meets some future accomplices we Bandiera Uh, the
brother of the Portuguese ambassador to the Netherlands, and a
Dutch financier named Carol Morong, as well as a German
(09:50):
spy named Adolph Hinnies. I like this ocean is eleven vibe.
It really does have have this vibe, and it's going
to get even even crazier. But he doesn't get away
with Ambaca, does he. No, he doesn't get away with Ambaca,
and he gets into prison um for embezzlement um. And
I believe that was thrown out and it was replaced
(10:13):
with just being fraud because of the check fraud, and
he's released on ten thou dollar us UH or the
equivalent US bail um. But then he is tried and
he is sent to prison, where he hatches his master plan,
which is the subject of today's episode. Right. Oddly enough,
he was a freeman pretty soon after Right. He only
(10:35):
served fifty four days. He maintained that there was a
criminal conspiracy, that it was some equivalent of the deep
state that put him down. And uh. While he was
in jail, he did not waste his time. He worked
on a scheme, a thing that today we call the
Portuguese bank note crisis. Here's how it happened. So Riez
(10:59):
has a lot of time m in jail, you know
what I mean. He's picturing with like a little piece
of chalk or charcoal, putting a dash for every day
he's locked up. And while he's locked up, he says,
you know, I think there's something weird about the Bank
of Portugal, because the Bank of Portugal prints bank notes,
but they don't record their serial numbers very accurately, and
(11:23):
they don't tell the government about how many notes are
or are not in circulation. And then he has another
lightbulb moment. Just picture him turning on light bulbs just
scattered around him in the air. So click, they don't
you know, they're not that great with recording their serial numbers.
And then click they don't tell the government how much
(11:44):
money they make, and then click. Portugal hasn't been on
the gold standards since so the only real expense involved
in issuing these notes is the cost of printing them.
And then he starts to do a little math, right,
He does do a little math um and he comes
up with the following. He figures that, um, if you
(12:08):
issued about three dred million escudos, which is around three
million eighty nine pounds, that would not be enough to
trigger any alarms, nor would it initially at least disrupt
the flow of currency um in the state through the
banking system. So that's how much he can get away with, right,
(12:30):
and that is a huge amount of scratch cash or
pony bones. But my question is this, though, Ben, how
is he directly benefit from this. He's getting the cash
and he's splitting it with his UH co conspirators and
then they're just spending it on goods and injecting it
back into the system like very quickly. Is not that
the idea that seems to be the idea. We also
have to remember that the only reason we're fortunate enough
(12:51):
to have this episode today is because the guy gets caught.
So spoiler alert, here's what he does. And to to
explain the admitted genius of this, we have to talk
a little bit about how counterfeiting actually works. So, as
we mentioned at the top of the show, there have
(13:13):
been tons and tons and tons of attempts to counterfeit
various types of different currency. Sometimes it's been something as
lazy as someone at home using photo shop and an
inkjet printer also side note, don't do that. And then
other times there have been state sponsored campaigns, like the
North Korean supernotes, which were so good that when they
(13:38):
were in circulation, US authorities said the best way to
tell whether this was a fake North Korean one bill
was that it was actually higher quality than the real
US currency. Anyway, despite all these different attempts to counterfeit things,
they all have this one thing in common. We're taking
(13:59):
actual bank notes or currency and we're creating fake versions
of it. Here's where Rayas is brilliant. He says, you
know what, why print fake bank notes when we could
print the real thing. He doesn't want to make counterfeit money, nol.
He wants to illegally make real money. And that's the
(14:21):
mind blowing part about the story is like we think about,
you know, when we're talking the top of the show
about the uh you know how our monetary system prints
money under lock and key within a government facility. Right,
This is not the case. They're essentially, you know, farming
out the printing of their money to like a private
company that you know, has the plates, the the engraved
(14:45):
plates or whatever to make the currency, has the equipment,
and just essentially operates on a not a freelance like
on a contract basis. Right. So Rayas in typical Rayas
form just goes to them with some forged document like saying, hey,
our government wants to invest in this company. Right, this
(15:06):
is this Angola Railway company, right, and we need you
to print this many scuto notes. Right. They go to
the printer that already was working for the Bank of
Portugal Waterlo and Sons and with exactly what you're describing,
all these forged documents that have questionable notarization, he convinces
(15:30):
them to print all these five hundred escudo notes. And
here's what's crazy about it. It worked. By the time
this operation was done, there were more bogus reprints of
five escudo notes, then there were officially issued as scudo notes.
(15:53):
And it's hard to imagine this working now, right because,
as you said, I like that phrase you used, under
lock and key. That's a most currencies printed these days.
But yes, took it to the maximum, right to the
limit and beyond. People started asking questions pretty soon. The
printers first said, well, it's kind of weird that we're
(16:15):
printing duplicate serial numbers. But Ray has dismissed these issues
because he said the notes would receive an overprint once
they arrived in Lisbon, but before they were sent to Angola.
And I don't know what that means. That sounds made up, Ben,
That sounds like something he just kind of came up
with on the fly exactly. Um, because there's a really
(16:39):
great article on p mg notes dot com about the
Portuguese banknote crisis and it characterizes it as such. So yeah,
the folks at Waterlow were like, hey, what gives We're
gonna make a call to to the government and guess
who their contact was in the government. It was rayas
you know, like it's literally like the whole thing where
(17:00):
you create an alibi by giving the detective a phone
number to one of your associates and then does a
voice and says, oh, yeah, totally he was he was there.
I mean, this is the classic con job material. And
this guy keeps not getting called on it, not getting
called on it, over and over and over again, and
so he ends up getting two hundred thousand, five hundred
(17:22):
a scudo notes printed, which is somewhere in the neighborhood
of a hundred million escudos. Uh, and was about eighty
point eight eight percent of the entire Portuguese g d P. Yeah,
this is big money. Now, he wasn't a complete criminal
mastermind because he did get lucky. We later learned that
(17:45):
the printers sent a letter to the Bank of England
raising concerns about this, and somehow it got lost in
the mail between England and Portugal. So the first hints
that not all is on the up and up actually
occur not when Reez prints the money, but when he
attempts to launder the cash. So he and his associates
(18:09):
make a bunch of small real estate and commercial investments,
you know, and then they open a bank, the Banco
da Angola in Metropol, to help them launder this not
quite counterfeit money, and the bank at first people love
it because they can issue you low interest loans with
(18:30):
little or no deposit or security. There. They'll just give
you money, which is pretty strange when you think about that. Well,
here's what he wanted to do. He wanted to use
the currency to buy gold backed foreign currency and then
trade in the five hundred of scudo bills for smaller
denominations and then use that to buy tangible assets land, jewelry,
(18:52):
clothing businesses throughout Portugal and Angola. But the problem is
he was messing with so much money. This was equal
to almost a full percent of Portugal's GDP at the
time point eight eight percent, And if we want to
put that in perspective in these our modern days in
(19:13):
the US, that would mean that Yez received a hundred
and fifty billion dollars. So he essentially became a billionaire
over the span of a few months. And his plan
seemed pretty great. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, essentially what
he did was create kind of a micro economic boom
for Portugal. But it wasn't based on anything real, and
(19:35):
now he's like becoming a you know, a bank mogul,
and he's giving out all these loans with very low
interest rates that also aren't based on anything real. It's
all at a subterfuge to cover up his his crime.
And you know, like any boom manufacturer otherwise, oftentimes there
is a bust or or a recession or a bubble bursting, right,
(19:57):
And that absolutely happened, um and the um well, maybe
not quite yet, but that absolutely was on the way
to happening when the authorities began to investigate the Banco
d'anola de metropolit because they were illegally buying foreign backed
currency and that's no good. So while they were being investigated,
(20:19):
they had these reserves of some of those illegal bank
notes that we're not gonna call them counterfeit because they
were in fact real bank notes. But they had those
duplicate serial numbers. Ha ha. That's where this house of
cars really begins to collapse. With those serial numbers. You
think they would have read flagged that earlier, but I
guess the bookkeeping system wasn't quite as sharp as it
(20:42):
could have been, which is how the operations started exactly.
It was only by chance that authorities managed to find
duplicate serial numbers. And and it's so strange because they
knew something was rotten in the state of Portuguese finance
is uh. If we're gonna make an awkward turner phrase there,
(21:03):
they knew something was rotten, but they could not pin
it down on him because again, any notes they found
were real. We should also point out this is let's
get to December of when the bank is actually busted
because they do somehow find these illegal duplicates. Rays is
twenty eight years old. Can you imagine in perspective? Do? Yeah,
(21:24):
he's done a lot with his life. Uh. And because
his associates and he can get word of an arrest warrant,
he and his associates know that the operation is burned.
You know what I mean. It's like now, it's like
the third act of the heist film. They've got to
get out of dodge. Some of his pals managed to escape. Yez, however,
(21:45):
chooses to stay and fight. He also and the Telegraph
has an interesting bit about this. He attempts to forge
documents suggesting that the Bank of Portugal was in on
the scam that they had ordered him to do that,
and his forged documents are so freaking good that some
(22:06):
people believed him. They thought the whole plot was made
up by Portugal Central Bank. And for five years this
delaying tactic works. I want to find out more about
this guy, like where did he learn to ford so well?
Who is his like forgery mentor how do you just
figure like I guess it all went back to that
first bad check that he wrote, Who Yoda does he
have a Yeah? Exactly. He just kind of decide, oh,
(22:28):
this is a means to an end for me when
I have no money, I can just you know, at
a time where it was very people wanted this system
to work. They wanted to believe in it, right, So
he kind of capitalized on that and uh totally was
able to you know, work that in his favor continuously
with people not calling him on it. All he had
to do was be pretty good at forging the document
(22:50):
and then talk a good game. Right. Well, think about
it this way too. We have to think about the
time in which Riaz is operating. First off, most people
have not seen official documents except maybe a marriage certificate,
a death certificate, or birth certificate or maybe the deed
to some important tangible asset. So a lot of people
(23:11):
don't know what the real deal looks like. Secondly, a
lot of people don't have access to printing technology, or
their handwriting looks like chicken scratch. That's a problem that
Bedevil's people like me in the modern day. So there
was not a frame of reference for a lot of people,
and even people who were experts, like let's say the
(23:32):
government of Angola or something, they would not receive boiler
plate forms. One bank might have a different kind of form,
you know. So there's also not a single right way
to do a lot of this stuff other than the
bank notes. So it was easier for him to get away.
But he's still I don't want to undermine the guy's talent.
(23:53):
He still is like a dog with a ball. It's
very telling. It shows us a lot about raises care
to when we learned that instead of escaping and he
could have escaped, he not only stayed, he tried to
forge his way out of the problem that he had
forged himself into. So what happens They take five years
(24:18):
to actually get the trial going. What what happens to him?
Does he get away. Does he forge himself a law
degree and become the judge of his case? No, no,
Alas you know, like uh many master criminals. Um, I
don't know Alas is maybe the wrong word. Is the
guy so plucky? You know? I mean, yeah, he kind
of tanks the Portuguese economy single handedly. Okay, not cool,
(24:41):
but you gotta you gotta appreciate how young he is
and the stick to itiveness with which he kind of
handled this whole affair. Um, yeah, it's true. He gets
sentenced to twenty years in prison, Uh, that he serves
out in its entirety. Um. And during this time he
was known for, um, you know, making a case for
(25:01):
himself like you know, and absolutely zero remorse fashion ben
and saying, hey, why were my notes considered counterfeit when
they're absolutely indistinguishable from the real ones? Uh? And in
true poetic justice fashion, when he's finally released, he gets
offered a job at an at a bank. Yeah, he
(25:24):
doesn't take the job, which is interesting. He lives a
pretty sedate life. Uh, and he doesn't make a lot
of money. You will hear people say that he lived modestly,
and then you will hear people say he was impoverished.
He died of a heart attack on the ninth of
June nineteen fifty five, and his associates died. Two of
(25:47):
them died pretty soon after. I think Henny's died in
fifty seven. Bendetta died in nineteen sixty one. Moron was
tried in Holland ninety six and went to jail for
eleven months. He actually became a naturalized French citizen and
did pretty well for himself. He died wealthy in nineteen sixty.
(26:09):
The guy is Sir William Waterlow died before all of
these folks. He was the guy in charge of the
printing company in England. He became the Lord Mayor of
London for a time, but the scandal of the Portuguese
bank note crisis is largely thought to have contributed to
his early death in ninety one. And I want to
say I respect the hustle, I respect what Riez did.
(26:30):
But if you look at a picture of this guy,
he just looks you know, I want to keep this
a family show. He looks like a real pill. Have
you seen a picture of him? He looks like a pill.
I don't know if I want to hang out with him.
Hang on, Ben, you might be saying you seem a
little conflicted. You say you respect the hustle, but you
say the guy's a real pill. Which is it? Well,
(26:51):
we have to examine the consequences of this, and then
we also have to admit that Angola at the time
was being treated very, very poorly by Portugal. But you
here's the deal. You can't just print bank notes and
expect everything to be okay. This has enormous and catastrophic
financial consequence, right yeah, really really far reaching. Because of
(27:14):
that excess circulation UM. Again that wasn't based on anything
but the whim of a totally narcissistic, self serving con man. Uh.
The currency, the escudo lost UH an awful lot of
its value. All five hundred scudo notes were pulled from circulation,
(27:35):
and the Central Bank of Portugal UM was able to
figure out which ones were the fraudulent ones. By the way,
if you yourself want to identify one of these ray
as reprints from a from a genuine note, UM, you
need only look for serial number prefixes with double vowels
or prefixes above a N. And not only did this
(28:00):
make everyone lose all confidence in the Portuguese monetary system.
It may have even brought on a change in government.
There's a great article on this at intro to Global
Studies dot com by Sean Smallman and Kimberly Brown where
they put this way, the implication of Rayez's crimes have
been staggering. The first republic, that's the Portuguese Republic, ended
(28:22):
in a military coup in nineteen twenty six. While it
would be too much to say that the loss of
confidence in Portugal's monetary system caused the democracy to collapse,
this fraud contributed to the sense of crisis that made
the coup possible. He came for the bank notes, and
he accidentally started a revolution or contributed to it, and
(28:44):
the bank eventually sued the printers, the Bank of Portugal.
They won a settlement of six hundred thousand pounds. Waterloo
never really recovered, they got bought out, they got dissolved
in two thousand and nine. And because of these consequent
is you will often hear that the counterfeiting operation, god
(29:05):
is it even counterfeiting such a mind buggling thing. You'll
hear that Yez ran the most successful countering fitting operation
in history. It's the biggest one that i've heard of,
unless you're one of those fiat currency people who thinks
paper money in general is counterfeiting, right, yeah, sort of
like taxation is theft. Uh No, it's true. Um, it's again.
(29:27):
I'm completely taken aback by how easily he was able
to pull this off. It was just like the perfect crime.
But not necessarily because he was some kind of genius.
He just was a very very um he's very very
good at taking advantage of people's stupidity. And I would
argue that the overthrow of that government was pretty earned
(29:51):
because they clearly were quite an apt that they couldn't
see this coming or have any safeguards in place to
prevent it. And then we also would be remiss if
we don't talk a little bit about the state of
the Portuguese Empire. Why some people may ask would a
guy born in Lisbon go to Angola in this time?
(30:13):
At this time, Angola was a Portuguese colony, and it
had been since fifteen seventy five. Riez was taking advantage
of systemic issues in the colonial system from the start,
when he got into the import export and all the
railway and all that stuff. And he was not he
was not helping the people of Angola. Angola has had terrible,
(30:38):
terrible consequences of from its time being colonized, and those
consequences still carry on to the modern day. So the
all to say, it's not like the Portuguese Empire, the
government of Portugal was uh, you know, a bunch of
goody two shoes, good people or heroes, know what I mean.
(31:00):
It's not like there's a clear hero in this story now.
And it wasn't until nineteen seventy five that uh Angola
actually got its independence after a very brutal and bloody
guerrilla war um that also resulted in another coup in
lisbon Um, but ultimately the Alvar Agreement was signed that
(31:22):
did separate Angola from Portugal. And this whole Angolan War
of Independence which raised from the nineteen sixty one to
nineteen seventy four, was initially a result of uprising because
of forced labor practices by the colonizers in Portugal against
the the native folks in Angola, and that include forcing
(31:42):
them to cultivate cotton right slavery, Yeah, slavery, and in
this sort of incredibly unstable, in humane environment, criminals like
Riez can thrive. You know. In fact, if you think
about it, I guess we could. We could end on
somewhat of if not uplifting an interesting note here we
(32:07):
here's an interesting bank note to end on, very proud
of that one. Ray As may have arguably been successful,
just not in the way he intended. Because remember, know
how you earlier mentioned there's an easy way to find
a ray As five hundred scudo note right, the double
(32:28):
vowels and prefixes above. What Yeah, the thing is those
rays reprints are not worth five dred scudo anymore. If
you are lucky enough to find one. They're actually worth
over seven thousand, five hundred dollars. So the notes that
(32:50):
he printed have actually been quite successful nowadays, at least
as a curio item you know of of some note? Right? Well,
you can't, you know, you can't buy a ticket to
a Cheryl Crow concert with one. If only it could, Man,
if only you could. What a world? What a world?
Oh man? By the way, uh, friend of the show,
there's a band I told you about called Kyle Kraft
(33:12):
and Showboat Honey who are on tour right now. You
should check them out if they come to your city. Um,
they were playing at the Newport Folk Festival and their
keyboard player, Kevin Clark, actually posted a picture of himself
with a friend of the show and then nemesis of
the show, Cheryl crow. Um, So I'm gonna have to
ask him about, you know what what she was like
in person? Do tell Yeah, we'd like to I I
(33:33):
personally would like to get past all the all the
strange late night rambling, vaguely accusatory text messages that she
sends me. You know, I just Cheryl let me know
if I did something, because I'm a huge fan of
your music. Uh. So that is the story of Alvis
dos Reyes. We hope you enjoyed it. I hope that
(33:55):
you do take the time to check out a picture
of this guy, because he does look like he's a
he's a slick talker, as folks would say in ages past.
Uh And as always, thank you for tuning in. Big
thanks to Cheryl Crowe always every day, indeed is a
winding road, a road that hopefully winds its way back
around to our super producer Casey Pegram, who also gets
(34:17):
massive thanks. Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Research associates
Gabe Lozier and Ryan Barrish Big thanks to Jonathan Strickland
a k a. The Quister and you know what, Noel,
Thanks to you, Man, Hey Man, thanks to you too.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for
(34:42):
My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to Ridiculous History, and thank you so much for tuning in. Today.
We're talking a little bit about money, and money when
you think of it is a very strange, strange thing. Hi,
I'm ben, Hey, I'm remember that every time I got money,
I always bring up the r M song strange Currency's like,
I don't know why you mean to me when I
called on the telephone, so I remember, um, but it's
(00:50):
called strange currency. And today it is definitely about some
strange currency. Um. It's sort of about forgery, but not
really about forgery. It's about manipulating a monetary system to
one's own personal gain. It's about a very very slick huckster. Um.
I was pretty impressed by his work here. Uh. And
it's about the country of Portugal. Yeah, it's Uh. It
(01:11):
is indeed relating to all of those things I was.
I was quite excited as always to look up the
currency of foreign countries, and our super producer, Casey Pegram
can attest to this fact as well. Casey, wouldn't you say,
in general, US money is pretty boring compared to the
(01:31):
currency of other countries. I think so but you know,
part of that could just be because we're used to it,
so if anything else seems kind of exotic. But yeah,
I will agree that in general, foreign currencies didn't have
a little more going on. Yeah, they've got like some
some shiny hologrammatic parts, which may be a word I
just made up. Uh, they've got a richer color palette,
(01:53):
you know, and sometimes they're different sizes depending on the amounts.
I believe hologrammatics is the language of telegrams. Oh okay,
that's what that is. Now I'm kidding. I think that
that's you just coined a new a new term. Um.
But remember when um, the US mentor whatever you want
to call it, the Federal Mint, the Federal Mint, the Reserve, whatever, Yeah,
re issued all of those kind of flashier, harder to
(02:15):
counterfeit notes, and everyone was like, these look just wrong.
But what they were doing was kind of trying to
make them a little bit more like European currency or
like currency from abroad. It was a little more colorful.
It had like the heads were bigger. There was things
about the design of them that were a little less drab.
The security stripped in there for everything over a five
(02:36):
dollar bill. Yeah, those those are pretty neat. Look, it
shouldn't surprise any of us to learn that there is
a huge industry dedicated to preventing counterfeit notes bank notes. However,
there is an equally huge industry dedicated to creating counterfeit
bank notes. And the war goes on and on tail
(02:57):
as old as time. Today's story is about something called
the Portuguese bank note crisis of nineteen five. Now, it's
no secret here on Ridiculous History we tend to I
don't know if I would say we we love a
good con but you have to respect a good hustle,
you know. Maybe maybe it's because we're far enough away
(03:18):
from this disaster that it hasn't directly affected us. But
tell us what you think. Tell us if you think
this is a clever plot, tell us if you think
this guy got lucky. Who is this guy, you may ask,
We're so glad you asked. His name is Alvis dos
Race born Arto Virgilio Alvis Race in Lisbon in September.
(03:42):
Another thing we love on Ridiculous History is a just
the perfect sucker, and the story is full of them.
Um as a couple of players that we should have
been aware of what Rays was doing, but they just
seemed to to not be for for just pure ignorance
or laziness or whatever. We'll get to that. Uh. So
Reyes was born, as you said, been eight in Portugal.
(04:05):
He was born into a poor family, but he had moxie. Been.
He had moxie. He had that entrepreneurial spirit because he
was born on the lower financial side of things and
maybe didn't have as many opportunities. He had to make
his own opportunities in the form of things like passing
bad checks, um, little you know, money laundering schemes. And
(04:27):
then he gradually worked his way up to the big show,
which we're going to get to uh in today's episode. UM.
He studied initially to be an engineer, UM, but decided
to give that up and instead he got married. And
then in nineteen sixteen, UM, he decided to go to
Angola rather than France, UM to serve in the army.
(04:49):
And this is my favorite part, this is where the
hustle really begins. We we already said he didn't graduate
from university, but he did have something with him that
he carried along to Angola that was a diploma, a
certified diploma that qualified him and like an ungodly absurd
amount of disciplines. Right, then that's right. Let's talk a
little bit about this degree that seems perhaps uh too
(05:14):
good to be true. And then well, and then I
want to jump back to his earliest known work in
this regard. Okay, So he has this signed diploma from
the Polytechnic School of Engineering, Oxford University. He is, according
to this diploma, an expert in no less than twenty
one subjects all the engineerings the cavalcade of engineerings, uh, geometry, physics, yeah, yeah,
(05:39):
And this diploma was not just signed, but it was
notarized in CenTra. Now, who in Angola would dare to
question such an authentic document, especially when it was notarized
by someone in the Portuguese bureaucracy. This makes it a
confidence job, full disclosure. He made the diploma and this
(06:03):
is actually not his first forgery. Earlier he had used
a bad check to buy part of a company somewhere
in Portugal and make himself, if not independently wealthy, a
man of comfortable means. And in Angola he takes a
job working on the railways. He has a desk clerk
(06:25):
basically because he did actually have some aptitude for engineering
and he always wore overalls. He quickly became known as
the monkey engineer and people said, you know what, maybe
he's a weird dude, but he makes the trains run
and using his duplicity is manipulative tactics. He soon became
(06:49):
the acting Chief Engineer of the Angola Railways again on
the basis of this entirely uh, this entirely fictitious diploma.
So fast forward to nineteen twenty two. At this point,
Reyes has been able to kind of parlay his political
standing within the Angola Railway Company into UM, a position
(07:13):
of much more social prominence where he has a rented
home in Lisbon for his family, very stylish in a
good part of town. UM. He has a car dealership
that sells us cars, and he also has set up
a company that is in shipping and receiving goods to
and from Angola where he's made those important connections. But
he needs fresh capital for this company to keep it going,
(07:36):
doesn't he, And he finds another company that is ailing.
It's called the Royal trans African Railway Company of Angola
or Embaka, and RIAZ becomes incredibly interested in Embaka because
he knows there's the equivalent of one thousand dollars in
US currency laying around in the company accounts. And we
(07:57):
have a quote from yas some help about this. He
says in the Materialistic Will, there are neither honest men,
no rogues. There are only victims and the vanquished. So
I had no hesitation and gaining control of the company
and making use of this shareholders money. Spoken like a
true rogue ish um fiend. He's like a seinestro to me.
(08:20):
If you're familiar with Green Lantern or one of the
cartoon bad guy, the type who ties people to train tracks.
He's got like a a picture. This is not true.
You can find pictures of him. I picture him having
a really sharp, pointing mustache that he sort of curls
around with when he's doing evil. You know, totally exactly.
So we're a theme in the story that we keep
(08:40):
seeing is people not calling this guy on his bs
or him presenting people side unseen with documents or checks
or um anything like. You know, it goes all the
way back to the college degree. It's him passing these
things off as being real and nobody bothering to do
their due diligence and checking behind it, and that continue
is exactly he says. You know, I see Ambaca and
(09:06):
he's twiddling his mustaches and so on, and he writes
some checks out of his New York bank. These checks
take eight days to get across the pond, and he
he kind of lies, does a little bit of showman
ship to wrangle a month's free credit, and he uses
that free credit to buy control of Ambaca, making the
(09:28):
US checks good with Ambaca money, and then he also
buys control of the South Angola Mining Company. At this
time he meets some future accomplices we Bandiera Uh, the
brother of the Portuguese ambassador to the Netherlands, and a
Dutch financier named Carol Morong, as well as a German
(09:50):
spy named Adolph Hinnies. I like this ocean is eleven vibe.
It really does have have this vibe, and it's going
to get even even crazier. But he doesn't get away
with Ambaca, does he. No, he doesn't get away with Ambaca,
and he gets into prison um for embezzlement um. And
I believe that was thrown out and it was replaced
(10:13):
with just being fraud because of the check fraud, and
he's released on ten thou dollar us UH or the
equivalent US bail um. But then he is tried and
he is sent to prison, where he hatches his master plan,
which is the subject of today's episode. Right. Oddly enough,
he was a freeman pretty soon after Right. He only
(10:35):
served fifty four days. He maintained that there was a
criminal conspiracy, that it was some equivalent of the deep
state that put him down. And uh. While he was
in jail, he did not waste his time. He worked
on a scheme, a thing that today we call the
Portuguese bank note crisis. Here's how it happened. So Riez
(10:59):
has a lot of time m in jail, you know
what I mean. He's picturing with like a little piece
of chalk or charcoal, putting a dash for every day
he's locked up. And while he's locked up, he says,
you know, I think there's something weird about the Bank
of Portugal, because the Bank of Portugal prints bank notes,
but they don't record their serial numbers very accurately, and
(11:23):
they don't tell the government about how many notes are
or are not in circulation. And then he has another
lightbulb moment. Just picture him turning on light bulbs just
scattered around him in the air. So click, they don't
you know, they're not that great with recording their serial numbers.
And then click they don't tell the government how much
(11:44):
money they make, and then click. Portugal hasn't been on
the gold standards since so the only real expense involved
in issuing these notes is the cost of printing them.
And then he starts to do a little math, right,
He does do a little math um and he comes
up with the following. He figures that, um, if you
(12:08):
issued about three dred million escudos, which is around three
million eighty nine pounds, that would not be enough to
trigger any alarms, nor would it initially at least disrupt
the flow of currency um in the state through the
banking system. So that's how much he can get away with, right,
(12:30):
and that is a huge amount of scratch cash or
pony bones. But my question is this, though, Ben, how
is he directly benefit from this. He's getting the cash
and he's splitting it with his UH co conspirators and
then they're just spending it on goods and injecting it
back into the system like very quickly. Is not that
the idea that seems to be the idea. We also
have to remember that the only reason we're fortunate enough
(12:51):
to have this episode today is because the guy gets caught.
So spoiler alert, here's what he does. And to to
explain the admitted genius of this, we have to talk
a little bit about how counterfeiting actually works. So, as
we mentioned at the top of the show, there have
(13:13):
been tons and tons and tons of attempts to counterfeit
various types of different currency. Sometimes it's been something as
lazy as someone at home using photo shop and an
inkjet printer also side note, don't do that. And then
other times there have been state sponsored campaigns, like the
North Korean supernotes, which were so good that when they
(13:38):
were in circulation, US authorities said the best way to
tell whether this was a fake North Korean one bill
was that it was actually higher quality than the real
US currency. Anyway, despite all these different attempts to counterfeit things,
they all have this one thing in common. We're taking
(13:59):
actual bank notes or currency and we're creating fake versions
of it. Here's where Rayas is brilliant. He says, you
know what, why print fake bank notes when we could
print the real thing. He doesn't want to make counterfeit money, nol.
He wants to illegally make real money. And that's the
(14:21):
mind blowing part about the story is like we think about,
you know, when we're talking the top of the show
about the uh you know how our monetary system prints
money under lock and key within a government facility. Right,
This is not the case. They're essentially, you know, farming
out the printing of their money to like a private
company that you know, has the plates, the the engraved
(14:45):
plates or whatever to make the currency, has the equipment,
and just essentially operates on a not a freelance like
on a contract basis. Right. So Rayas in typical Rayas
form just goes to them with some forged document like saying, hey,
our government wants to invest in this company. Right, this
(15:06):
is this Angola Railway company, right, and we need you
to print this many scuto notes. Right. They go to
the printer that already was working for the Bank of
Portugal Waterlo and Sons and with exactly what you're describing,
all these forged documents that have questionable notarization, he convinces
(15:30):
them to print all these five hundred escudo notes. And
here's what's crazy about it. It worked. By the time
this operation was done, there were more bogus reprints of
five escudo notes, then there were officially issued as scudo notes.
(15:53):
And it's hard to imagine this working now, right because,
as you said, I like that phrase you used, under
lock and key. That's a most currencies printed these days.
But yes, took it to the maximum, right to the
limit and beyond. People started asking questions pretty soon. The
printers first said, well, it's kind of weird that we're
(16:15):
printing duplicate serial numbers. But Ray has dismissed these issues
because he said the notes would receive an overprint once
they arrived in Lisbon, but before they were sent to Angola.
And I don't know what that means. That sounds made up, Ben,
That sounds like something he just kind of came up
with on the fly exactly. Um, because there's a really
(16:39):
great article on p mg notes dot com about the
Portuguese banknote crisis and it characterizes it as such. So yeah,
the folks at Waterlow were like, hey, what gives We're
gonna make a call to to the government and guess
who their contact was in the government. It was rayas
you know, like it's literally like the whole thing where
(17:00):
you create an alibi by giving the detective a phone
number to one of your associates and then does a
voice and says, oh, yeah, totally he was he was there.
I mean, this is the classic con job material. And
this guy keeps not getting called on it, not getting
called on it, over and over and over again, and
so he ends up getting two hundred thousand, five hundred
(17:22):
a scudo notes printed, which is somewhere in the neighborhood
of a hundred million escudos. Uh, and was about eighty
point eight eight percent of the entire Portuguese g d P. Yeah,
this is big money. Now, he wasn't a complete criminal
mastermind because he did get lucky. We later learned that
(17:45):
the printers sent a letter to the Bank of England
raising concerns about this, and somehow it got lost in
the mail between England and Portugal. So the first hints
that not all is on the up and up actually
occur not when Reez prints the money, but when he
attempts to launder the cash. So he and his associates
(18:09):
make a bunch of small real estate and commercial investments,
you know, and then they open a bank, the Banco
da Angola in Metropol, to help them launder this not
quite counterfeit money, and the bank at first people love
it because they can issue you low interest loans with
(18:30):
little or no deposit or security. There. They'll just give
you money, which is pretty strange when you think about that. Well,
here's what he wanted to do. He wanted to use
the currency to buy gold backed foreign currency and then
trade in the five hundred of scudo bills for smaller
denominations and then use that to buy tangible assets land, jewelry,
(18:52):
clothing businesses throughout Portugal and Angola. But the problem is
he was messing with so much money. This was equal
to almost a full percent of Portugal's GDP at the
time point eight eight percent, And if we want to
put that in perspective in these our modern days in
(19:13):
the US, that would mean that Yez received a hundred
and fifty billion dollars. So he essentially became a billionaire
over the span of a few months. And his plan
seemed pretty great. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, essentially what
he did was create kind of a micro economic boom
for Portugal. But it wasn't based on anything real, and
(19:35):
now he's like becoming a you know, a bank mogul,
and he's giving out all these loans with very low
interest rates that also aren't based on anything real. It's
all at a subterfuge to cover up his his crime.
And you know, like any boom manufacturer otherwise, oftentimes there
is a bust or or a recession or a bubble bursting, right,
(19:57):
And that absolutely happened, um and the um well, maybe
not quite yet, but that absolutely was on the way
to happening when the authorities began to investigate the Banco
d'anola de metropolit because they were illegally buying foreign backed
currency and that's no good. So while they were being investigated,
(20:19):
they had these reserves of some of those illegal bank
notes that we're not gonna call them counterfeit because they
were in fact real bank notes. But they had those
duplicate serial numbers. Ha ha. That's where this house of
cars really begins to collapse. With those serial numbers. You
think they would have read flagged that earlier, but I
guess the bookkeeping system wasn't quite as sharp as it
(20:42):
could have been, which is how the operations started exactly.
It was only by chance that authorities managed to find
duplicate serial numbers. And and it's so strange because they
knew something was rotten in the state of Portuguese finance
is uh. If we're gonna make an awkward turner phrase there,
(21:03):
they knew something was rotten, but they could not pin
it down on him because again, any notes they found
were real. We should also point out this is let's
get to December of when the bank is actually busted
because they do somehow find these illegal duplicates. Rays is
twenty eight years old. Can you imagine in perspective? Do? Yeah,
(21:24):
he's done a lot with his life. Uh. And because
his associates and he can get word of an arrest warrant,
he and his associates know that the operation is burned.
You know what I mean. It's like now, it's like
the third act of the heist film. They've got to
get out of dodge. Some of his pals managed to escape. Yez, however,
(21:45):
chooses to stay and fight. He also and the Telegraph
has an interesting bit about this. He attempts to forge
documents suggesting that the Bank of Portugal was in on
the scam that they had ordered him to do that,
and his forged documents are so freaking good that some
(22:06):
people believed him. They thought the whole plot was made
up by Portugal Central Bank. And for five years this
delaying tactic works. I want to find out more about
this guy, like where did he learn to ford so well?
Who is his like forgery mentor how do you just
figure like I guess it all went back to that
first bad check that he wrote, Who Yoda does he
have a Yeah? Exactly. He just kind of decide, oh,
(22:28):
this is a means to an end for me when
I have no money, I can just you know, at
a time where it was very people wanted this system
to work. They wanted to believe in it, right, So
he kind of capitalized on that and uh totally was
able to you know, work that in his favor continuously
with people not calling him on it. All he had
to do was be pretty good at forging the document
(22:50):
and then talk a good game. Right. Well, think about
it this way too. We have to think about the
time in which Riaz is operating. First off, most people
have not seen official documents except maybe a marriage certificate,
a death certificate, or birth certificate or maybe the deed
to some important tangible asset. So a lot of people
(23:11):
don't know what the real deal looks like. Secondly, a
lot of people don't have access to printing technology, or
their handwriting looks like chicken scratch. That's a problem that
Bedevil's people like me in the modern day. So there
was not a frame of reference for a lot of people,
and even people who were experts, like let's say the
(23:32):
government of Angola or something, they would not receive boiler
plate forms. One bank might have a different kind of form,
you know. So there's also not a single right way
to do a lot of this stuff other than the
bank notes. So it was easier for him to get away.
But he's still I don't want to undermine the guy's talent.
(23:53):
He still is like a dog with a ball. It's
very telling. It shows us a lot about raises care
to when we learned that instead of escaping and he
could have escaped, he not only stayed, he tried to
forge his way out of the problem that he had
forged himself into. So what happens They take five years
(24:18):
to actually get the trial going. What what happens to him?
Does he get away. Does he forge himself a law
degree and become the judge of his case? No, no,
Alas you know, like uh many master criminals. Um, I
don't know Alas is maybe the wrong word. Is the
guy so plucky? You know? I mean, yeah, he kind
of tanks the Portuguese economy single handedly. Okay, not cool,
(24:41):
but you gotta you gotta appreciate how young he is
and the stick to itiveness with which he kind of
handled this whole affair. Um, yeah, it's true. He gets
sentenced to twenty years in prison, Uh, that he serves
out in its entirety. Um. And during this time he
was known for, um, you know, making a case for
(25:01):
himself like you know, and absolutely zero remorse fashion ben
and saying, hey, why were my notes considered counterfeit when
they're absolutely indistinguishable from the real ones? Uh? And in
true poetic justice fashion, when he's finally released, he gets
offered a job at an at a bank. Yeah, he
(25:24):
doesn't take the job, which is interesting. He lives a
pretty sedate life. Uh, and he doesn't make a lot
of money. You will hear people say that he lived modestly,
and then you will hear people say he was impoverished.
He died of a heart attack on the ninth of
June nineteen fifty five, and his associates died. Two of
(25:47):
them died pretty soon after. I think Henny's died in
fifty seven. Bendetta died in nineteen sixty one. Moron was
tried in Holland ninety six and went to jail for
eleven months. He actually became a naturalized French citizen and
did pretty well for himself. He died wealthy in nineteen sixty.
(26:09):
The guy is Sir William Waterlow died before all of
these folks. He was the guy in charge of the
printing company in England. He became the Lord Mayor of
London for a time, but the scandal of the Portuguese
bank note crisis is largely thought to have contributed to
his early death in ninety one. And I want to
say I respect the hustle, I respect what Riez did.
(26:30):
But if you look at a picture of this guy,
he just looks you know, I want to keep this
a family show. He looks like a real pill. Have
you seen a picture of him? He looks like a pill.
I don't know if I want to hang out with him.
Hang on, Ben, you might be saying you seem a
little conflicted. You say you respect the hustle, but you
say the guy's a real pill. Which is it? Well,
(26:51):
we have to examine the consequences of this, and then
we also have to admit that Angola at the time
was being treated very, very poorly by Portugal. But you
here's the deal. You can't just print bank notes and
expect everything to be okay. This has enormous and catastrophic
financial consequence, right yeah, really really far reaching. Because of
(27:14):
that excess circulation UM. Again that wasn't based on anything
but the whim of a totally narcissistic, self serving con man. Uh.
The currency, the escudo lost UH an awful lot of
its value. All five hundred scudo notes were pulled from circulation,
(27:35):
and the Central Bank of Portugal UM was able to
figure out which ones were the fraudulent ones. By the way,
if you yourself want to identify one of these ray
as reprints from a from a genuine note, UM, you
need only look for serial number prefixes with double vowels
or prefixes above a N. And not only did this
(28:00):
make everyone lose all confidence in the Portuguese monetary system.
It may have even brought on a change in government.
There's a great article on this at intro to Global
Studies dot com by Sean Smallman and Kimberly Brown where
they put this way, the implication of Rayez's crimes have
been staggering. The first republic, that's the Portuguese Republic, ended
(28:22):
in a military coup in nineteen twenty six. While it
would be too much to say that the loss of
confidence in Portugal's monetary system caused the democracy to collapse,
this fraud contributed to the sense of crisis that made
the coup possible. He came for the bank notes, and
he accidentally started a revolution or contributed to it, and
(28:44):
the bank eventually sued the printers, the Bank of Portugal.
They won a settlement of six hundred thousand pounds. Waterloo
never really recovered, they got bought out, they got dissolved
in two thousand and nine. And because of these consequent
is you will often hear that the counterfeiting operation, god
(29:05):
is it even counterfeiting such a mind buggling thing. You'll
hear that Yez ran the most successful countering fitting operation
in history. It's the biggest one that i've heard of,
unless you're one of those fiat currency people who thinks
paper money in general is counterfeiting, right, yeah, sort of
like taxation is theft. Uh No, it's true. Um, it's again.
(29:27):
I'm completely taken aback by how easily he was able
to pull this off. It was just like the perfect crime.
But not necessarily because he was some kind of genius.
He just was a very very um he's very very
good at taking advantage of people's stupidity. And I would
argue that the overthrow of that government was pretty earned
(29:51):
because they clearly were quite an apt that they couldn't
see this coming or have any safeguards in place to
prevent it. And then we also would be remiss if
we don't talk a little bit about the state of
the Portuguese Empire. Why some people may ask would a
guy born in Lisbon go to Angola in this time?
(30:13):
At this time, Angola was a Portuguese colony, and it
had been since fifteen seventy five. Riez was taking advantage
of systemic issues in the colonial system from the start,
when he got into the import export and all the
railway and all that stuff. And he was not he
was not helping the people of Angola. Angola has had terrible,
(30:38):
terrible consequences of from its time being colonized, and those
consequences still carry on to the modern day. So the
all to say, it's not like the Portuguese Empire, the
government of Portugal was uh, you know, a bunch of
goody two shoes, good people or heroes, know what I mean.
(31:00):
It's not like there's a clear hero in this story now.
And it wasn't until nineteen seventy five that uh Angola
actually got its independence after a very brutal and bloody
guerrilla war um that also resulted in another coup in
lisbon Um, but ultimately the Alvar Agreement was signed that
(31:22):
did separate Angola from Portugal. And this whole Angolan War
of Independence which raised from the nineteen sixty one to
nineteen seventy four, was initially a result of uprising because
of forced labor practices by the colonizers in Portugal against
the the native folks in Angola, and that include forcing
(31:42):
them to cultivate cotton right slavery, Yeah, slavery, and in
this sort of incredibly unstable, in humane environment, criminals like
Riez can thrive. You know. In fact, if you think
about it, I guess we could. We could end on
somewhat of if not uplifting an interesting note here we
(32:07):
here's an interesting bank note to end on, very proud
of that one. Ray As may have arguably been successful,
just not in the way he intended. Because remember, know
how you earlier mentioned there's an easy way to find
a ray As five hundred scudo note right, the double
(32:28):
vowels and prefixes above. What Yeah, the thing is those
rays reprints are not worth five dred scudo anymore. If
you are lucky enough to find one. They're actually worth
over seven thousand, five hundred dollars. So the notes that
(32:50):
he printed have actually been quite successful nowadays, at least
as a curio item you know of of some note? Right? Well,
you can't, you know, you can't buy a ticket to
a Cheryl Crow concert with one. If only it could, Man,
if only you could. What a world? What a world?
Oh man? By the way, uh, friend of the show,
there's a band I told you about called Kyle Kraft
(33:12):
and Showboat Honey who are on tour right now. You
should check them out if they come to your city. Um,
they were playing at the Newport Folk Festival and their
keyboard player, Kevin Clark, actually posted a picture of himself
with a friend of the show and then nemesis of
the show, Cheryl crow. Um, So I'm gonna have to
ask him about, you know what what she was like
in person? Do tell Yeah, we'd like to I I
(33:33):
personally would like to get past all the all the
strange late night rambling, vaguely accusatory text messages that she
sends me. You know, I just Cheryl let me know
if I did something, because I'm a huge fan of
your music. Uh. So that is the story of Alvis
dos Reyes. We hope you enjoyed it. I hope that
(33:55):
you do take the time to check out a picture
of this guy, because he does look like he's a
he's a slick talker, as folks would say in ages past.
Uh And as always, thank you for tuning in. Big
thanks to Cheryl Crowe always every day, indeed is a
winding road, a road that hopefully winds its way back
around to our super producer Casey Pegram, who also gets
(34:17):
massive thanks. Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Research associates
Gabe Lozier and Ryan Barrish Big thanks to Jonathan Strickland
a k a. The Quister and you know what, Noel,
Thanks to you, Man, Hey Man, thanks to you too.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts for
(34:42):
My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Noel Brown
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