Now that he had the paper, the equipment, and the guy to operate it, Frank figured the fabrication of his fortune would be a simple matter of flipping a switch. And sure enough, after several weeks of tinkering to get the color just right, he was moved by what he saw coming off the Heidelberg. “I’m not an emotional guy, but when I looked at that first perfect sheet, it sort of rang home. After all of those years of dodging the police and running around and chasing money, it really rang home: I’m fucking rich! Right now! Oh yeah!” Frank claims that his little shop in the farmer’s garage began pumping out tens of millions of dollars’ worth of flawless twenties a month.

Now Frank’s attention shifted to finding somebody to sell them to. He hired a marketing director of sorts, an old friend, who’d dig up customers.

“We’d been talking to some drug guys, heavy workers who were moving cocaine,” Frank said. But to his surprise, guys who were perfectly comfortable shipping cocaine by the container load drew the line at phony bills. “No thanks, and be careful” was where that conversation ended. This bewildered Frank Bourassa. “I was saying to myself, Jesus Christ! These guys were doing a lot worse than moving counterfeit bills, and they’re telling me to be careful? Are they screwed up?”

Still unable to find buyers, Frank brought on a second customer-outreach man whom we’ll call George. For months, Frank did nothing but pack sample boxes—hundreds of thousands, face value—for his guys to take to potential clients. Frank’s spirits were flagging. “I wasn’t getting paid. I was just sending out free shit.”

At last Frank’s sales agents located some customers. These were four buyers of the ideal kind, guys with import-export connections who wanted to sell the bills overseas. But they weren’t interested in the sort of volume Frank was keen to unload. “Their first orders were $10,000,” Frank said. “I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, it can’t be! I might as well go to McDonald’s with $20 bills and change ’em that way.’ It was ridiculous.” But soon their appetites grew. Frank says they started taking a million a week apiece, which he was selling them for thirty cents on the dollar. Just like that, Bourassa recouped his $300,000 investment. Still, at this rate, it would take over a year to unload the full press run—ample time, Frank worried, for the cops to get wise to the garage.

(According to a short ABC News piece on Frank and his adventures, the authorities began spotting the bills in both Florida and Las Vegas. But exactly how wise the cops were getting to Frank’s operation, the authorities won’t say. Officials from the U.S. Secret Service, Interpol, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police refused to discuss details of the investigation.)

In search of new business, Frank began flying George all over the world. “He was talking to all sorts of people, a guy who had casinos, other guys who said they were interested, but nothing panned out.”

At last George reached out to a local guy in Trois-Rivières who was operating a stolen-heavy-equipment ring. For two years, the heavy-equipment man, whose name was Éric Lefebvre, had been unwittingly selling stolen dump trucks and front-end loaders to a man we will call Undercover Cop. One day in May 2012, Lefebvre asked Cop whether he might also be interested in some high-quality counterfeit bills. Cop said that he would indeed be interested. He ordered $100,000 worth for $30,000, clean. And abandoning his usual caution, Frank stuffed the bills into a box and carried them, in person, to Lefebvre, who was waiting for him at the house of a guy they both knew. Lefebvre carried the bills to Cop, and Cop was so well pleased with the bills that he ordered another $100,000 the very next day. So Frank boxed up another 100K, and he set off to meet Lefebvre, whom, it turned out, a helicopter had followed. It was flying at such an altitude that Frank neither saw it nor heard it. Yet something—some unarticulable misgiving—nagged at Frank’s consciousness that day. Ordinarily, he might have simply parked in the driveway and lugged in the boxes of phony cash. But today something told him to be careful. Rather than tote the deliverables inside in plain view, he backed into the carport, an inadvertent act of caution that would prove helpful down the line.