Jory: Funny Money

Funny Money

Jory, Stephen

John Blake Publishing

2002

ISBN1 903402 57 3

Billed as "The True Story of the World’s Largest Ever Counterfeiting Ring," Jory’s book is, inevitably, one that, from time to time, gets stuck in the reader’s built in BS filter. It’s hard to tell how much is fact and how much is either rosy recollection or fiction.

But that small detail seems somehow unimportant because the real value of the book lies not in the story of the counterfeiting operation (although that is interesting) but in the dynamics of how crime is funded, how non-organised crime operates and how - remarkably - criminals return to do business with each other even after a previous double-cross. And it demonstrates how the criminal and legitimate enterprises interface to provide a sometimes grey area where some are doing illegal things but within a legal business and accounting for them so that investigations do not find black holes in stocks or accounts.

The book is actually a pretty good tale and it’s easy to finish it at a couple of sittings. It’s lightweight but there is an occasional unsuccessful attempt to give it gravitas.

In summary, Jory made a fortune making and selling counterfeit perfume. It’s not very clear how that fortune was dissipated but he found himself coming out of jail following one of his frequent convictions to learn that he was "potless" (perhaps the most delightful of the low-class London phraseology he employs in the book in an attempt to establish his criminal credentials, an unnecessary task in the light of his list of convictions).

A contact encouraged him to move into counterfeit currency and he made - in the sense of manufactured - a lot of money.

But Jory is, at best, a loser. And every deal he was involved in, and some he was not, caved in and he was left with no money or, worse, underground loan sharks inviting him to have a drink in places where they had a habit of hurting people. Badly.

At the end of the book, Jory is back in jail. Unsurprisingly. Since the book was published, Jory has served his latest sentence. He’s taken up life as an artist, according to a news report.

His only bit of luck seems to have been that the authorities were more interested in locking him up than trying to secure the profits he had made. If he repeated his activities, the property and cars he gave to his family would now be up for grabs under the UK’s Proceeds of Crime Act. That the old procedure for confiscation was unwieldy probably meant that there was not a lot of attempt made to trace and confiscate his profits. Now things would be different.

Underneath it all, it would be easy to come away with the idea that Jory is a loveable rogue and he does not admit to committing any violence although there was always plenty around him. But he isn’t at all loveable. He’s made enough fake money to destabilise economies and it’s only due to the lack of an effective organisation around him that he failed to do so.

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