On November 9, 1963, two investigators from France’s Central Office for Counterfeit Currency Control (OCRFM) arrived at the post office on Rue Turgot in Paris’s 9th arrondissement. Five days earlier, a customer had purchased 1,000 francs’ worth of Treasury bonds there using a stack of crisp 100-franc notes bearing the portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte. At first glance, nothing seemed unusual. The notes looked authentic, felt authentic, and even carried convincing watermarks. But they were counterfeit.
A 'Bonaparte' 100 Franc notes that Ceslaw Bojarski forged. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Hoping the man who had passed the forged notes might return, Commissioner Emile Benhamou, head of the OCRFM, dispatched two officers to the post office to investigate. Benhamou was one of France’s most experienced counterfeit hunters. Over the course of his career, he had tracked down every forger he had pursued. Yet for more than a decade, one elusive counterfeiting operation had continually escaped him. Its craftsmen had produced remarkably sophisticated 1,000-franc notes known as the “Minerva and Hercules,” followed by equally impressive 5,000-franc bills called “Land and Sea.” Benhamou was convinced that the same master hand lay behind all of them.
A month after the alert at the Rue Turgot post office, the customer who had passed the counterfeit notes returned to the same counter. This time, a vigilant postal employee discreetly recorded the license plate number of his car. The information quickly led police to the vehicle’s owner, a man named Alexis Chouvaloff.
For weeks, investigators kept Chouvaloff under close surveillance, tracking his movements, his meetings, and the people who drifted in and out of his orbit. Before long, detectives noticed that he was in frequent contact with his brother-in-law, Antoine Dowgierd. The two men were arrested on January 17, 1964.
Under interrogation, Dowgierd finally gave investigators the breakthrough they had pursued for more than a decade. He admitted that he had been buying counterfeit notes at 40 percent of their face value from an old friend of Polish origin: Czesław Bojarski.
The following day, January 18, a police team raided Bojarski’s house. At first, the search was bafflingly disappointing. Bojarski hardly resembled the criminal mastermind the police had imagined. Quiet and unassuming, he appeared more like a modest technician than the head of a sophisticated counterfeiting network. The house itself yielded nothing obviously incriminating, except for some perfectly legitimate Treasury bonds.
While searching the house, an inspector accidentally knocked over a glass of water. As the liquid spread across the floor, he noticed that the water was disappearing into a thin, almost invisible slit between the floorboards. The discovery revealed a cleverly concealed trapdoor.
The hatch, operated by an electric mechanism, opened into a cramped underground workshop measuring barely three by three meters. Inside the hidden room the police found engraving tools, printing plates, specialized machinery, chemical mixtures, carefully prepared paper stock, and stacks of freshly printed Bonaparte notes, thirty million francs’ worth of them—notes so perfectly executed that they were virtually indistinguishable from genuine French currency.
Ceslaw Bojarski and his accomplices, Alexis Chouvaloff and Antoine Dowgierd.
Czesław Bojarski was born in 1912 in the town of Łańcut in southeastern Poland, then part of the Austro-Hungarian world that had only recently disappeared from the map of Europe. He studied engineering, first at the Polytechnic in Lviv and later at the Gdańsk University of Technology. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, millions were uprooted, and Bojarski was among those forced into exile. He eventually made his way to France, where he joined the newly forming Polish army alongside other displaced compatriots determined to continue the fight.
After the war, unlike many soldiers who returned home, Bojarski chose to remain in France. He settled in the small town of Vic-sur-Cère in the Auvergne region and attempted to build an ordinary life. At first, Bojarski lived modestly but he drifted through odd jobs, unable or perhaps unwilling to remain in positions that failed to match either his education or his restless ambitions.
For a time, Bojarski devoted himself to invention. Gifted with the mind of an engineer and the imagination of a tinkerer, he designed an array of practical devices: a special spherical stopper for containers, a redesigned toothbrush, a plastic pencil, a new type of razor, and even an early model of coffee capsules for espresso machines. Convinced that his ideas could bring him success, he founded a company to market his inventions. But the business failed.
In 1948, Bojarski married, and the couple moved into a new home near Paris. Before long, they had two children. Family life brought stability, but also mounting financial pressure. It was around this time, perhaps driven by frustration, necessity, or the belief that his talents deserved greater rewards, that he began experimenting with forged banknotes.
Bojarski approached forgery with the mind of an engineer and the patience of an artist. Rather than relying on accomplices or industrial equipment, he taught himself nearly every aspect of banknote production. He manufactured his own paper, mixed his own inks, engraved copper printing plates by hand, and even constructed the printing machinery himself.
To counterfeit paper, Bojarski dissolved cigarette paper and tracing paper in water. He mixed the finished banknotes with dust and ash, which he often collected in churches to give it an excellent aging effect. He carried out all this work in absolute secrecy inside a hidden workshop built within his Paris apartment. No one was allowed inside the room, not even his wife.
At first, Bojarski focused on larger denominations, including 1,000-franc and 5,000-franc notes. But he soon realized smaller notes moved more invisibly through daily commerce. His masterpiece became the 100-franc Bonaparte note. This note was very modern for its time, with extremely sophisticated watermarks. But Bojarski managed to reproduce it such skill that even bank employees could not tell the fakes from the real notes.
These notes passed through cafés, train stations, tobacco shops, markets, and post offices across France. Instead of flooding a single city with counterfeit money, Bojarski distributed the notes slowly and methodically. He travelled constantly, often taking overnight trains from one region to another, spending small amounts in dozens of locations to avoid creating suspicious patterns. His family believed he was a traveling salesman making money selling cigarettes, pens, and even flint.
The quality of his work was so extraordinary that the tiny flaws that the forged notes contained could be identified only after examination under a microscope. For example, in the fakes one of Napoleon's hair strands was a bit too long. One petal was also missing from a tiny flower in the corner of the banknote.
For years, the French police remained baffled. Counterfeit notes kept appearing across the country, yet no clear distribution network emerged. Authorities assumed they were dealing with a major criminal organization operating across borders. Investigators eventually estimated that Bojarski produced counterfeit currency worth roughly 300 million old francs over more than a decade. In modern terms, the total value was enormous.
For more than a decade, Czesław Bojarski worked almost entirely alone, and that isolation was precisely what kept him beyond the reach of the police. But eventually, the strain of maintaining the operation began to wear him down. Exhausted by the constant travelling he had to make all over France to pass his fake notes, in 1962, Bojarski made the mistake that ultimately unravelled him: he brought another man into the operation.
Reluctantly, he entrusted part of the distribution network to Antoine Dowgierd. A year later, Dowgierd expanded the circle further by involving his brother-in-law. Unlike Bojarski, who had spent years carefully dispersing counterfeit notes across the country to avoid attracting attention, the newcomers took shortcuts. Instead of traveling widely, they began passing large quantities of forged bills at the same nearby post office. That carelessness proved fatal.
When arrested and charged, Bojarski pleaded guilty. The trial became a sensation in France. Newspapers portrayed Bojarski as a criminal genius. Journalists compared him to an artist. Some dubbed him “the Cézanne of counterfeiters.”
In 1964, Bojarski was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but released after serving 13 years due to good behaviour.
But the story was not over. In 1978, Bojarski and his wife, who were living in a modest one-room apartment in Évry, were on holiday when plumbers entered their apartment to repair a water leak. When moving the cooker, they found 10 gold bars and 797 gold coins— treasure apparently accumulated during Bojarski’s counterfeiting years. The discovery triggered a second legal battle. In 1980, another trial ended with the confiscation of virtually all the Bojarskis’ remaining property.
Ceslaw Bojarski spent his remaining years in relative poverty and died in 2003.
Today, his counterfeit banknotes are a rarity among collectors and fetch prices far higher than their face value. In 2015, at an auction in Paris, an “authentic Bojarski with Napoleon” sold for over €7,000.
References:
# Ceslaw Bojarski. Wikipedia
# Czesław Bojarski - genialny polski fałszerz francuskich banknotów. Business Insider
# Affaire Bojarski : "J'ai été habituée à ne jamais poser de questions", confie la fille du "Cézanne de la fausse monnaie". RTL
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