World History · English
Printed by the Bank Itself
Alves dos Reis, Waterlow & Sons, and the Banknote Fraud That Shook Portugal
About this book
In 1925, a Lisbon clerk with a forged Oxford diploma orchestrated the largest banknote fraud in history. Alves dos Reis convinced London printers Waterlow & Sons to produce genuine 500-escudo notes using the Bank of Portugal’s own plates, backed by fabricated contracts and official correspondence. He flooded Angola with legitimate currency, purchased major enterprises, and nearly seized control of the central bank itself. The scheme unraveled only when a Porto newspaper and a routine inspection exposed the deception, triggering arrests, a sensational trial, and a landmark House of Lords judgment seven years later. Drawn from trial records, litigation files, bank registers, and participant memoirs, this narrative reconstructs the audacious crime that destabilized a nation’s currency and destroyed a venerable printing house. It is a story of bureaucratic exploitation and legal consequence, where authentic money became indistinguishable from counterfeit ambition.
AI editorial review
This biography excels in its forensic integration of person and system, using ledgers, cables, and inventories to make institutional procedure itself the engine of the story. The dramatic tension in scenes like the vault inventory is masterfully achieved without melodrama. However, the prose rhythm can occasionally flatten into a procedural drone, with an over-reliance on em-dashes and repetitive sentence openings that dull the narrative drive at pivotal moments. The book's great strength lies in showing, not just telling, how power mechanisms work, even if some later chapters briefly lapse in
