North Korea’s Dollar Store
15th January 2011
Liu had been convicted of conspiracy and fraud involving millions of dollars made not by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing but by counterfeiting presses in a foreign country, presumably North Korea. The quality of these “supernote” forgeries is so high that he’d managed to pass enormous quantities through the electronic detection devices with which every Vegas slot machine is supposed to be equipped.
‘It’s only dirty paper.’ — Bugsy Siegel
The link between Wilson Liu’s counterfeit bills and North Korea’s missiles and nuclear weapons is umbilical. “More than 70 percent of the missiles’ components are imported from overseas,” says Syung Je Park, a director of the Asia Strategy Institute, a think tank affiliated with South Korea’s military, whom I met (at his insistence) at a safe house in London. Park has debriefed more than 1,000 North Korean defectors, including Hwang Jang Yop, once the regime’s chief ideologist and Kim Jong Il’s tutor. North Korea depends on international aid just to keep famine at bay. “They need money,” says Park. “Where else can they get it?” The answer, he and senior U.S. officials believe, is by means of organized crime: not only the production of counterfeit currency but also the manufacture and export of counterfeit cigarettes and pharmaceuticals, and the sale of drugs such as heroin and crystal methamphetamine.