In the 1920s, a 28-year-old dropout named Alves Reis arranged for the printing of banknotes worth nearly 1 percent of Portugal’s gross domestic product, and he did it without a counterfeiting press. This episode follows him from Lisbon, where he was born in 1896 to a bankrupt undertaker and scorned by his in-laws, to Angola, where a forged Oxford engineering diploma won him a civil service post. A railway takeover paid for with bad checks came next, then 54 days in a Porto jail, where he conceived something far larger.

His insight was that he did not need to fake the money, only the authority to order it. With a forged contract stamped by a notary and three embassies, and signatures traced from banknotes in his pocket, he persuaded the London firm that held Portugal’s official plates to print 200,000 notes of 500 escudos. The episode tracks the diplomatic pouches, the bank he founded to launder the cash, his attempt to buy the Bank of Portugal itself, and the collapse that helped bring down a republic.

• Reis bought control of an Angolan railway with checks drawn on an empty New York account, then covered them with the company’s own bailout money before they cleared.
• When the printers noticed his serial numbers duplicated existing notes, he said the bills were bound for Angola and would be overprinted on arrival.
• His Bank of Angola and Metropole lent freely without taking deposits, which drew scrutiny from the newspaper O Seculo.
• A teller in Porto reported ledgers being torn out, and in December 1925 an inspector laid two Vasco da Gama notes side by side and saw the same serial number.
• The recall of every 500 escudo note within 20 days wrecked confidence in the currency and fed the 1926 military coup; Reis was sentenced to 20 years in 1930.