Ceslaw Bojarski

Ceslaw (Czesław) Jan Bojarski, (15 October 1912 – 2 May 2003), was a Polish-French counterfeiter.

He became famous in the 1960s for his extremely accurate counterfeit of the 100-franc "Bonaparte" banknote, prompting the newspaper Le Parisien to call him "The Cezanne of counterfeit money".

Biography Ceslaw Bojarski was born on 15 October 1912 in Łańcut in Poland. He studied at Lviv Polytechnic then at Gdańsk University of Technology, graduating with a degree in architectural engineering. After the war, he settled in Vic-sur-Cère, Cantal, where he met his French wife. With the profits from his first fake banknotes, he had a house built in Montegeron, Essonne, and moved into it with his family. According to Christian Porcheron, director of the Museum of Counterfeit Money, "He was the greatest counterfeiter of the 20th century. He has no match."

First counterfeits Bojarski counterfeited and passed his first fake 1,000-franc banknotes in 1950. Although Bojarski was dissatisfied with them, these first notes were very well-printed, on watermarked paper he made himself. In January 1951, the central Bank of France reported circulation of these almost flawless fake notes in the Paris region. . They flooded the coffers of the Bank of France; at their height in 1954 they reached 1,500 units per month. Then in 1958 he moved on to counterfeiting 5,000-franc notes These three counterfeits of three different banknotes (1,000-, 5,000- and then 100-franc notes) caused experts at the Bank of France to suspect they were made by the same hand.

The exceptional quality of Bojarski's counterfeits made him world-famous, first with Police services specialising in counterfeiting, and then with currency collectors. Experts from the Bank of France believed they were dealing with a powerful criminal organisation with significant technical resources and the skills of several specialists, yet Bojarski produced his fake notes entirely alone, using machines he invented and constructed himself out of fear of being caught when purschasing them. Unusually for a counterfeiter, he developed and produced all his own paper, with an authentic watermark, as well as his own inks, and engraved his own copper printing plates.

Arrest and imprisonment While most fake banknotes are usually identified and removed from bundles of notes, in 1963 Bank of France experts discovered a bundle of ten fake notes, which the police traced to a purchase of Treasury bonds, whose envelope was stamped in a post office in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. The post office clerks were given the description of the man passing fake notes, and when a suspect came to the post office on 10 December 1963, the police followed him, which lead them to a second man, Alexis Chouvaloff, a Russian very close to his Polish brother-in-law, Antoine Dowgierd. On 17 January 1964, the two were questioned at their home and found to be in possession of fake banknotes. They gave up Bojarski, who was arrested at home in Montgeron the same day by police from the Central Office for Counterfeit Currency Control (l'Office central de répression de la fausse monnaie). Alexis Chouvaloff had naively bought Treasury bonds at the post office with his fake notes. The police raid at Bojarski's house initially revealed only one safe containing 72 million francs in genuine Treasury bonds, but fake banknotes, until an inspector accidentally knocked over a glass of water and the water flowed into a trapdoor, revealing a hidden underground workshop. In 1978, he 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. In 1980, a second trial ended with the confiscation of all the Bojarskis' property.

Bojarski died in poverty on 2 May 2003 and was buried at Saint-Nizier-du-Moucherotte cemetery in Isère. As of 2013, the secret trapdoor still exists in his home in Montgeron.

Popular culture His life was the subject of the 2025 French film The Money Maker, released in France as L'Affaire Bojarski.