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'^[1][2]

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.^[1] While serving as an Officer in the Polish army during World War Two, he was captured by the Hungarians, but managed to escape and sought refuge in France.^[3] After the war, he first settled in Vic-sur-Cère, Cantal, where he met his French wife^[4]. With the profits from his first fake banknotes, he had a house built in Montegeron, Essonne, where he moved with his family^[2]. Here, he printed 30,000 banknotes which he then passed off, convincing his wife that he was a travelling salesman, before being arrested in 1964^[5]. According to Christian Porcheron, director of the Museum of Counterfeit Money (musée de la Fausse Monnaie) "He was the greatest counterfeiter of the 20th century. He has no match.^[6]"

Bojarski counterfeited and passed his first fake 1,000-franc banknotes in 1950^[7]. 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^[8]. 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^[8].

In November 1962, Ceslaw Bojarski switched from counterfeiting 5,000-franc notes for the recently redesigned 'Bonaparte' 100-franc notes. Producing these notes needed skills and experience that took Bojarski more than ten years to achieve. His counterfeits were so successful that even skilled bank employees could not tell the fakes from the real notes. The fake 'Bonapartes' Bojarski created remain to this day the only fake notes to be directly exchanged by the Bank of France^[9]. These three counterfeits of three different banknotes (1,000-, 5,000- and then 100-franc notes) caused the Bank of France experts suspect they were made by the same hand^[10].

The exceptional quality of Bojarski's counterfeiting made him world-famous, first with Police services specialised 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 Ceslaw Bojarski produced his fake notes entirely alone, using machines he invented and constructed himself (out of fear of being caught when buying 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^[11].

While most fake banknotes are usually identified and removed from bundles of notes, in 1963, Bank of France experts discovered a whole bundle of ten fake notes, which allowed the Police to trace the bundle back 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 10th 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 men were questioned at their home and found to be in possession of fake banknotes. They gave up Ceslaw 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)^[10].

For years, Bojarski had been travelling all over France by night train to pass his fake notes. One day, exhausted by all the travelling, he reluctantly decided to work with Chouvaloff and Dowgierd to pass the fakes – 300 million francs in twelve years^[12]. 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 no trace of fake banknotes, until an inspector accidentally knocked over a glass of water, which revealed a hidden underground workshop when the water flowed into a trapdoor^[10][11].

Bojarski was sentenced to 20 years in prison and served his sentence at La Santé prison in Paris^[12]. Because they turned Bojarski in, his two accomplices Chouvaloff and Dowgierd were exempted from punishment. Bojarski's sentence was reduced for good behaviour after thirteen years in prison^[13]. 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. In 1980, a second trail ended with the confiscation of all the Bojarskis' property^[14].

Ceslaw Bojarski died in poverty on 2 May 2003, and was buried at Saint-Nizier-du-Moucherotte cemetery in Isère^[15]. As of 2013, the secret trapdoor still exists in his original home in Montgeron^[16].

His life was the subject of the 2025 French film L’Affaire Bojarski^[17].