The Ultimate Counterfeiter Isn’t a Crook — He’s an Artist

I think a great part of that frustration is down to long-form magazine features being ported to wired.com, where brevity is better suited to the web-page form.

Personally, I think almost all of the writing in Wired is excellent - well crafted and edited and laid out within interesting designs. Yes, while there are pretty common 'paint a picture' set-ups and more detail about the actual people involved than you'd get in news (for sure) and non-US feature writing (my view), that's part of the reason I keep buying the US print copy of Wired (even in the UK), and enjoy settling down to read it.

Good at making counterfeits, bad at making counterfeiting work.

Saw a trashy Discovery channel doc on counterfeiters. They printed using laser printers, and had a good process for aging the money. That was all that was needed... people just don't look that closely at money most of the time. They got away with it for years, even though they were pretty foolish (spent their own fakes, used the same spot every time to print money, etc.)

I can't tell if all that means there are probably smart people getting away with it constantly because they don't slip up in these dumb ways?

If you read this article and have a halfway decent model of the world in your head, you will realize that police entrapment was the proximate cause of this real, talented artist low on his money becoming a counterfeiter: i.e. they made him do it, and he wouldn't have done it without them, and a judge released him early on probation for this reason (from the article).

But the damage was done. Still without any money, this genuine artist (who had "refused to do two Warhol copies, including forged signatures", always signing his own name instead on homage pieces) now had a criminal skill that had no other applications.

The fact is most people here have had a time in their life when they had unhoned skills (e.g. software/hardware hacking) that, if they only landed the right internship, would become very valuable. When the police are the proximate cause to creating this "lucky" internship (lucky in that the guy had 0 experience with it, or even interest for that matter) to create skills that have only a criminal market [1], something is very wrong.

It would be great if Freakonomics covered entrapment some time, as it's very insidious - on the surface it seeems that if you do it you "would have done it anyway", but this example shows pretty obviously that this isn't true in any form whatsoever.

[1] EDIT: or not even a criminal market, as the case may be:

"The problem was, Kuhl and his partners couldn’t make a deal with anyone. It wasn’t for lack of trying—a sale brokered by a criminal-minded former cop fell through, and another transaction with a supposed buyer in Majorca fizzled. That was when Becker and his colleagues decided to help things along by providing an attractive buyer themselves."

No. Long-form journalism is about keeping the reader engaged in a story they didn't know they wanted to hear. You wouldn't write fiction with a strict focus on the sequence of events, why should this be any different? While you're feeling patronized I find that I enjoy the engagement. Frankly, your way sounds boring.

I have the exact same revulsion to this style writing when I see it in print. The only upside is that, in print, it's easier for me to skip through the article and get to the actual content.