The Man Who Counterfeited Nickels

Francis Leroy Henning is a name that is not found in history books.  His portrait will not be found in any art museum or on any postage stamp.  As far as I've been able to determine he has not walked the Earth's surface for the last several years, and yet in his own strange way, Francis Leroy Henning managed to do something that no one before him had ever done before and no one will ever do since.  Francis Leroy Henning is The Man Who Counterfeited Nickels.

He was not the only man who counterfeited coins, but he was the only man we are aware of who counterfeited your average run-of-the-mill five cent piece commonly found in circulation, who mass produced over 400,000 of them from the basement of his home in Erial N.J., near Philadelphia.  His nickels are still being found in circulation today, and are much sought after by coin collectors.

I first heard of The Man Who Counterfeited Nickels when I was twelve years of age, in a book about the U.S. Secret Service that I had checked out of the school library.  His criminal enterprise was one of the strangest stories of this type of criminal activity that I had ever heard of, and still ranks as such today.  Although a nickel had considerable more purchasing power in 1954 when he counterfeited as it does today, the Secret Service, per my recollection, was having trouble understanding why he was counterfeiting common coinage.

The story in that book has it that Mr. Henning had been mass producing these fake nickels out of an alloy that is similar as to what the real nickels use today.  He was somehow getting large numbers of these into circulation and that his efforts were undetected until a paperboy in Philadelphia got one of these in his change when he was collecting payment for the newspapers on his route.  He was jingling the coins in his pocket, and noticed that one of them wasn't sounding right.  He got his change out to look at it, and immediately spotted the fake nickel:  a nickel dated 1944, but missing the mintmark on the reverse.

I'll have to digress a little bit and explain about mintmarks.

In those days, coins minted in Philadelphia did not have mintmarks on them until 1942, and that was only on the nickel.  The alloy was switched to a wartime alloy and in order to distinguish these nickels from the regular copper/nickel alloy, the mintmarks on the reverse of nickels were enlarged and placed conspicuously above the Monticello.  The Philadelphia mint, for the first time, used the "P" mintmark.  This practice continued for all nickels dated 1943, 1944, and 1945.  In 1946 the regular alloy was resumed and the mintmarks went back to where they were for the pre-war years, and Philadelphia dropped the "P" entirely ("P" marked coins returned in 1979 for Susan B Anthony dollars, and have been used on all coins, save for cents, beginning in 1980). 

Anyway, to get back to the story, the paperboy knew that he had a fake nickel, not only by the way that it sounded, but also because it was missing a mintmark that should have appeared on any nickel dated 1944.  The paperboy showed the nickel to his father, who in turn contacted the Secret Service, and the Secret Service began investigating.  Significant quantities of fake nickels, some with dates other than 1944 were being reported, at which point newspaper reports of large quantities of fake nickels circulating in the Philadelphia area were appearing.  Francis Henning read about himself, realizing that he was attracting much more attention than he wanted, and he decided that it was time to get rid of the evidence.

Up until then, he had been depositing his nickels into banks, using the story that he owned a vending machine route.  His nickels were of decent enough quality to not draw attention, but weren't cost effective.  One story is that he figured out how much this was costing him, and that he learned that they were costing him six cents each to make.  Another story is that he abandoned counterfeiting nickels since he figured he would make five dollar bills instead, and yet another story is that he had been caught faking the fives, and switched to nickels when he got out of prison. 

The one story that is consistent here is that he dumped 200,000 of his nickels into the Schuylkill River, and another 200,000 in Copper Creek.  This suggests that he had to get rid of the evidence before fleeing the area.

Somehow, the Secret Service caught up to him, and when looking at various links this evening, one source said that he had fled to Cleveland before being arrested.  Arrested he was, and Francis Leroy Henning found himself in the slammer, in federal lockup for one of the more strangest counterfeiting schemes in human history.

As previously stated, Henning nickels are still found in circulation.  There were so many of them placed out there that some coin books, when you look up the value of the 1944 nickel, will have an asterisk next to that date, and the footnote will read that "1944 nickels without mintmarks are counterfeit".  Henning used other dates, such as 1939 and 1953, and authenticating fake nickels (as silly as that sounds) is a subject that frequently comes up on the coin collecting discussion boards.

It is a strange irony that these nickels, fake as they are, are still sought after to this day, and auction prices for these have been known to run as high as $80. 

I have to admit, that I wouldn't mind owning a few of these nickels myself.

Yes......a coin collector, wanting to own a few fake nickels. 

Go figure.