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Counterfeiting case linked to two murders

One suspect says another bought cocaine with fake $100 bills. Jailhouse interviews offer an inside look at the bay area counterfeiting operation.

By THOMAS LAKE
Published July 29, 2006

About nine months ago, a new kind of counterfeit money trickled toward the Tampa Bay area. Merchants were swindled. Authorities were baffled. Finally on Monday, three in the case went to jail. They were from Port Richey, and two of them said the only way they could get money was to make it themselves.

Then investigators realized one of the fake $100 bills had turned up more than 460 miles away near Mobile, Ala. This bill was connected to another high-profile crime. But it was not another counterfeiting case.

It was a double murder.

Authorities say Christopher "Black" Cheatham, the man accused of pumping 16 bullets into two men on a Hudson street July 10, was caught nine days later in Alabama with a $100 bill that seemed to be from the people accused in the Port Richey counterfeiting. At a news conference on Thursday, authorities said they weren't sure how he got it.

Here's a clue:

In a jailhouse interview late Wednesday night, Charles Ruffini, one of the men accused of counterfeiting, said Cheatham once dealt crack to Joseph Irizarry, the man alleged as the leader in the counterfeiting.

And Irizarry bought the drugs with fake bills, Ruffini said.

"Joe offed two of the fake hundreds on Black one night," Ruffini told the Times. "It's amazing, huh? Small world."

That was one of several revelations from interviews with Ruffini and Irizarry at the Land O'Lakes jail. Coupled with an undercover detective's interview and surveillance clips from Thursday's news conference at the Pasco County Sheriff's Office, they provide a window into the new world of counterfeiting.

"It's not that hard," Ruffini said. "It's pathetically easy."

The beginning of the end came July 19, the same day Cheatham was caught in Alabama, when undercover Detective Darcy Ganter walked into a Port Richey house with no electricity or running water.

She was led there by an informer, a friend of a friend who vouched for her identity. There she met Irizarry, a 29-year-old down-and-outer whose girlfriend had just had a baby girl.

Irizarry was in an unusual position. He was practically penniless, but he had once met someone in jail who taught him how to turn $5 into $100.

And for $700 in real cash, he was willing to show Ganter how.

"I just did it to survive," Irizarry said later.

They met Monday at the Comfort Inn on U.S. 19, where hidden cameras rolled and Secret Service agents waited next door.

The process went something like this, according to witnesses and surveillance video: Irizarry used a white jug full of a secret chemical to bleach the ink off $5 bills. Then he blow-dried them. From there, the team used an off-the-shelf Hewlett Packard printer to copy the image of a real $100 bill onto the blank fives.

Authorities say they finished 22 bills that afternoon, though Ruffini and Irizarry say only the back sides had been copied. In any case, Ruffini was smoking a Newport Menthol Light when the agents burst in with their guns drawn.

Ruffini and Irizarry never got their money. Along with Nanci Waples, who was watching Ruffini's children during the operation, they face 22 counts of forging bank bills. It would take $356,000 to bail them all out of jail.

And there's no telling where they'll get it.

"Between the two of us," Ruffini said, "we don't have a red cent to rub together."

So how can someone who can create $100 bills at will be penniless? Ganter said she thinks they spent their money on cocaine.

Even though the sting did a lot to explain the counterfeiting technique, one aspect remains a mystery. No one will say what chemical was used to wash the ink off the bills.

At the news conference on Thursday, Special Agent John Joyce was asked if he knew what it was.

"I do," he said, "but I'm not going to share it."

During at least one point on the surveillance video, the camera zooms close to a mysterious white jug on the bathroom sink. Before a Times reporter could read the label, sheriff's spokesman Kevin Doll stopped the tape.

Irizarry wouldn't help either.

"I will never tell anybody what that chemical was," he said through the thick glass in the visiting room. "You'll never guess it in a million years."

Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or 727 869-6245.

[Last modified July 28, 2006, 22:43:56]