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    The Ivy League Counterfeiter
    The Ivy League Counterfeiter
    The Ivy League Counterfeiter

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    Ebook76 pages3 hours

    The Ivy League Counterfeiter

    By Touré

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Cliff Evans attended a storied New England prep school and an Ivy League university, and when he finished, he turned to … professional counterfeiting. He and his team sought ways to make money illegally – by photocopying it. Why would someone with all the opportunities in the world turn to a life of crime?

    In the Everand Original, The Ivy League Counterfeiter, author and TV host Touré dives into how Evans built his operation and how it all fell apart. Touré and Evans were not just classmates – they were also friends. This true, gripping story goes deep inside Evans’s roller coaster life. It’s built on court documents and interviews with Evans, his mother, and his friends, who reveal that Evans was enamored with the street life – partly because he looked up to his older brother, a serial bank robber. His brother taught him the code of the street, but did he help bring down Evans?

    The Ivy League Counterfeiter is a harrowing, heart-thumping journey that takes us from the streets of Chicago to the hallowed halls of Columbia University, and into the criminal underworld. This provocative, unforgettable story encompasses the wild, chaotic ride of someone who just couldn’t stay away from the street life.

    Editor's Note

    A deadly hustle…

    After Cliff Evans finished Columbia University, he started making his own money. By using a copy machine. Touré, the author, was one of Cliffʼs friends. This book explores how — and, more crucially, why — Cliff was working in the criminal underground even though everyone around him was telling him to stop.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Originals
    Release dateDec 5, 2022
    ISBN9781094452579
    Author

    Touré

    Touré is an author who has published six books, including I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon and Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book. He was a TV host at MSNBC, MTV, and BET, and a correspondent at CNN. He hosts the podcast Touré Show. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Nation, Vogue, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. Follow his Instagram @Toure.

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    Reviews for The Ivy League Counterfeiter

    4/5

    29 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      He was a friend of mine too from Columbia who I hadn't seen since I graduated and I didn't know what happened to him after the arrest. Thanks for all the info. So sad....RIP Cliff Evans
    • 5/5
      Toure great work as always!! Good read I would recommend it.
    • 5/5
      Interesting quick read about someone from the inner city who goes to an Ivy League university, yet decides to become a career criminal.
    • 5/5
      The story of cliff reflects on our generation now,youths looking for a shortcut to wealth.

    Book preview

    The Ivy League Counterfeiter - Touré

    Introduction

    Cliff Evans sat in his Harlem apartment smoking a blunt near stacks and stacks of counterfeit twenties, unaware that in the hallway outside, several plainclothes federal officers were in position just waiting for the moment to bust in and arrest him. It was November 1996, around 2 p.m., and life as Cliff knew it was over. He just didn’t know it yet.

    Cliff called the apartment at 140th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue the Chop Zone, because, he said, That’s where all the money got chopped up. He meant counterfeit money. There was about $80,000 in fake currency in the apartment that day. Cliff and his crew had been creating their own money for months. Now he was sitting in a back room, waiting for his partner Teddy Olulenu to arrive. The dude was late, but Cliff barely noticed because he was so high. The reason Olulenu was late was that he’d been arrested. After confessing to law enforcement, Olulenu called Cliff to say he had to see him right away.

    Cliff was a young Black man who’d finished Columbia University months earlier, at a time when his older brother Joe was back home in Chicago after doing five years in federal prison. Many had thought Cliff going to Columbia meant he wouldn’t end up in prison like his brother. When Olulenu called, though, the feds were listening. For a decade, Cliff had been molded by teachers at one of America’s greatest prep schools and then at an Ivy League university, but all that work was flushed down the toilet the night he decided to run a criminal enterprise built around distributing money that came from a photocopier.

    In the moments before he was arrested, Cliff may have appeared calm, but he was holding in a ton of anxiety. He worried that some crew from Harlem was plotting to attack him. A counterfeiter can’t put money in a bank, so people who knew what Cliff was doing were aware there had to be money in his apartment. And some of the people who knew what he was doing were the sort of people who’d smile in your face and then stab you in the eye while taking everything you own.

    Had they figured out where he lived? Was he about to be robbed and killed?

    Every day he thought maybe today would be the one when some gang would burst in on him.

    I could tell this motherfucker wasn’t sleeping, a friend said of Cliff in the days before his arrest. His nerves were shot. He had to get the fuck out. He couldn’t keep doing it at that rate. He knew he was risking his life. When I saw the shotguns and the rifles and the pistols I was like, Oh this nigga is freaked out.

    The feds ordered Olulenu to knock on the door. He was wearing a wire. They already had a written statement from him admitting to federal crimes. Now he was just bait being dangled to catch a bigger fish.

    Once inside the apartment, Olulenu handed Cliff $10,000 in counterfeit twenties and then told him, I don’t want to do this anymore.

    Cliff was immediately suspicious. He told Olulenu he couldn’t quit, because he was in the process of arranging a deal to sell $150,000 in counterfeit money and needed Olulenu’s help to get it done. As federal agents listened, Cliff peppered Olulenu with questions, watching him closely, noticing that he was stuttering and fidgety and was avoiding eye contact.

    All the telltale signs, Cliff said later, of someone who told. Finally, Cliff said to Olulenu, You got a wire on or somethin’?

    At that moment, his front door blew off of its hinges and a frightening noise froze them as men began pouring in.

    I thought I was getting robbed, Cliff said. I thought I was fittin’ to get murdered.

    Cliff had no idea who they were, and he didn’t have time to grab a gun, but he couldn’t back down.

    I rushed ’em, he said. I thought that was my only chance of living. But there were several armed federal agents running at him.

    One of them smacked him on the forehead with the butt of a gun and he went down, his body limp from the pain.

    I hit the ground, he said, and he stood on my neck and screamed, ‘Where’s the motherfuckin’ guns? Where’s the fuckin’ money?’

    Cliff, lying flat on the ground, could only see the black boots swarming his place. He thought, Thank God it’s the cops. If it had been someone from the streets bursting in, he would’ve been dead by then. The agents asked if they could search the place. Cliff later said he didn’t give a fuck. He knew he was going to prison. The only question was for how long.

    The agents found counterfeit bills in plain view on the living room table and a stack of them in a kitchen cabinet. They also found a backpack containing more bills and a paper cutter. Cliff waived his rights and gave the officers a written statement admitting to passing counterfeit currency in New York City, D.C., and Chicago. Cliff had agreed to sell a large stack of counterfeit bills to someone, but now he said it was $200,000 instead of the $150,000 he’d previously told Olulenu it would be. Was this even true? Later, the veracity of that claim would become a very important question.

    Life had given Cliff many chances to avoid this day. Years in prep school had shown him what was possible for someone who was smart and connected. Years at Columbia had introduced him to important ideas and important people. And his home life in Chicago had shown him what happened to people in the underground economy. He had a father who was a police officer and an older brother who had done time.

    So why did he risk everything on a counterfeiting scheme? How did he pull off this scheme? How did it all fall apart so terribly? And why is it that after doing federal time for counterfeiting, Cliff went into an

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