Artur Virgílio Alves dos Reis was born into the petty bourgeoisie during the turmoil of the Portuguese monarchy. At the age of 18, the young man abandoned his engineering studies to marry a high-ranking young woman. After his father’s bankruptcy, Alves dos Reis was discouraged by his in-laws because of their social differences. Stung to the core, he left Lisbon for Angola in 1916 in the hope of making his fortune there.
Once there, his rise was meteoric : he became the director of the Angolan railways. How can such a feat be explained ? Alves dos Reis simply forged a diploma from a fake school at Oxford University, the Polytechnic School of Engineering. His areas of expertise ? Engineering sciences, geology, geometry, physics, metallurgy, pure mathematics, palaeography, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanics and applied physics. You’ll pardon the pun !
After the war, the economic crisis in Portugal was a cold shower for Artur, who had enormous ambitions. He then tried a poker game. With a cheque in hand, he became the majority shareholder in the Angolan railway company that employed him ! The aim was to sell his shares at a higher price before the money sent from New York reached its destination. But he was caught red-handed and other affairs caught up with him : embezzlement, arms trafficking… At 28, his career in the colony had turned him into a real crook. He was repatriated to Portugal to be judged, claimed to be the victim of a plot and was released on 27 August 1924 after only 34 days in prison.
This long month in the jails of Porto gave him the opportunity to work out the swindle of the century. He had noticed that there was a loophole in the Bank of Portugal, which was partly privatised and completely lax in controlling escudo notes. The aim of the operation was simple : to create a false contract with the Bank of Portugal in order to issue counterfeit notes of similar quality. As soon as he was released from prison, Artur exposed his plan to a gang of gentlemen thieves who got on like a house on fire. Among the most notable were the Dutch financier Karel Marang van Ysselveere, the German diplomatic spy Adolph Hennies and José Bandeira, the brother of António Bandeira, the Portuguese ambassador in The Hague. These men will be the diplomatic and financial cogs in a well-crafted scam.
By dint of trickery and falsified documents, Alves dos Reis’s gang obtained an essential piece of information : the 500 escudo notes were printed in London, at Waterlow and Sons. The financier Marang van Ysselveere met the boss William Waterlow, who told him to « keep this political meeting very quiet ».
Marang requested the printing of new 500 escudo banknotes, under the pretext of lending money to the Angolan colony. As these notes were intended for the colony, Marang van Ysselveere finally specified that the numbers of the series of notes already printed for Portugal could be used again.
The doubtful Englishman was finally convinced when he received a letter of confirmation and contracts from the Bank of Portugal. Official documents… obviously falsified by our master crook Alves dos Reis. Thus, in February 1925, Waterlow & Sons began delivering some of the 580,000 500 escudo notes, equivalent to almost half of the country’s money supply ! The notes arrived in Portugal in diplomatic bags from the Netherlands, without any control.
Fernando Pessoa, under the nickname of Bernardo Soares, imagined it in 1922. Artur Alves dos Reis embodies it perfectly. By obtaining 25% of the profits from this deception, the swindler founded the Angola e Metrópole bank during the same period, whose magnificent headquarters were established in rua da Conceição. This allowed him to get rid of counterfeit money by granting loans at unbeatable rates. He bought the Menino de Ouro palace (now the British Council) and led a hectic, luxurious life. He invested heavily in the stock market, even causing a revival of the Portuguese economy. To avoid any suspicion of this scam, he started to buy the Bank of Portugal, but failed in his operation.
The glory was short-lived. The mass of banknotes in circulation began to raise suspicions about the presence of counterfeit money. Alves dos Reis was also a subject of interest to O Século journalists. How was it that his bank could lend at such low rates without receiving deposits ? How could this man become so rich and flashy overnight ?
The cat was out of the bag and on 5 December 1925, the newspaper O Século revealed the scam. Each bank checked its deposits of 500 escudo notes and discovered many duplicate serial numbers. The next day, the capital of the Angola e Metrópole bank was confiscated. At the age of 29, Alves dos Reis was arrested on the Adolph Woermann, a German ship bound for Angola. His biggest accomplices, such as the financier Marang and the spy Adolph Hennies, managed to escape.
The trial lasted 5 years because Alves dos Reis’ falsified documents were so well done that the judges thought he had accomplices within the Bank of Portugal. Sentenced to 20 years in prison, he was released from prison in 1945 and went on an adventure to Angola. There, he tried a final swindle with the coffee trade. Sentenced to 4 years in prison, he died of a heart attack just before serving his sentence, poor and in general indifference.
This swindle of the century, this almost perfect crime, will have serious consequences. The destabilized escudo will cause a severe economic crisis in Portugal. This enormous scandal would discredit the Republic and its institutions. In 1926, this instability favoured the advent of a military dictatorship. In 1928, in order to revive the economy and stabilise the currency, the junta put its trust in the theories of a professor of economics. His name ? António de Oliveira Salazar.
