MISTER 880—THE MAN, THE MOVIE, THE RETROSPECTIVE

THE NEW YORKER HAS A REGULAR FEATURE “TAKES,” retrospectives of previous pieces on one thing and another. “David Grann on St. Clair McKelway’s ‘Old Eight Eighty’,” October 19, 2025, is exemplary of the genre: Grann opens with, “It seemed no more than a curious footnote—a counterfeiter so outlandishly inept that his forged dollar bills were detectable even at a casual glance. Nearly all were emblazoned with a telltale flaw: the name of America’s first President was spelled ‘Wahsington.’ ”

Curious indeed. And Grann’s retrospective led me onto Internet sleuthing ranging from Wikipedia and IMBd, to YouTube and, of course, The New Yorker. Here are tidbits gleaned from this sleuthing.

What’s “Eight Eighty”? Grann recounts, “The scammer, who operated in the New York area from 1938 to 1948, was known to the often exasperated agents of the U.S. Secret Service as No. 880, for the number of his case file.” The culprit also acquired the moniker “Mister 880.”

Emerich Juettner, 1876–1955, Austrian-American, aka Edward Mueller aka Mister 880. Image, 1948, by Nick Peterson New York Daily News. 

A Hardened Criminal? Hardly. “Unlike his more masterly criminal brethren,” Grann continues, “he never posed a threat to the sanctity of the financial system at large. He produced only dollar bills, and only forty or so of them each month, enough to provide himself and his dog with a few supplies. (The bogus currency was easily passed off, because who inspects a dollar bill?)” 

A Fire—and the Misspelling—His Downfall. “In the end,” Grann writes, “No. 880 was found only because a fire broke out in his apartment, and, as a result, the tools of his criminality—including a zinc engraving plate with the misspelled word ‘Wahsington’—were thrown out the window and discovered by children playing in the neighborhood.”

At First, an Immigrant Success Story, Sorta. Wikipedia notes Juettner’s arrival to the U.S. in 1890 at the age of 14. By a dozen years later, he “had found work as a picture frame gilder before marrying Florence LeMein in 1902 at the age of 26. His wife gave birth to a son, Walter, in 1903 and a daughter, Florence, in 1918. To support his family, he began working as a maintenance man and building superintendent in New York’s Upper East Side. His job allowed him and his family to live rent free in the basement of the building where he worked.” 

The Spanish Flu and a Junkman Evolves. Juettner’s wife died of the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918. “He then became a junk collector,” Wikipedia says. And, apparently, the junkman did fine for two decades, even into difficult times of the Great Depression.

Then an Occasional Sideline—For a Decade. “In 1938,” Wikipedia continues, “Juettner began using ten to twelve homemade counterfeited bills a week in select stores in the neighborhoods of Manhattan. Over the following ten years, Juettner continued to use his counterfeited bills sparingly, never repeating storefronts or tenders. The bills were always poorly made on cheap paper and included details such as Washington being misspelled ‘Wahsington.’ ”

This and another image from the YouTube of the movie Mister 880. 

Merely a Mirror Error. In the “Trivia” portion of IMBd’s review of the flick Mister 880, a commenter responds, “The misspelled ‘Wahsington’ on the bills (based on fact) is perhaps not quite as inept as it may seem at first glance. The bills were printed from photo-etched plates, which required some hand touch-ups. Looking directly at them, one sees a mirror image of the printed bill—‘notgnihsaW’ (but also with each letter itself reversed).”

Also in Juettner’s Defense. Wikipedia recounts, “When caught, he openly admitted his actions, adding that he had never given more than one bill to anyone, so no person had lost more than one dollar. He was sentenced to one year and one day in prison and a one-dollar fine, and he later sold the rights to his story, which was made into the 1950 film Mister 880.”

The Flick. Mister 880 is a Hollywoodized version of the caper. Edmund Gwenn (only three years after his Oscar-winning Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street) earned another Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award for portraying poor/kindly/Navy vet/counterfeiting “Skipper” Miller. Secret Service agent Burt Lancaster reluctantly captures him. Dorothy McGuire ends up loving them both.

In Summation, Your Honor….  In his “Old Eight Eighty-I,” “Annals of Crime,” The New Yorker, August 20, 1949, St. Clair McKelway wrote, “Long before the Secret Service men caught up with Old Eight Eighty, in the spring of 1948, and arrested him in the kitchen of his sunny, top-floor tenement flat near Broadway and Ninety-sixth Street, he was, besides being known to them as Old Eight Eighty, generally recognized by them as the most exasperating counterfeiter of all time, and the least greedy…. He was well over seventy by then—a mild, cheerful looking old fellow, with bright-blue eyes, a fringe of snowy hair over his ears, a wispy white mustache, and a toothless grin that all Secret Service men who ever saw him found unforgettable.”

Edmund Gwenn, Dorothy McGuire, and Burt Lancaster in Mister 880, the entire flick accessible at YouTube.

I feel the same, and I have yet to watch the flick, which is likely to enhance my opinion. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025