The crime
“They were the McDonald’s of forgers, cranking out hundreds of thousands of forgeries and peddling them on eBay and the Internet, the cable TV home shopping channels, mail order, auctions, card shows and retail shops in every state in the Union.”

The story
Operation Bullpen: The Inside Story of the Biggest Forgery Scam in American History isn’t very well written (or edited; author Kevin Nelson is allowed to use the wrong “discrete,” several times). And it’s probably about 25 percent longer than it needs to be, one of those true-crime books that calls an office-park case location “nondescript” and then proceeds to…describe it, like, thanks for the qualifiers but we probably all assumed it was low-slung and beige? But that first-drafty quality isn’t fatal; Nelson’s breathless “let me just get all this down before I forget which Mikey is which” tone works for the material, and it’s not poetry, but it’s pace-y.

It’s also process-y as hell — in a few ways.