Word: kersten
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Writer Jason Kersten first told Williams' story in Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. Now he's returned to the subject for a book, The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter. Williams took a stab at making an honest living, but eventually returned to counterfeiting and was arrested again in 2007. He's currently serving a federal prison term scheduled to end in 2013. Kersten spoke with TIME about Williams' remarkable criminal career and the odd allure of duplicating dollars...
...control, then give the BKA greater investigative powers and move the agency to Berlin. The trouble is, the states refuse to cede any power to the federal government. State officials say what's needed is improved cooperation, not centralization. At the end of last year, BKA president Ulrich Kersten proposed moving his team to Berlin, sparking massive protests by employees and local politicians who feared the economic consequences. Schily removed Kersten from his post and created a commission to study the plan. Its recommendations are expected by early summer. Germany's fragmented security structure dates back...
Back in 1996, Justin, his twin brother Jef and their friend Larry Kersten were laboring at a Dallas dotcom that had been dangling the prospect of shares before its underpaid employees. But the Sewells and Kersten were low on the ladder, and the promised stock never arrived. A dark mood ensued, Justin recalls, "especially after we started to see other employees becoming fantastically wealthy very quickly...
...Justin received a catalog for Successories, the pre-eminent retailer of motivational art--posters and plaques bearing corporate bromides along the order of "Your attitude determines your altitude." The Sewells and Kersten started "bitterly laughing at how there was nothing in the catalog remotely appropriate to the situation we were in," Justin says. They started riffing on some notions for "demotivational" art. They even borrowed stock photos and ran up posters for their cubicles. "We didn't have any intention of starting a company at that point," Justin says, "because none of us had any entrepreneurial drive or self-confidence...
...orders. Filling those orders almost broke them. As a hedge against dealing with retailers who "could tell we were rubes and pretenders," Justin says, Despair went online, structuring Despair.com as a ruthless parody of "everything that's wrong in corporate America" and setting up a stylized version of Kersten as the embodiment of a cynical, jargon-spouting...