Ink, Paper, Talent: The King of Counterfeiters

It was dark when Zdzisław Nęcka, the Matejko of Monte, sat at his small table. The night lamp casts a soft light over piles of paper, paints, and precision tools. Drunken shouts and the grinding of old trams could be heard somewhere outside the window. He was the king of Polish counterfeiters, a man whose works fooled even the sharpest eyes.

“At the orphanage, they used to say I’d either become an artist or rot in prison,” he would say with irony.

Nęcka’s childhood was far from idyllic. Raised in the shadow of Kraków’s Montelupich prison, where incarceration loomed like a daily neighbor, Zdzisław learned to dodge blows before he learned to read. His mother drank, his father was distant, and the system ripped him from the middle of a school lesson, sending him to an orphanage. It was there he first heard the prophecy of his talent:

“You’ll either become an artist or rot in prison.”

He had the talent, but he never found love. Instead, he met women who, as he put it, had “a knack for spending.” When he produced 50 fake 100-zloty notes in a single night, they complained it wasn’t enough. So he made 100, 200, even 500.

“A man doesn’t realize when he’s going too far. The women pushed me to work, and I had no objections. After all, what kind of work is it? A few hours with ink and you’ve got real money,” he said with a laugh.

A Child of the Streets

His first forgeries were trifles: IDs, certificates, and school diplomas for his orphanage friends. Nęcka had a knack for details, lines, and curves. He was a perfectionist, like any true artist. Over time, he learned more. He extracted every bit of knowledge from the steel engraving techniques at his art high school. However, his most significant lessons came from Professor Racinowski’s typography classes — a professor who never knew what his pupils planned to do with that knowledge.

“The letter must be perfect; it can’t waver,” Nęcka would say.

His first serious project was counterfeit dollars. He spent a year and a half on them. The paint, paper, and structure all had to align. The failure of his first batch nearly broke him. But when he approached the task again, he erased ink from single-dollar bills instead of creating paper from scratch. The result? A “horse” — a black-market currency dealer — by Kraków’s Cracovia Hotel picked it up, rubbed it, and said:

“A hundred. Good one.”

The pride of a counterfeiter, when his creation passes as genuine, was Nęcka’s greatest reward. In those moments, he felt like more than a craftsman. He was a creator who had beaten the system and outsmarted the finest security specialists.

The Forger-Artist

Nęcka never liked monotony. When wedding rings were in demand, he forged rings. When documents were needed, he made documents. Everything was custom work. He operated with surgical precision, paying meticulous attention to every detail. He was perfect in a world that allowed for mediocrity.

Every time he landed behind bars, he emerged with new skills. Prison chapels, frescoes, and paintings for guards and inmates were his escape from reality. At Kraków’s Montelupich prison, he spent months painting sacred scenes on the chapel walls. Cardinal Macharski himself blessed his work. A paradox? Not for Nęcka.

“Caravaggio wasn’t a saint either, and the Church commissioned his paintings,” he would say.

The Last Golden Hundred

Today, the Matejko of Monte is 81 years old, living in a tiny social housing flat, just 11 square meters — smaller than the prison cells where he spent most of his life. A plague of cockroaches, an old table, and Bachorek the dog, his only faithful companion, remain all. Paints are too expensive, and his former passion lives on only as a memory.

“I won’t go back to it,” he assures. “I’m too old now. But if something happened, I could start over from scratch. After all, it’s just paper, paint, and talent. And I never lacked for that.”

At the end, he adds with a smile:

“Unless it’s an island where they pay with seashells. My talent wouldn’t work there.”

Because Zdzisław Nęcka always knew one thing: the most important thing is to possess something no one else has. For him, it wasn’t the talent for painting but the skill that made him a legend — the art of forging the truth.

Source: Był królem polskich fałszerzy.”W bidulu mówili, że albo zostanę artystą, albo zgniję w kryminale”