In Italy, Counterfeiting With Artisanal Care Kathryn Cook for The New York Times An expert in counterfeit money showed details of a confiscated, counterfeit 100-Euro-bill at the Italian Carabinieri Currency Anti-Counterfeiting Unit in Rome. GIUGLIANO IN CAMPANIA, Italy - While Europe's financial overlords debate the wisdom of spurring growth by letting the European Central Bank print more money, some enterprising sorts in this semi-urban sprawl northwest of Naples are taking matters into their own hands and printing reams of counterfeit euros. The Campania region of southern Italy is known for its sunny skies, fresh mozzarella and organized crime, but it has a different kind of cottage industry that accounts for more than half of the 550,000 to 800,000 fake euro notes pulled from circulation annually by European central banks. Italy appears to have a particular artisanal flair for the printing arts, even though the authorities have also found illicit euro operations in France, Spain, Eastern Europe and South America. Its most accomplished practitioners can be found in and around Giugliano, where concrete-block apartments abut orchards and car dealerships, and young African prostitutes stand amid the rushes on unkempt roads. "In Italy, there's a great, ancient and august tradition: Here, they make fake money, done well," said Col. Alessandro Gentili, the head of the Italian Carabinieri's Currency Anti-Counterfeiting Unit in Rome. Giugliano is still the capital. It has the best professionals. Quite a number of them, as it turns out. When the police rolled up some of the counterfeiting operations around Giugliano as well as in the Calabria region farther south in January 2009, they raided 162 locations and arrested 109 people, seizing a mountain of illicit materials. Despite that raid, the biggest in years, Colonel Gentili says the counterfeiting continues, a tradition that - like winemaking, pottery, fabrics and other fine arts for which Italy is justly famous - is often passed from father to son. This month, the police in the southern Apulia region, also known as Puglia, arrested two men on charges of counterfeiting and said that organized crime groups around the city of Foggia had teamed up with those from the Campania region to produce a swarm of fake euros. While Campania is dominated by the Camorra, the notoriously violent organized crime network, the authorities here say counterfeiting is actually a peripheral line for the gangsters, who prefer to focus on more lucrative businesses like toxic waste dumping, drug trafficking and illegal garment workshops. "Organized crime certainly obtains a cut from this activity, and it can intervene to regulate its use in the market because it has economic interests in the area," said Raffaele Cantone, a Supreme Court justice who as a magistrate earlier in his career conducted wide-reaching investigations into the Camorra. Colonel Gentili, who displays a clear respect for the wily counterfeiters he spends his days chasing, said proudly that his unit, founded in 1992, was the first anti-counterfeiting unit in Europe, owing to Italy's gift for fakery. Before the euro, Italian presses, especially in the Naples area, specialized in fake lire, dollars and French and Swiss francs, he said. On his office wall, he displayed a counterfeit "A.M. lira," a currency circulated after the Allied landing in Italy, which was printed in Leonforte, Sicily, in 1946. To the untrained eye, the counterfeit euros made by groups active in this area are reasonably convincing. But they look slightly off: They are printed on paper without a watermark, and their silver holograms catch the light differently from those on real euros. Authorities found the first fake euros within days of the currency's introduction in January 2002, and they made their first big counterfeiting raids six months later. Since then, the euro has become a global currency, and counterfeit euros have followed the currents of international drug trafficking and immigration. In recent years, the authorities have found fake euros in Bulgaria, Colombia, Russia, Turkey, Iran and Iraq, countries with large cash economies, where it is often easier to spend fake euros because bank and shop clerks are not so familiar with the real thing. Sometimes immigrants from Africa and Latin America knowingly buy fake euros in Europe and try to use them back home to buy property, Colonel Gentili said. The euro - particularly the 500-euro note, worth about $660 - has become the currency of choice for drug dealers worldwide, and fake euros have become part of their operations. Last month, the authorities in Bogotá, Colombia, dismantled a counterfeit press and seized half a million counterfeit euro notes. Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.