The Secret Service is mostly known as the organization that protects the president, but long before they started doing that, they were fighting the growing epidemic of counterfeiting in post-Civil War America.

In the 1970s and 80s, the Secret Service was still battling counterfeiting, and they had recently taken another forger off the streets. But when they searched

for his printing equipment, which is known as a plant, they found much more than they had bargained for.

On top of engraved printing plates and counterfeit bills, they found notes about financial

scams, a kill kit, and even audio recordings of sexual assaults.

This is Monsters. The details of the crimes in this story are true, but many of the names have been replaced with pseudonyms.

James Mitchell de Bartolabin Jr. was born on March 20th, 1940 in Little Rock, Arkansas.

He went by Mike and was the middle of three children born to James Sr. and Mary Lou

DeBartalabin. He had an older sister named Linda and a younger brother

named Ralph. Mike's young life was not stable by any means. His father was commissioned as a

lieutenant in the United States Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 and

was stationed in Washington, D.C. After the move, Mike's mother, Mary

Lou began drinking heavily and James Sr. began having an affair with a woman he worked with.

Mary Lou was aware of the infidelity and considered the affair an emotional divorce, but the

couple remained married. In 1945, the family moved to Austin, Texas, just before

James Sr. was sent to the Pacific Theater. In Austin, Linda would later report that their

mother was often drunk and she had to pick up the slack in taking care of her brothers. Mary Lou

would sometimes take the children with her to the bars where she would pick up

men and have her own affairs. When James Sr. returned to the states after a nine-month deployment,

Linda said that he was so embarrassed by the state of their family that he rejoined the army and

got stationed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky so they could start over somewhere else.

As James Sr.'s career advanced, the family moved to Frankfurt, West Germany, and then to

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