Did you-all see this in AWADmail Issue 182?
From: Vivian
Subject: benjamins

As one of the recording engineers who first mixed the popular Puff Daddy hit record, entitled "All About The Benjamins", I can't help feeling a bit of a combination of disappointment and relief that this slang expression for a hundred-dollar bill has now formally been incorporated into the lexicon of our twenty-first century vernacular.

Relief, because, despite hundreds of playbacks in working on the original piece, it took my sixteen-year-old son's exasperated explanation to illuminate me to its meaning, and disappointment because it seems a poor repository for the memory of perhaps the most brilliant of our American
forefathers. Nonetheless, I am curious if there are any literary references to the word prior to the release of the pop song, or if P Diddy is to be remembered for all time as a modern contributor to our language.

The OED lists him (as S. Combs) as the first citation (1994) for the word in the line "My pockets swell to the rim with Benjamins."
-Anu Garg

And for those of us who think our jobs are bad:
From: Kerala
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--benjamin

I started earning a living in the India Security Press in the early 60s as a supervisor which was also part of the currency note printing press in India at the time. We used to work in bays, so to say that any worker leaving the bay had to be frisked by a watchman at the door, and workers returning home or breaking for lunch literally were required to strip themselves in front of the security staff who carried out the search with bare hands. Bales of special white paper used to get printed in printing presses six days in a week of two ten-hour shifts in a dingy prisonlike highwalled building. Fresh air was at a premium and once inside you could breathe fresh air only when
out of the main Gate.

We still carry the picture of Mahatma Gandhi in currency notes and no one calls the Indian currency notes 'Gandhis'.