The Art of Making Money

by Jason Kersten

  It was a lot to assimilate for a sixteen-year-old: advanced printing techniques, abstract concepts of monetary “space,” law enforcement tactics of one of the world’s most elite agencies. Art started to feel a bit like James Bond, an adopted persona that he would embrace and never quite get over. “Years later, I would think back on how I had learned from the best, telling myself that I knew what I was doing, and the arrogance it would inspire was ridiculous.”

  At the time, of course, he quickly learned that the act of counterfeiting itself is less than glamorous. Eliminating evidence was essential to Pete, and Art came to loathe the endless precautions. They never began work in the shop without first applying superglue to their fingertips to avoid leaving prints. A stray print on a bill spells instant doom for a counterfeiter, especially if it can be linked to a shop or a press peppered with the same prints. Pete was militaristic when it came to cleanliness, and one of Art’s prime responsibilities was to rub down every surface at the day’s end, then throw the rags in the washing machine—an act he thought unnecessary since they’d be right back at it the following morning. But Pete was insistent that the Service could very well raid or conduct an extralegal visit to the shop while they were away, and if that happened they had to make it as sterile as possible. When Art was finished, the master counterfeiter would inspect the job, grousing about a stray ink stain here or a paper shred there.

  Gardeners have “green thumbs,” and Williams learned the hard way that counterfeiters get them too. To clean the press, Pete insisted on using a powerful, alcohol-based degreaser. “Never let this get on your skin,” Pete had warned Art, but one day during the middle of wiping down the press he went to the bathroom still wearing rubber gloves. He was instantly crippled by a tremendous burning sensation. “It burned like a motherfucker, but that wasn’t the only bad part! I had green money ink all over my dick. And then I had a hard time getting it off. I couldn’t use the degreaser, because that’s what made it sting. Basically I just jerked it off over the next couple days—that’s one way to clean it! I was too embarrassed to tell Pete about it. I still had cleaning to do and the whole time my penis was burning. It was the worst.”

  Every bit of garbage had to be burned, and at the end of each day Art carried piles of chemical-saturated paper towels and printing stock to the back lot, threw it all into a fifty-five-gallon drum, and tossed in a match. He’d watch it burn as the far more captivating lights of Chicago’s skyline brightened in the dusk. He’d gaze at the city from the industrial hinterlands, no different from any American teenager daydreaming of bigger things while engaged in a shit chore.

  If anything, he was far closer to obtaining those dreams. During the print runs, the garbage often included money—hundreds of bills that da Vinci had determined were flawed due to bad color, alignment, or just an odd feeling he had when looking at them.

  “How much money have you burned?” Art once asked him.

  “Oh, man. There have been runs when I’ve burned as much as I’ve made,” Pete replied.

  After it got colder, on several occasions Pete took Art back to his house and they burned money in his fireplace, warming themselves by it while watching football. Pete’s house was the most refined home Art had ever seen, a collector’s home crammed with old books of English poetry, tall, exotic lamps from China, and oil paintings of cities and landscapes, many of them done by da Vinci himself. Away from the shop, they’d slip out of counterfeit talk.

  “What’s it’s like to be a father?” Pete inquired one time.

  “It’s weird,” Art said. “I can’t believe I actually am one. I want to be a good one, but I don’t feel like I’m qualified. I love my son, but look at what we do, where I am.”

  “Have you ever heard of Epictetus?”

  “No.”

  “He was a slave, a Greek slave brought to Rome to serve a very powerful adviser of the emperor Nero. But he was also a writer, a poet, and a philosopher. He said beautiful things, and even though he was a slave, the people loved him. At parties, people would gather around him. They wanted to hear everything that came out of his mouth because he was wise and funny. They didn’t think of him as a slave. But his master always did.

  “Over the years Epictetus’s body betrayed him. He became a cripple, ugly and disfigured. Some said that it was because his master was jealous and beat him when nobody else was around. But the interesting thing was that older and more ugly Epictetus became, the more beautiful were his thoughts and words, and the people loved him even more. ‘How can you have such a positive outlook on life when you’ve suffered so much?’ they asked him. And his reply was that even though it might appear that life had made him ugly, it was only an appearance. Throughout all his suffering, his insides had become only more beautiful—and that was the true reality, what made him a great man.

  “It’s not your fault that your pops left you,” da Vinci told Art. “You can still be a good pops yourself. It’s not your fault that you’re in the projects, and you’ll get out of them. Just don’t give up.”

  It had occurred to Art earlier that maybe the reason da Vinci was teaching him in the first place was because he didn’t have any kids of his own. Did da Vinci think of him as a son? He wasn’t an emotionally demonstrative man. The one time Art had seen him blush had been in the print shop when, feeling frolicky, he had snatched Pete’s beanie off his head and run around the shop, refusing to return it. “Now I know why you never take it off!” Art had shouted. “You’re bald!” Pete had grumbled, demanding his beanie back, then halfheartedly chased him around the shop until they both tired of the game.

  “I kind of think of you as my pops,” Art blurted out that day by the fire of burning bills. He will never forget his mentor’s response. Pete’s “eyes bugged out” and he didn’t say anything for a long time. Art threw the rest of the bills into the fire and they joked and talked more as a cold night fell down on Bridgeport. It was one of the last times he ever saw Pete da Vinci.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER THEIR THIRD PRINT RUN, Art noticed that it had been a while since Pete had dropped by the apartment to visit his mother. When he asked her about it, she began to cry.

  “I don’t know where he is,” Malinda said. “He hasn’t called or come by the snack shop. Nobody there has seen him. I’ve called his home and office and nobody picks up. I’m worried.”

  “Did you guys get in a fight?”

  “No, no fights. That’s why I’m worried.”

  “I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Art consoled his mom, but he was bothered himself. The last time he had seen Pete, nothing had been out of the ordinary. He told Art that they’d been doing another run in six weeks and jokingly admonished him not to forget everything he’d learned. He’d made no mention of any impending trips, and Art had assumed he’d see him around the house as usual. If Pete had known he’d be leaving, it would have been completely out of character not to say good-bye and offer an explanation.

  At the same time, Art understood that Pete wasn’t in the kind of business that benefits from predictability and informing others of your actions. If Pete had a reason for staying away it was probably a good one. Had he been under surveillance by the Secret Service or even arrested, Pete would not have risked exposing Art and his mother by calling. Thinking that might be the case, Art avoided sniffing around da Vinci’s print shop or his house.

  He did start swinging by Ed’s on a daily basis. He’d stick his head in the door, scanning the usual crowd of heads in the hope of spotting the beanie. He figured that Pete would be back any day and have one hell of a story about why he had left town. But as the days turned to weeks and the date of their appointed print run passed, Art started getting a bad feeling. Unable to contain his worry any longer, he began driving by both the house and the print shop, hoping to spot the Caddy. When it never appeared he even knocked on the door and peeked in the windows of Pete’s house; no one answered, and although Pete’s stuff was still there, the place had an empty aura, as if it hadn’t bee
n inhabited for weeks. Art finally began wondering about another explanation, one he’d forced himself not to consider.

  It happened all the time in Chicago. He pictured Pete pulling the Caddy up to a hotel or an out-of-the-way lot. The client would have been someone he knew well, a regular who he felt comfortable with. He exited the car carrying a satchel filled with the same bills Art himself had helped create. For some reason—greed or paranoia—the buyer had decided that this would be the last deal, but Pete didn’t know that. He would have greeted his executioner the way he greeted everyone, with that happy-dog smile.

  Art thought about making a few inquiries to some of the local associates of the Outfit—Chicago’s Italian Mafia—then thought better of it. If Pete had met his end at the hands of the mob, a search for answers could easily take him on the same trip Pete had made, into the suffocating darkness of a car trunk and the illimitable voids of Lake Michigan.

  “I’d like to think that he’s still alive and out there somewhere,” Art says. In his heart, he still wants to believe that Pete never would have left both him and his mother without an explanation.

  4

  ESCAPE

  The American dream is, in part, responsible for a great deal of crime and violence because people feel that the country owes them not only a living but a good living.

  —DAVID ABRAHAMSEN, CRIMINAL PSYCHIATRIST,

  QUOTED IN THE San Francisco

  Examiner & Chronicle, 1975

  Art’s hopes of becoming a master counterfeiter disappeared with his mentor. He was still a kid, and the discipline, financial resources, and equipment necessary to start his own operation seemed unobtainable. With three printings under his belt, he had a solid understanding of the basics, but he didn’t possess the intuition and experience that separates fiddler from master. Most of all he lacked patience, and as he looked around for new options he saw his friends making faster money the Bridgeport way—by their wits and their balls.

  Many of the SDs were now dealing drugs, cocaine mostly, while others had gotten deeper into auto theft. Art dabbled in both, but fresh from da Vinci, those crimes didn’t fulfill his sense of craftsmanship or excitement. He had become something of criminal snob, a condition as common to counterfeiters as inky fingers.

  Art had been spending a lot of time hanging out on Taylor Street—Chicago’s Little Italy. Unlike his own neighborhood, Taylor Street was solidly middle class, a world of cafés, bakeries, pizza places, Italian-ice shops, and some of the best restaurants in the city. At the same time, it had its own criminal sect, which was much less visible but by far the most successful in the city. The Outfit had ruled the neighborhood since the turn of the century, when its predecessors, known by the old Sicilian moniker La Mano Nera, or “Black Hand,” carved the names of their enemies on a poplar tree that stood at the intersection of Taylor and Loomis. “Dead Man’s Tree” was long gone by the time Art started hanging out in Little Italy, replaced by progress and more subtle methods of influence, but the Mafia itself was still firmly and quietly rooted there. It was a street where kids hanging out in front of a coffee shop might suddenly be hailed by a man driving a black Crown Vic, handed two hundred bucks and a gas can, and told to drive the car somewhere out of the way and burn it to the ground—something that Art himself did on one occasion.

  Unlike the boys from the projects, the crime-oriented kids he knew from Taylor Street were making good money as bookmakers, debt collectors, or by selling stolen merchandise. Art wanted to make his own fast bucks, too, and since he was no longer interested in the classic Bridgeport routes of stealing or selling drugs, he opted for a combination of both: robbing drug dealers.

  Like everywhere else in the late eighties and early nineties, in Chicago cocaine and marijuana were rampant. Spotting the dealers was easy; they carried beepers, tended to drive flashy vehicles with gaudy accessories like blinding rims, and of course everyone knew who they were anyway, because just about everybody Art’s age in Bridgeport did drugs.

  His favorite technique was to either buy or steal a Chevrolet Caprice, preferably black or white, and outfit it with a long, squiggly police antenna and a cherry dashboard strobe. He and two other crew members would tail a dealer all night, until his stash box was full of cash and, hopefully, more drugs. They’d wait until he was on a side street, then flip on the cherry and pull him over. They’d rush out of the Caprice wearing black nylon Windbreakers, brandishing pistols and Maglites, and “basically scare the living shit out of the dealer.” They’d go through the whole routine, screaming profanities, pegging the dealer to the asphalt, cuffing him, then searching his vehicle until they found the cash and the stash. When they were finished, they’d knock the dealer upside the head, walk back to the Caprice, and speed off, screaming and laughing and floating on adrenaline.

  A good drug-dealer hit could earn Art up to fifteen thousand dollars, and it appealed to his sense of justice and his flair for drama. He felt, in his own words, “like a bad motherfucker.” Over the years it would be a crime he’d have a hard time resisting, even when times were good.

  With Art’s resurgence as a street criminal, he was once again on the fast track to either prison or death—fates that by now were visiting his friends with morbid regularity. His first, horrifying taste of the perplexing speed with which the projects can snuff out a life had come one day in the summer of ’89. That afternoon, he was doing nothing more than standing next to a brick wall and chatting with his friend and fellow gang member Peter Friegel. He was looking his buddy right in the face when a bullet ripped into the left side of Peter’s head. He was killed instantly.

  The police attributed Friegel’s murder to a gang hit. Art, who never saw the shooter, assumed it was the Latin Kings, but gangs weren’t the only the killers. On another occasion, his friend Darren Frandelo walked into a Dunkin’ Donuts on Thirty-first and Halsted—after just having attended the funeral of yet another friend—and got into a minor argument with a man inside. After picking up his crullers and coffee, Frandelo walked back to his car, where his young wife and daughter were waiting. Moments later, the offended man emerged wielding a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. He strolled up to Frandelo’s car and unloaded both rounds into the driver’s seat. Just before he was hit, Darren begged the man not to hurt his family.

  Other than poverty, the common denominator behind many of the deaths was simply guns, which in the late eighties hit Chicago like a medieval plague. “It was just one summer and suddenly guns were everywhere,” Art remembers. “It was scary. Something happened and then everyone had a gun. They were easy to get, almost like somebody planned it and brought them in by the crate. It wasn’t just my neighborhood, but the whole fucking city.”

  By the time he was nineteen, Art had lost five friends to gun violence. In terms of American lives lost, Bridgeport had become as much a war zone as Baghdad later would, and similar death traps were sprouting up all over the country—South Central Los Angeles, Detroit, Harlem—anyplace where people were poor, angry, and looking for fast power.

  It sounds trite to say that Art’s number was bound to come up—violence is never inevitable until someone decides it is—but it did early one morning in the summer of 1990 as he was walking home from a party. It was about three A.M., and he had just crossed into the basketball courts at the Homes when two young men stepped out of the shadows and accosted him.

  Their faces were covered in bandanas and Art never got a good look at them. They were black, and one was in his late teens and the other didn’t look much older than eleven. They started asking Art questions: “Where you from? This is our court. What you doin’ here?” in that tone people use when you know there’s no right answer, because they’re just fishing for a verbal response as excuse to hurt you. Art got out a “What are you talking about?” before they both raised pistols at him and opened fire.

  He wheeled around and started to run, dropping his chin down close to his chest. He got about twenty yards away, then felt a sharp push
on his left hip and tumbled to the cement. He’d been hit by a .25 caliber round. The shooters screamed with glee and chased after him, but he got up again and kept running. As he did so, another bullet from a 9mm struck him on his right thigh. Flying on adrenaline and knowing that he had no choice but to keep running, he rounded the corner onto Thirty-first Street, where a Chicago Tribune deliveryman was unloading stacks of the early edition. He collapsed next to the van and asked him to call an ambulance.

  LUCKILY ART’S GUNSHOT WOUNDS were superficial; paramedics took him to Mercy Hospital, where surgeons removed the bullets and released him in less than twenty-four hours. The shooters were never caught, and in a macabre way, getting shot was a good thing for Art; it crystallized the literal dead end he’d been heading down since arriving at the Bridgeport Homes. Lying incapacitated in his bedroom, he knew that the moment he recovered he would be right back where he had been. He had hated the Homes from day one, then the Homes had become home, and for the better part of a decade they had defined him and then nearly killed him.

  “After I got shot, I thought a lot about the things da Vinci had told me about getting out of the projects,” Art says. “I knew that I’d die if I stayed there. I didn’t know how I’d get out, but I decided that I would.”

  It turned out the decision would be made for him. About three weeks after he returned from the hospital, he awoke one morning to the sound of his mother in his doorway.

  “Arty! Get up! There’s a fire downstairs. We gotta get out of the house. Hurry up!” she shouted until she saw Art’s head pop up from his pillow, then whisked back downstairs.