The Art of Making Money

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The Art of Making Money Page 8

by Jason Kersten


  He groaned plaintively, naturally thinking that his mom was experiencing another delusional episode. But a few seconds later, he smelled smoke. He lifted his head off the pillow, saw a black cloud pouring through the heater vent, and ran to the doorway. When he looked downstairs he saw the living room half engulfed in flames. Malinda and Wensdae were nowhere to be seen.

  Art snatched up some jeans and a T-shirt and ran out to the parking lot, where his mother and sister were waiting. The three of them watched as the Chicago Fire Department moved in and tried to save the home they loathed. The firefighters were able to contain the flames to just their apartment, but it was a total loss. Fire investigators later attributed the blaze to a cigarette butt that Malinda had left burning on the living-room sofa. Interviews with the neighbors and records checks confirmed that Malinda was certifiably crazy and a heavy smoker. Case closed.

  Art wasn’t so sure. “I asked her about it later and she was cagey,” he says. “I agree with the fire department in that she started the fire, but I don’t think it was an accident. I think she did it because it would be the only thing that would force us to find a way out of the projects. It was right after I got shot. I don’t think she wanted to live there anymore. I think something snapped in her mind, and I think she fucking lit the house up. I mean, my mom was a smoker. She may have been crazy, but she knew how to smoke.”

  And that was how they finally got out of the Bridgeport Homes. Accident or not, Malinda had initiated one the most desperate jail-break gambits in the book: She’d lit her own cell on fire.

  TWO DAYS AFTER THE FIRE, one off the local churches found the Williamses a new apartment ten blocks away at Thirty-first and Wells. Although just a short hop from the projects, it was another planet. There were brick town houses with little iron gates in front, well-lit streets, trees—and none of the gunshots and gangbangers that had made the simple act of coming and going from home akin to navigating a siege zone. Rent was a few hundred dollars more than it had been at the Homes, but Art had saved enough to tide them over for the first few months. Once the family moved in, the collective mood soared as they realized that they had spent the last seven years stuck inside a trap from which they were now free. Art wished his mother had set the fire the day they moved in.

  The Williamses spent a year in the Wells Street apartment, which became a base that each of them would use to embark on their next stages of life. Wendz was the first to move on; she took a job at Ed’s Snack Shop, and there she met and fell in love with Dr. Samos—a dentist from Greek Town who was fifteen years her senior. He not only treated her well and fixed her teeth for free, but he also paid for her to attend both junior college and modeling school. Wendz eventually moved in with him, and a year later Art would attend her first fashion show at a club on State Street. He had always thought of his little sister as a rag doll, but the young woman he saw striding down the catwalk was stunningly beautiful. “She was wearing a white outfit. Slacks with a white shirt, and a white coat. And I didn’t even realize it was her at first. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s my sister. ’ A whole crowd of cameras went off, click click click. I remember her looking at me when she came to the end of the runway. She turned and the jacket dropped to her arm; it was beautiful. I remember how proud I was of her, because she just had it.”

  Once Wensdae moved out, Malinda quickly followed suit. Sick of the city altogether, she headed back to Texas, leaving Art enough room to bring in Karen and the baby. For the first time since becoming a father, he finally had his own family under one roof, but he soon learned that escaping the Bridgeport Homes would require more than geographical separation.

  The Thirty-second Street Satan’s Disciples were not enthusiastic about Art’s move. Now twenty years old, he had risen to become one of the top lieutenants and moneymakers. At first he continued to visit his old friends at the Homes and show up for the Friday meetings, but after Karen and the baby moved in he decided it was time to end his involvement in the gang. Knowing that the gang’s leader, Marty Arbide, wouldn’t be too happy about one of his top lieutenants jumping ship, Art chose a passive exit strategy: He simply stopped attending meetings in the hopes that everyone would understand his new situation. But a few days after he failed to show up, he ran into two SDs on the street and realized it wasn’t going to be so easy. They immediately asked him where he’d been.

  “You know I love you guys, but I’m not about this anymore,” he told them. “I have to look after my family now.”

  “You gotta show up, Arty,” one of them replied. “Even if you’re not out there anymore, you gotta pay your respects.”

  “Hey, I respect you, but I don’t know what else to tell you, man. I’m steppin’, I gotta move on,” he said, and told them he had somewhere he needed to be.

  After Art failed to attend the next meeting, he started missing the camaraderie of the Disciples, and decided to drop by the playground the following Friday for a visit. Marty was there, along with his three biggest attack dogs: Danny, Porky, and Redhead Jerry. When Art greeted them with his normal enthusiasm, he realized right away that he had made a mistake. “They kind of rolled up on me, gave me the silent treatment,” Art says, “and I knew something was going down.”

  “You have a violation coming for not attending the last two meetings,” Marty flatly told Art. In Disciple-speak, that meant that he was now expected to submit to three gang members as they beat him for thirty-two seconds—because they were from Thirty-second Street. If he resisted, more seconds would be added according to Marty’s whim.

  “I’m not taking it,” Art told him. “If you start swinging, we’re fighting.”

  “That’s the way it is, then,” Marty said, and before Art knew it Marty and his lieutenants were charging him.

  Art was standing with his back to a brick wall, and the first to reach him was Danny, who opened up with a wide, wild right. Seeing it coming, Art sidestepped left and ducked. An instant later, he heard a crack followed by a scream, and was amazed to see one of Danny’s wrist bones sticking out from the skin of his right hand; he had struck the brick wall instead of Art. That turned out to be the only heroic moment for Art, because after that the other three boys moved in and beat him senseless. As he lay on the ground, knotted up and bleeding, they reminded him to be at the next week’s meeting.

  The indignation of the beating only solidified Art’s determination to get out of the gang, and sure enough, he refused to turn up the following Friday. He didn’t hear anything from the Disciples for three weeks, and then one evening he heard a knock on his front door. Thinking it was probably one of Karen’s friends, he opened it, and the next thing he knew Marty and two Disciples bum-rushed their way into his apartment and began beating him in his own hallway.

  Art covered his face and scrambled to get a footing, but in moments they had him on the floor. He heard his wife and son yelling hysterically in the next room, then suddenly all three Disciples were running for the front door. When he looked up, he saw Karen pointing his 9mm at the gangsters, screaming at them to get the fuck out, and looking very much on the edge of justifiable homicide.

  “I never really talked to any of them after that for a long time,” says Art. “They left me alone. I think they were more afraid of Karen than they were of me.”

  That was the final straw for Art. With scenes of pissed-off drug dealers and gangbangers invading his home and killing his family boiling through his dreams, he resolved to get out of the robbery business as well. In the relativity of his world, he had matured, and with it came an epiphany.

  “I remembered what Pete had told me about having a nice life,” he says. “He had showed me that stuff for a reason, because he wanted me to have another avenue out. I had no idea how I would do it because frankly I had forgotten just about everything, but I knew that I was going to become a counterfeiter, like him. And, well, you know me. Once I set my mind to something, I’m obsessed. I took what he taught me and amplified it a hundred times over.”


  5

  THE DUNGEON

  So I fixed up the basement with

  What I was a-workin’ with

  Stocked it full of jelly jars

  And heavy equipment

  We’re in the basement,

  Learning to print

  All of it’s hot

  All counterfeit

  —B-52’S, “LEGAL TENDER”

  Starting a counterfeiting operation from scratch is a formidable task for a crew of men; for a single man, it’s a protracted logistical battle in which a hundred items must be acquired, prepared, and studied—all before ink wets paper. Four years after learning the basics from da Vinci, Art possessed the maturity and patience to pursue the endeavor, but as he set about his mission it was no less daunting. Pete had taught him only everything that took place in the shop, and production is only part of counterfeiting. Art didn’t know where the old man had gotten supplies, how he found clients, or how to conduct deals.

  By necessity, Art’s first acquisition had to be a safe house, or what the Secret Service calls a “printing hole.” Like the song says, counterfeiters like to operate in basements, and for good reason: Chugging along at full speed, even a small electric offset press generates vibrations rivaling an off-balance washing machine full of shoes. Ideally, the press should have solid ground beneath it and thick walls around it, or be located far from any other building. With limited resources, Art didn’t have the option of renting an isolated space somewhere in the sticks or even an industrial spot like da Vinci’s. He needed to stay as local as possible.

  Luckily, it turned out that one of his friends, Chris Bucklin, was the son of a local real estate baron. Chris’s dad lived in Ireland and delegated the management of his properties to his son. After a few vague descriptions, Art was able to pay Chris cash for a three-bedroom basement apartment on Halsted Street, the kind of gloomy subterranean den that few people passing on the sidewalk above ever notice.

  He called the apartment “the Dungeon,” and immediately went shopping for equipment. Offset printing supplies are easy to find in most large cities, but Chicago in particular offers a bountiful hunting ground. Just like the meatpackers, printers were drawn to the city by its central location, and by the early twentieth century it hosted the greatest concentration of printers in the world. Companies like RR Donnelley & Sons grouped along Chicago’s South Loop in an area that became known as Printer’s Row, eventually spreading their industry outward. To this day, the graphic-arts industry remains the city’s largest single employer, and the heart of America’s printing industry still lies within a two-hundred-mile radius.

  State-of-the-art small-sized presses can cost upwards of ten thousand dollars, so Art focused his search on used presses. He checked the For Sale sections of local newspapers and called local print shops, asking if anyone had a press they wanted to unload. At a going-out-of-business sale, he picked up an old AB Dick for five hundred dollars. “It was the lowest end of the line,” he says with a tinge of embarrassment. “It was literally something out of the nineteen seventies, sitting abandoned in the corner of the print shop.”

  Adding on the process camera, plate burner, hydraulic cutter, inks, lights, tables, tools, and chemical solutions, he stocked his shop for about five thousand dollars. It was a bare-bones setup befitting the name of Art’s hideout. But in one regard it was also advanced: In addition to the other equipment, Art also picked up an Apple computer, a scanner, and a diazotype blueprint machine—a high-end architectural printer.

  In 1992, less than one half of one percent of counterfeiters used desktop-publishing equipment, but Williams had long wondered if there was a way to integrate the new technology into a counterfeiting operation. Wired into a Macintosh computer running the image-editing program Photoshop, he’d have the option of playing with bill images and cleaning them up on the screen, then printing them out on the diazotype. He had no idea how well the technology would work and decided to stick to the tried-and-true method Pete had taught him, but he wanted to experiment in the future—an inclination that would later define his criminal career. “Da Vinci never messed with computers and printers—he was strictly old school—but I knew they had possibilities,” says Art. “It was just something I wanted to play with.”

  At the same time Art was accumulating all his printing supplies, he set aside one room in the apartment for a new “hobby”—a hydroponic marijuana grow room. On the streets “Dro,” as it was called, was becoming all the rage. It was selling for $350 an ounce, and Art figured that the weed operation would be a good fallback, with the added benefit that he’d be able to smoke as much as he wanted, for inspiration. He needed to rig a fan and duct system to get rid of the smell of printing chemicals anyway, and it would also work just as well evacuating the skunky-sweet stench of a roomful of Dro.

  Two months went by before he had all the equipment ready, and by then he was missing the one crucial counterfeiting element that can’t be easily obtained: the paper. United States currency is printed on a paper composed of 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. Da Vinci’s Royal Linen had done a good job of mimicking the material, but the old man had never told Art where he got it. All Art knew was that it was lightweight newsprint, the kind of industrial publishing paper that generally comes in refrigerator-sized rolls that often weigh several tons.

  Knowing that da Vinci had used a connection at one of the many local printing houses, Art improvised a plan for acquiring paper. After running through a list of larger printing houses in the Yellow Pages, he targeted one on Dearborn Street, a low-lying redbrick monster that specialized in printing trade magazines, brochures, and newsletters by the millions. He dressed up in khaki slacks and put his glasses on, then drove over to the printing house in a pickup truck borrowed from a friend. After walking in through the loading dock, he asked to see the manager.

  A few minutes later Art was a greeted by a short, jocund man with white hair, bright blue eyes, and a round face. Drawing on his days of begging paper for school, Art told him that he was a student who was working on a presentation that would cover a whole wall of the gym. He needed a roll of light newsprint, but he didn’t have much money. Specifically, Art asked the manager if he had any “butt rolls.” Also called “stub rolls,” they’re the unused cores of the huge industrial rolls—the publishing equivalent of those last, untappable sheets on a roll of toilet paper, with the exception that butt rolls typically weigh a couple hundred pounds. Too small for a large-scale print run and too large to throw away, most printers send them to the recycling bins. For a flourish, Art told the manager that he was also interested in becoming a printer someday. The manager, who was South Side Irish to the core, perked right up.

  “Look, if I got some in the bins, you can take ’em,” he told Art, “but since you’re interested in becoming a printer, wouldn’t you like to take a look around?”

  Art said yes.

  The manager proceeded to give him a tour of the whole building, from their computerized design studio to their roaring, forty-foot-long presses that devoured ink by the barrel. As they came to each machine, he’d tap a supervisor on the back, introduce Art as an aspiring printer, and have him explain the details of his post. Art peppered them with questions, and enjoyed the tour so much that he almost forgot why he had come, until the manager pointed out the recycling bins.

  Rummaging around inside the bins, he found three butt rolls of light newsprint that fit his need to a tee. Not only did the manager give them to him for free, but he even shouted a couple workers over to load them into the pickup.

  He drove off waving to the manager, with enough paper to print millions of dollars.

  WITH HIS SHOP FULLY EQUIPPED, Art hunkered down in the Dungeon and began the exacting process of re-creating everything da Vinci had taught him. Like a pilot attempting his first solo flight four years after his lessons, he was shaky and tentative, operating mostly on guts and general memory. Time’s dulling flow had softened his appreciation of the cr
ime’s fundamental truth: Counterfeiting is immensely difficult.

  He didn’t even consider printing da Vinci’s preferred product—hundred-dollar bills—because they were the most scrutinized denomination. His plan was start with twenties, working his way up as his bills improved.

  To his surprise, his plates came out okay. Not quite as crisp as da Vinci’s, but his mentor had drummed into him the importance of taking precise measurements before shooting the negatives, and this had stayed with him. It wasn’t until he moved to the offset press that he realized his education was woefully incomplete.

  Art did everything the way he remembered—mounting his plates on the roller, mixing his inks, and firing up the AB Dick—but as his first batch emerged on the delivery tray he didn’t see the bright, fine rectangles of mint that he remembered from the da Vinci days. Instead, he had a batch of purple bills. He turned off the press and went back to the ink palette, adding more green and yellow. But his next batch of bills was almost chartreuse and looked like they had been exposed to radiation. Again and again he’d adjust his color and run off a few hundred sheets, only to find he’d created some new perversion of the twenty-dollar bill, like a mad scientist with a labful of mutants.

  “I got discouraged,” says Art. “When I was with Pete, I never got to run the press or mix the inks. I just watched him, so I tried to go off what I had watched. I knew how to turn the press on, raise the paper, put the plate on, get it to run, but I didn’t know how to do it all by myself.”

  He took a week off and spent the time hanging out with his friends from Taylor Street, mulling over what had gone wrong. The problem, he knew, was one of attention and patience: Rather than letting the press rip away and hope for the best, he needed to control the pace. So on his second attempt he began stopping the press every fifteen or twenty sheets, then adjusting his colors and alignment. He did this dozens of times, losing himself in the process.

 

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