The Art of Making Money

by Jason Kersten

  After hours of tweaking, he went to the tray and saw something that made his heart pound: All of a sudden he was looking at money. A little dark, but it was there.

  Like a roughneck striking oil, he quickly turned the press back on and ran off more than two thousand fronts. Then came the seals and serial numbers. From experience, he knew that the backs—which consisted of only one color—would be far easier, and they were. In a matter of a few more hours of printing and cutting, he was sitting at the kitchen table in the Dungeon, exhausted. In front of him was twenty thousand dollars in counterfeit.

  “There were a lot of feelings going through me. I felt really good, but I also felt alone, like I was in this all by myself because Pete wasn’t there. I remember thinking, ‘Man, I wish you could see me now, Buddy. You never got to finish teaching me, but I went ahead and finished for you.”

  DESPITE HIS ELATION, Art was now confronted with a much bigger problem than the mechanics of making money. Obsessed with remembering the details of how to counterfeit, he’d given little thought to what he’d do if he actually succeeded, and when it came to the second half the business—unloading it—da Vinci had provided him no training whatsoever. And so he went to the one person he knew who would have a plan.

  Back when he was learning how to counterfeit, Art hadn’t exactly kept his promise to da Vinci about not telling a soul. “I had to tell someone,” he admits with embarrassment. “It was too intense to keep all to myself. So I told one person.”

  His confidant had been Michael Pepitone, a nineteen-year-old from Taylor Street who was one of the most peculiar specimens of Chicago criminal Art had ever met, beginning with his looks. With a lithe build, bright blue eyes, a crew cut, and light Mediterranean skin, Pepitone was by no means unattractive, but he had a gawkish tendency to carry his head out in front of his chest, sometimes moving it in a herky-jerky pivot when he spoke. This little head-dance placed him squarely in the odd-bird family—an image that was bolstered by his unnatural obsession with details. “Every morning, the first thing Mikey did was change his voice mail,” says Art. “He’d say, ‘Hello, this is Michael Pepitone. The date is Tuesday the twenty-second. . . .’ If you called him the next day he would say exactly the same thing, but it would be the twenty-third. It didn’t matter what day you called, he’d always have it current. He’s a fucking madman. But I like that about him.”

  Long after his childhood, Mikey would learn that he suffered from attention deficit disorder. But what was truly bizarre about Pepitone was that although he showed definite strains of geek, he was one of the fiercest boys on Taylor Street. A lifeguard by day, he spent his nights working as a debt collector for independent bookmakers, who knew him as Mikey “Bad to the Bone” Pepitone, one of the most successful amateur boxers in the city. At six two and 175 pounds, he had a nasty left hook and would end his amateur career with a 19-2 record. The bookies took notice and offered him thirty to fifty percent of everything he could collect, depending on the age of the debt. He’d show up at a debtor’s doorstep, try to gab his way to the money, and if that failed he’d go from zero to Nero almost instantaneously. “I wouldn’t say I liked roughing people up,” explains Mikey, “but you have to understand where Arty and I came from. If somebody gets over on you and you let it happen, that’s on you. When I was collecting, those guys knew why I was there. Once he paid, a guy might invite me to sit down and have a coffee with him. Yeah, that was weird, especially if he had bandages. But they didn’t blame me. They blamed themselves.”

  Williams and Pepitone actually met during a street fight. One day while Art was walking down Taylor Street, two kids from the nearby Jane Addams Homes stopped him and demanded his shoes, a brand-new pair of high-tops. Art immediately started swinging, and as he struggled to hold his own, he suddenly found Mikey fighting alongside him, whipping his fists with such speed and ferocity that the two assailants quickly backed off. Pepitone’s fearlessness earned tremendous respect from Williams, and as the boys came to know each other better they discovered that they had more in common than the ability to use their fists. Mikey was yet another paternal amputee. He had never met his dad, who had abandoned his mother before he was born, and she’d raised him with the help of a stepfather who came along later. “Arty’s life and my life were very similar, and we recognized that right away,” says Mikey. “The only thing I was thankful to my dad for was that he made me a hundred percent Italian.”

  Unlike many other street criminals Art knew, Mikey rarely boasted when it came to his exploits as a shakedown man, and Art sensed that the older boy was cautious and enterprising when it came to crime. It had been all these factors—Pepitone’s street smarts, his courage, cautiousness, and spiritual brotherhood—that led Art to break his second promise to da Vinci and tell Mikey that he was learning an esoteric criminal art.

  “We’d been shooting some hoops at Sheridan Park and afterwards Art pulls me aside,” Mikey remembers. “He told me he had learned this new trade, then he showed me one of these hundred dollar bills, and my penis became erect. I couldn’t believe it. That was a rare thing he was learning, and he was just a kid. Where we come from, learning something like that was almost a privilege. We call the stuff he made by its Italian name, fugazi, and guys who can do it well are rare. I said, ‘Don’t be a jagoff and pay the fuck attention to everything this guy is showing you.’ ”

  Now three years on, Art approached Mikey at the basketball courts once again, this time handing him a bill made entirely by him. Pepitone’s nose for profit immediately kicked into overdrive.

  “How much do you have?” he asked.

  “Twenty thousand.”

  “That’s it?” was Mikey’s response. Art would hear similar complaints from many friends and associates over the years. No one would ever appreciate the effort it took to create a convincing bill, or the dangers of making too many. Everyone but the counterfeiter himself assumes that if you can make a thousand, then the logical thing to do is to go ahead and print a million.

  Despite his great expectations, Mikey was happy to help Art unload the twenty large. A week later, he called Art and presented him with his first “deal.” There was a pot dealer, a young guy who was growing hydroponic weed in his home, who would take the whole batch in exchange for six pounds. But there was a catch: The dealer, Mikey told Art, would have no idea that the money was counterfeit. Art felt like he was headed right back into the racket he’d been trying to escape, but he needed the money.

  “By the time he realizes the money is fake, we’ll be long gone,” Mikey assured him. “And if he does realize it, fuck him. What’s he gonna do? Call the cops?”

  “Where’s he from?” Art asked.

  “Kenosha,” Mikey replied with a smile.

  And that sealed it. Everyone on the South Side knew that guys from Kenosha were “soft”—suburban kids unaccustomed to having to fight for their meat. A few days later they met the dealer in the parking lot of a local gas station.

  Art had stashed the money in a large-sized manila envelope. When the dealer opened it and flipped through the bills, centuries passed between the beats of Art’s heart.

  “Go ahead and count it,” Mikey said amicably, but after running his thumb through the two-inch-thick bricks, the dealer was satisfied. By the time they got back to their own car, Art was uncharac teristically nervous, insisting that they speed away immediately. He still thought the bills were too dark, and was certain the dealer would recognize this.

  “Relax,” Mikey told him. “The money will pass.”

  The dealer called Mikey two hours later.

  “Your guy gave me counterfeit bills,” he said. Mikey played dumb and told the dealer he wanted to come over and inspect the bills himself. The dealer was hesitant, and gave Mikey vague warnings that there’d be “repercussions.” Unfortunately for the Kenosha Kid, it was just the kind of threat that Pepitone’s inner thug delighted in answering. Mikey had a cop friend run the Kid’s license plate for an address, then wen
t to his house and popped him over the head with a tire iron. “It was too bad it ended that way,” says Mikey, “because I was looking forward to establishing a relationship with him so I could fuck him again.”

  They never heard from the Kenosha Kid again. Art split the six pounds with Mikey, and within two weeks he had unloaded most of his half for a profit of twelve thousand dollars. He kept a few ounces for himself and stuffed it in the Dungeon’s freezer.

  Although the pot deal had been lucrative, Art cringed at the fact that a bumpkin had identified his bills as fake after a mere two hours—a vulnerability that could have gotten him killed by a more streetwise dealer. It was also the kind of reckless, bottom-dwelling deal that his old mentor would have sneered at. “Da Vinci would have been appalled,” says Art. “Something like that was way beneath him. And I wanted to do the kind of deals he had done, big batches with deep-pocketed clients.”

  The only way to do that was to improve his bills, so he went back to the print shop. And this time he threw out the rulebook.

  Part of the reason his bills had been too dark had to do with his press. Thanks to its advanced age, it lacked agility when it came to registering fine lines off a plate. To compensate, Art had darkened his colors, sacrificing detail for the illusion of substance. He guessed that the dealer in Kenosha had been convinced enough in the dim light of a car ceiling bulb, but once he’d taken them home and counted them in good light, the faces caught his attention. His suspicions piqued, the dealer probably then compared serial numbers and noticed the same four again and again—the final tell.

  The only way to eliminate the darkness and improve his lines was to buy a better press, but Art was curious about the computer equipment. He scanned some bill fronts and started experimenting with the Photoshop program, which at the time was only a few years old. It didn’t take him long to realize that by spending hours touching up a scan he could boost the output on the ink-jet printer to the point where it surpassed the level of detail he was getting from his old AB Dick. “Right away I saw that the computer could take care of my darkness problem and give me fine lines,” says Art. “Even back then you could get the ink-jets and computers to do amazing things. In fact, some of the older printers will do things new ones can’t.”

  At the same time, Art saw the limitations. There were things the digital equipment just couldn’t do well: the faint, almost imperceptible green background of bills, the sharpness of the seals and the serial numbers, and the minuscule red and blue silk fibers all looked pixilated and artificial. Every advantage the computer technology gave him came with a weakness. The solution he came up with was almost unheard of at the time: a hybrid bill that utilized both offset and digital. He employed the offset for his background, seals, serial numbers, and fibers, then moved his sheets to the inkjet to print his faces. Overall, it was no more or less time-consuming than purely sticking to the offset, but it gave him more control, and the results were immediate and dramatic. “I don’t want to say that they were as good as da Vinci’s bills . . . ,” Art hems. “They were different. He probably wouldn’t like them because he was old school. But they were infinitely better than that first batch. I was pretty sure I could get thirty cents on the dollar, in daylight.”

  ART KNEW that if he wanted to sell a hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit at thirty cents on the dollar, then he needed clients with both the cash to pay for his product and a network to distribute it. That meant he really had only one choice.

  Organized crime loves counterfeit money. Since their own businesses are illegitimate, their patrons are usually in no position to complain. If you’re running gambling rackets, you can mix counterfeit into the payoffs and people are not only unlikely to protest, but they won’t be in a hurry to seek the police. If you’re smuggling, the fakes go abroad, where a third-worlder is as likely to stuff American dollars under his mattress as he is to deposit them in a bank. It’s even better if you’re running drugs, because then you’re dealing with so much cash that a hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit may well be a drop in the pond. And there are always the middlemen, the ones who buy counterfeit for thirty cents on the dollar and sell it downstream for fifty cents to guys without connections.

  Fortunately for Art, Chicago was about as bountiful in Mafia as it was in printers. The most accessible group was the Outfit, which had dominated the city since the days of Al Capone. Having grown up in Bridgeport and made a second home of Taylor Street, Art personally knew Outfit associates from two of the six different “crews” that ran the city much in the same way that New York’s Five Families divided up their turf. The Twenty-sixth Street or “Chinatown” Crew was right there in Bridgeport and specialized in truck hijacking, gambling, extortion, and juice loans. Some of its members even lived on his street (albeit on a nicer block) and he knew them on a first-name basis. Art was even better connected to the Taylor Street or “Ferriola” Crew, which was heavily involved in gambling and bookmaking. With one phone call, he could have arranged a meeting with a made man who was sure to want hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  But there were problems when it came to doing business with the Outfit. As every crook in Chicago knew, once a crew had you on their radar, you risked becoming their personal ATM. If they didn’t try to run Art’s operation outright, at the very least they’d force him to pay a “street tax” of twenty-five percent on everything he made—under penalty of death. For this reason, Art not only discounted doing business with the Outfit, but also refused to have any direct contact with it.

  That still left an entire city in which virtually every immigrant group had a criminal adjunct, and Bridgeport, whose sociocriminal intricacies were as familiar to Art as the run of a backyard stream, was home to many of them. One of the groups that impressed him the most was the Chinese Mafia. Better known as the On Leong organization, the group had a long history in the city, evolving out of a traditional Chinese secret society, or tong, of the same name. It operated out of Chinatown’s most iconic structure, the On Leong Merchants Association Building, a traditional pagoda-style edifice on Wentworth Avenue. From there, the organization ran a small criminal empire that included gambling, prostitution, auto theft, human trafficking, and selling heroin. To keep the Italians off its back, On Leong paid a street tax that constituted one of the Outfit’s biggest cash cows.

  Art had gotten to know an On Leong member a year earlier through Carlos Espinosa, a half-Chinese, half-Mexican acquaintance who ran a chop shop in Bridgeport. Knowing that Art occasionally stole cars, Espinosa had approached him with an unusual job offer: The Chinese were looking for someone to steal Corvettes, and claimed to have not only the addresses of every car, but an electronic key that would open all of them. Art thought the story about the key was “full of shit,” but he said he’d at least meet with the On Leong guy and hear what he had to say. His contact’s name, Espinosa told him, was the Horse.

  “Why’s he called that?” Art asked.

  Carlos smiled. “Believe me, dude. You’ll see.”

  A few days later, Art went to the corner of Thirty-fourth and Wal lace, where a Chinese guy pulled up in a white Corvette. When Art hopped into the car, he was transfixed as the driver, speaking from a face that could have graced a Palomino, introduced himself as the Horse.

  In a thick Chinese accent, the Horse explained the job. He wanted only Corvettes, and he would pay Art five thousand dollars for each one. He handed Art a key chain with a small plastic box attached to it, along with a list of addresses where he could find the vehicles. Art signed on dubiously, but when he visited the first address, the car was right where the Horse had said it would be, and the little magic box, which emitted a radio signal that was the equivalent of a master key, worked flawlessly. Over the next week, he stole seven ’Vettes for the Horse for a total of thirty-five thousand dollars. It was the easiest and best money he’d ever made at crime. On Leong was clearly all about conducting business with as few surprises as possible, and to Art that made them the ideal
potential clients.

  Hoping that the Horse might be interested in purchasing some counterfeit, Art gave him a call and arranged a meeting at Ping Tom Park, a pleasant patch of green on the edge of Chinatown that skirts the South Branch of the Chicago River. As they once again sat in the Horse’s ’Vette, Art handed him a bill and explained, proudly, that he was its maker.

  “I thought you were a car thief !” the Horse said after scrutinizing the bill. “You’re full of surprises.”

  The Horse told Art that he was impressed and interested, but first he had to consult his superiors in Chinatown and do a background check on the street. Two days later, the Horse offered him twenty cents on the dollar for a hundred thousand dollars. Art asked for thirty and they settled on twenty-five.

  “It’s none of my business what you do with the money and I don’t care, but there is one thing,” Art explained as they went over details. “If my money will be distributed in the Chicago area, I need to know. It helps me understand my risk. You know what I’m saying?”

  The Horse thought about it for a moment and nodded his long face.

  “Sure, I understand. This money will stay here,” he said. It wasn’t the answer Art had hoped for, but at least he knew. He made a mental note to not sell locally bound bills again too quickly. Let the money pop, let the Service sniff around, then give the trail time to dry up before executing another deal. And make sure the next batch is different enough to raise doubts about its origin.

  They met in a South Side hotel room three weeks later. Art brought along Bill Barcus, a six-foot-tall, 280-pound Lithuanian friend that he knew from Taylor Street, who was better known as “Big Bill.” Art was really beginning to like the Horse, but with that much cash and counterfeit in play he had no intention of walking into a deal without an insurance policy, which in Barcus’s case also included a 9mm.