“He looks up, and the look on his face!” Art recalls. “Can you imagine? I covered my face and started walking real fast. My brother’s behind me and he says, ‘Who the fuck is that? What’s going on?’ I’m like, ‘That’s him, walk!’ And the dude freaks out and starts following us.” As soon as Jason realized Clayton was following, he wheeled around to confront him, but rather than take on two men, the dealer backed off. Art and Jason took a side street, circled around, and met Natalie. But a minute after they pulled away Art spied the black Mustang behind them. Clayton was on his cell phone, undoubtedly rounding up friends to come help him take back his drugs and money by force. Art had no intention of being around when that happened.
“When we get to the next stop sign, Jason and I are jumping out,” he told Natalie. “Then you turn around and get the fuck out of here, go home. He’s gonna follow us because we’re carrying all the bags.”
Natalie, who was terrified of being left alone, didn’t like the idea at all, but by then she had already reached the next stop sign. Before she could protest, the brothers were already out the door. The ruse worked. After the brothers bailed out of the car, Clayton backed up and tried to follow them, but they quickly lost him by jumping fences. The problem was that they weren’t familiar with Denton, and soon found themselves slogging through a swamp on the outskirts of town. As the day wore on, the dejected brothers started arguing, then wound up getting into a small fistfight right there in the muck. By the time they finally found their way back to Susan’s apartment, hours later, they were both covered in mud, shrub-cut, and exhausted.
Natalie, Susan, and Lucy were crying when they arrived, terrified that Art and Jason had been killed because Clayton had called and threatened as much. Art calmed the girls down and assured them that the dealer was simply talking tough. But Clayton did do something: He found the phone number and address of Art’s aunt Donna, then called her house and threatened to burn it down unless he got his money and drugs back. That was as far as Art was willing to let it go. He and Jason hid in the woods again, waited for Clayton to leave his home, and gave him a South Side beating. By the time they were done, he not only promised to leave them alone, but left town altogether.
CRIME SO OFTEN POISONS RELATIONSHIPS that it’s easy to forget its power to feed them. Although the Clayton robbery was a fiasco, for Art the episode’s most surprising aspect wasn’t getting caught: It was the women. “They were frightened, but they stood strong,” he says. “And in spite of everything, they had a taste for it. I blame myself for that. I think in order to be a criminal, to a certain extent one has to have it in them, but I was the catalyst that brought it out. I straight-out corrupted them.”
Art wasted little time devising a way he could use two of the women, Susan and Lucy, to hit drug dealers. On a trip across the Mexican border to Nuevo Laredo, he obtained a bottle of Rohypnol— better known as the “date rape drug”—and starting taking the girls to honky-tonks. The group would perch themselves at a table where they could watch the bar, and Art would scout for cowboy drug dealers. Except for the boots and hats, they were as conspicuous as Chicago dealers. They carried the fat billfolds and beepers, and came and left the bar every ten minutes. After Art zeroed in on a mark, one of the girls would sidle up to the bar, take a nearby stool, and chat him up. Over the course of a few hours, the girls would let the dealers buy them drinks, growing increasingly flirtatious until coyly suggesting that the dealer take them back to his place. And when they’d pull out of the parking lot, Art and the other girls would be sharking right behind them.
Once a girl got inside a dealer’s house, she’d fix him a drink and drop in the Rohypnol. The drug was infallible and magnificently fast, usually about fifteen minutes before a dealer passed out. The girl would open the front door and Art and the others would breeze right in. With the dealer out cold, they’d leisurely rifle the house until they found the drugs and cash, then drive away. “It was so easy it almost wasn’t fair,” Art muses.
Now fully back in the criminal life—and with a harem for a crew no less—Art wasn’t so sure that staying straight was his best move. “There was too much opportunity in Texas. These rednecks were just clueless, the girls were down, and it wasn’t like we were robbing nice people. These guys were dirtbags and we were kinda their reckoning.” After getting into an argument with a coworker at a construction site, he quit his day job, rationalizing that the wages were too low anyway thanks to an overabundance of migrant workers from Mexico.
Not long after he and the girls began pulling the Rohypnol gambits, Art met Dave Pettis, a local from Denton who rode a motorcycle and seemed to share Art’s appetite for excitement. Like Art, Pettis talked big when he had a few drinks in him and came off as fearless, though in his case it was mostly a front. He had very little criminal experience, but Art took him under his wing, thinking that it might be useful to have a male crew member around. And within a week of meeting him, Pettis approached Art with a potential score. Pettis had a girlfriend whose father was a struggling jeweler. Times being tough, he was looking to liquidate his business, and figured the fastest way was to cash in on theft insurance. All he needed was someone to break into his house and steal his inventory; he’d report the theft and file his claim, and the hired thief would get to keep about twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of gems and precious metals. “I’d do it myself,” he told Art, “but you have more experience with this than me, and we’ll still have to break in and be smooth about it. He works from his home and he has neighbors and everything.”
Art was not only flattered, but it sounded like a dream opportunity. Even if they somehow got arrested the jeweler wasn’t going to press charges, and there’d also be no need for surveillance since they’d know exactly when he’d be out and for how long. The jeweler was leaving town the upcoming weekend, and he had told Pettis that he wouldn’t report the theft until Sunday night.
On the designated Saturday, Dave and Art bought some gloves and a pry bar, then cased the house, a one-story home on the outskirts of Denton. Once it was dark, Art dropped Pettis off on the closest corner, then joined him after he’d pried his way in through the back door. Just as Dave had said, the house was dark and deserted, and he led Art straight to the jeweler’s workshop. It was then that Art started to have misgivings. Even for a home business, the shop seemed little more than a tinkerer’s den—a few power tools, a work lamp, some plastic bins of beads, and a file cabinet. When they pawed through the cabinet’s drawers they found about thirty gold and silver chains and semiprecious stones, but nothing close to as valuable as what Dave had described. “It was like we were robbing somebody’s artsy-and-craftsy grandma,” Art says. “There was maybe five thousand dollars’ worth of shit.”
Dave seemed confused and dejected. He wanted to search the house more but Art insisted that they leave immediately. Whoever the jeweler was, he had either lied about his inventory or Dave had misled him. After Art threatened to leave him there alone, Dave reluctantly followed him back to the car. On the way back to Valley View, Dave drove fast and nervously, weaving in and out of traffic as Art chastised Pettis for lying to him about the merch. And it was smack in the middle of that harangue that the red and blue strobe lights of a cruiser from the Denton County Sheriff’s Office graced the rearview mirror.
Art suspected that the deputies were pulling them over for a simple traffic violation, and he urged Dave to pull over and play it cool. But Pettis’s nerves were overloading, and when one of the deputies approached the driver’s side and asked him for his license and registration, he fumbled and failed to find them, then stammered as the deputy quizzed him as to where he was headed. Suspicious, the deputy requested to search the car—and Dave refused so adamantly that the cops went ahead and searched it anyway on the grounds that they had reason to believe there were drugs in the car.
They had placed the jeweler’s goods into an old bowling-ball bag they’d found in the house, and when the police opened it and saw the chains
and stones their suspicions were immediately aroused. The bag was monogrammed with the jeweler’s name, which they used to look up his address. While Dave and Art waited, a unit was dispatched to the house, where officers quickly discovered signs of a break-in. The pair were arrested and taken to the Denton County Jail. A day later, they were both charged with burglary of a habitation—a first-degree felony that, under Texas’s infamously harsh penal code, can carry a maximum sentence of twenty years.
Dave had lied about the whole enterprise—a nervous novice, he’d invented the story about the insurance scam as a way to enlist someone with more experience to commit a genuine robbery (though Art’s familiarity with crime hadn’t helped much when it came to assaying the trustworthiness of a fellow criminal). The only truth was that the jeweler had indeed been the father of Dave’s girlfriend, but it turned out the two men hated each other, meaning the jeweler had every intention of pressing charges.
Having been caught with the stolen goods, Art knew that he had little chance of beating the rap. He could have attempted to cut a deal by testifying that Pettis had been the mastermind behind the burglary, but in his mind he was still in Bridgeport, where the only certain honor is resisting the opportunity to become a rat. Unhampered by any such code, Pettis told prosecutors that the burglary had been Art’s idea and agreed to testify against him, winning himself probation. On the advice of his court-appointed lawyer, Art pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary of a habitation.
On January 12, 1996, a Denton County judge sentenced Art to six years in prison. With time served and good behavior, he and his lawyer calculated he’d do only three. But that would be plenty of time to reflect on the fact that he’d lost his freedom over a crime that, compared with his earlier stint as a counterfeiter, was low-rent, lowbrow, and high risk. Perhaps in that regard the reformatory powers of Texas’s prison system would work; Art would never rob from an individual again, drug dealer or otherwise. From that point on, only one crime would consume his thoughts. What he didn’t realize was that the rules of the world’s second oldest profession were about to change.
BOOK TWO
7
BATTLE OF THE BILL
Scarcely was the ink dry on the first note from the press of the Treasury, before its bogus counterpart appeared in circulation.
—LA FAYETTE CHARLES BAKER, 1867
On April 30, 1999—three years, two months, and nine days after his robbery arrest—Art Williams stepped out from behind the security gates of the Holiday Unit in Huntsville like a man preserved in ice. He was dressed in the same pair of jeans and white T-shirt he’d worn on the night of his arrest, and in terms of his plans for the future, he hadn’t evolved much further. He had spent most of his time coping with the present realities of one of America’s worst correctional systems.
While serving out his sentence, Art had gotten the grand tour of Texas’s penal system, which at the time was the second-largest in the country and the fastest-growing system in the world. After riding the merry-go-round through transfer and processing units like Gurney, Moore, and Huntsville, he finally wound up at the Lopez State Jail, which was both geographically and spiritually the ass end of the system. Located at the southernmost tip of Texas in the town of Ed inburg, it sat twelve miles from the Mexican border, in a parched, three-hundred-acre parcel that the twelve hundred prisoners farmed for vegetables while shotgun-bearing guards on horseback watched over them like extras from every bad prison movie ever made. During the summer, temperatures routinely broke a hundred degrees Fahrenheit while humidity from the Gulf of Mexico turned the whole place into a soul-sapping sweatbox. Although the unit was brand new, it was brutally Spartan: there was no air-conditioning to speak of, and prisoners often had to boil their own water to make it drinkable. The running joke among the inmates was that they were no longer in the United States. “We’re in fucking Mexico,” they’d say, and invent stories about how then-governor George W. Bush had struck a deal under NAFTA to export Texas’s prisoners south of the Rio Grande.
“It was just hell,” Art remembers. “It was a hundred degrees in a tin box, and people were so angry because of the heat. At different times of the season we’d have billions of mosquitoes and they had to cancel rec because people were getting eaten up. When you could go to the rec yard, there were also rattlesnakes. You’re hitting iron, and fucking baby rattlesnakes are coming up behind you!” The social ills weren’t much better. Statistically, Texas was the state where an inmate was most likely to be raped, and most likely to die in prison. A few years after Art was sentenced, a federal judge (who was aptly named William Justice) declared that Texas’s penal system was rife with “a culture of sadistic and malicious violence.” Art participated in it firsthand. Early on, another inmate had demanded he hand over some of his commissary goods, a brief exchange that resulted in the other inmate winding up in the hospital and Art spending a month in solitary confinement. That was the only time he was attacked, but on numerous occasions he faced down other inmates, mostly blacks and Mexicans, who are disproportionately represented in Texas. Having come from Chicago, where race is less important than your gang affiliation, Art found the self-segregation utterly weird. Most of the time he read books and kept to himself. As one of the few inmates who could read and write well, he ended up working in administration, which was considered a cushy job.
Throughout it all, the one bright spot in his life was the quiet girl he’d barely gotten to know before he went to prison: Natalie Silva. Prior to his arrest, he’d had a couple romantic encounters with her, but after he went to jail she’d had a brief fling with another man that resulted in a son, Alex. Art naturally assumed she’d fade away, but she’d surprised him by visiting him early on, then followed up by writing him letters. She was the only one of the four girls who stayed in contact with him once he was sentenced, and over the years the letters never stopped, nor did her visits. She trailed him throughout the system, filing her name on visitor-request forms and driving hundreds of miles to whenever he was transferred. “I was in love with Art the first moment I saw him,” she’d later confess, “but I would have been stupid to tell him that. I was young, he was dating my friend, and he definitely wasn’t husband material. But he was unlike anyone I’ve ever met. I have very little tolerance for stupid people, and the thing about Art—other than the fact that he is very, very good-looking—is that he has brains. Yeah, he was a criminal, but to me that always came second.”
For both of them, Lopez—576 miles from Denton—was the ultimate test. Art would have understood if she’d visited him once a year, but once a month Natalie would hop in her Toyota on a Friday and set off on a ten-hour drive. She’d pop Metabolife diet pills to stay awake and sleep at rest stops when they wore off. After washing her hair and doing her makeup in a gas station restroom, she’d show up in Lopez’s visiting room on Saturday afternoon looking like she’d just stepped off a private jet. The permissible visiting time was four hours, and when it expired she’d turn right back around to be at her ticketing-agent job at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport by Monday morning.
Natalie was right outside the gate when Art was released. She drove him back to her place, made love to him, and over the next few weeks offered him encouragement as he looked for a legitimate job. “Initially he had a positive attitude about going straight. He got up early every day and found a job framing houses, like he did before. And he went to work. But after a couple weeks he became quiet, depressed. And then he started complaining about the jobs not paying enough.”
Art was earning seven dollars an hour for backbreaking labor. Since the work itself was intermittent, and he was wrestling to help support his nine year old son up in Chicago, he began to slip into the old victim’s mind-set. “I know every criminal says this,” he says, “but it’s almost like the system wants you to commit another crime. Since you’re a felon, nobody wants to hire you, and those who do are paying you shit because they know they can get away with it. At the same time, mo
st prisons don’t do shit to give you skills. They get the more educated inmates to teach classes. Needless to say, they aren’t the best teachers. I know it sounds lame, but if you’ve never stood in those shoes, you don’t know. You start thinking about how much money you used to make as a crook. And once you start thinking like that it’s hard to stop. Then that opportunity comes along, and suddenly you’re back in it.”
A few weeks after Art was released, he and Natalie visited a local Barnes & Noble. Feeling depressed about his work situation, he wanted to pick up a copy of the Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee, who he’d found inspiring ever since he was a kid. Art hadn’t been paid yet from his construction job, and as they stood in line Natalie gave him a brand new C-note to pay for the book. He had barely gotten a look at the bill before handing it to the cashier, but in those brief seconds his curiosity ignited with the shattering alacrity of buried ordnance.
The hundred-dollar bill, he was astonished to see, had changed.
AMERICA’S CURRENCY had already begun to change as early as 1990, the year the Bureau of Engraving and Printing instituted the security strip and microprinting. Hold any bill except a dollar note in front of a light source, and the strip appears as a vertical line, with “USA,” the denomination, and an American flag running its length. Made of a 1.4mm-wide polyester thread, the strip is embedded in the bill and invisible unless it’s backlit. It foils counterfeiters who use copiers because the flash bulb exposes the strip, leaving a jarring black line across the copy. If exposed to ultraviolet light, the thread will also beautifully fluoresce: red for a hundred, yellow for a fifty, green for a twenty, and so on. Microprinting, the second change, installed the words The United States of America in the window framing the portraits, in letters six to seven thousandths of an inch wide—too small for most copiers or scanners to register without blurred results. Over the ensuing three years, the measures were extended to all but the dollar bill.
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