Both of those changes—neither of which affected the look that U.S. currency had maintained since 1929—had been instituted to combat rapidly developing reprographic technology, which by the mid-1980s had become so good that even nine-to-fivers were increasingly flirting with counterfeiting. Every month newer, more advanced color-copiers, printers, and scanners were entering offices, where one of the first things curious employees did was lay a twenty on the glass, press start, and see what came out of the dispenser—call it the counterfeiting reflex. For the overwhelming majority it was an innocent game that resulted in a momentary thrill followed by a trip to the shredder. But by 1985 the copiers were becoming so advanced that the Treasury Department commissioned the National Materials Advisory Board to research ways of making U.S. currency more secure. The resulting report recommended sweeping changes to the currency, including the institution of a watermark, more complex printing patterns, and an invisible “security thread” specifically meant to foil color copying machines. In the best bureaucratic tradition, Treasury shelved the report, only to commission another study two years later that reached virtually identical conclusions. But the department worried that radical aesthetic changes in the currency would undermine the distinctiveness and continuity of the dollar—and therefore the value of the dollar itself. Compromising, they ignored most of the second report and adopted the two least intrusive changes.
The 1990 modifications failed dismally. Despite an extensive publicity campaign, few people ever knew the strip existed, and since the average lifespan of a hundred-dollar bill is about seven and a half years, counterfeiters simply continued running off older bills. People were equally oblivious of the microprinting because all but the most hawkeyed needed a magnifying glass to see it. Treasury had been so obsessed about preserving the continuity of the greenback’s appearance that they had effectively minimized their anticounter feiting improvements. Back in his Dungeon days, Art hadn’t even bothered with the strip because he’d never seen anyone look for it, and he’d found that as long as he could approximate the size and spacing of the microprinted words, no one closely inspected those either. “I was far more worried about the pen,” he says.
The counterfeit-detector “pen”—patented only a year after the security strip was introduced—was a felt-tipped marker with a yellow, iodine-based ink that turned dark brown when it reacted to the starch binding agent contained in most paper. Since currency is starch-free, the ink stays yellow on cash—a fast, apparently simple way to test a bill. By 1995, a company called Dri Mark was selling about two million pens a year for approximately three dollars each, and promoting them as a pen “that detects authenticity of U.S. currency instantly.” Major chains like 7-Eleven were using the pens to test all hundred-dollar bills. The pen was so effective and popular that, toward the end of his Dungeon days, Art had started printing twenties and tens on specific occasions just to avoid it.
By 1993, only three years after the Series 1990 note entered circulation, the amount of counterfeit bills produced using electrophotographic equipment was doubling every year. Scanners, ink-jet printers, and computers were developing so fast that they were even beginning to replicate microprinting. Many of the new counterfeiters were teenagers, natural masters of new technology who wanted spending money. They’d run off a few twenties and try to pass them at music stores or McDonald’s. The Secret Service dubbed them “digifeiters,” a name that offered little consolation to elite agents who were now spending much of their time chasing kids. Under pressure from both the Service and the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department decided to take drastic measures. America’s currency, it concluded, needed a complete overhaul. For the first time in sixty-six years the almighty dollar was going to change.
Treasury formed the New Currency Design Task Force, a group of a dozen men and women led by a bright, career BEP official named Thomas Ferguson who had been skeptical of the 1990 changes as being too moderate. With free rein to design a completely new currency, Ferguson immediately went about implementing security measures the likes of which Americans had never seen. The final product, which Art first glimpsed that day in the bookstore, was the Series 1996 hundred-dollar note, and it was so unlike every other bill before it that Treasury simply called it the “New Note.”
The first change—and the most visually dramatic—was Franklin’s portrait. Using the original Duplessis painting as a guide, BEP engravers enlarged it by fifty percent. The new, “supersized” portrait accommodated much greater detail and line count, making it far more difficult for scanners to render. A straight scan would also produce a “moiré pattern”—an optical effect that turned the portrait’s otherwise muted background into a jarring mess of geometric waves upon printing. Even Franklin’s lapel was microprinted with the words United States of America.
The denomination marks were the next most notable change. As in the portrait, the BEP enlarged them to include fine lines, but the mark on the lower right-hand corner boasted something truly space-age. It was now a bright, metallic green, which changed to black depending on the angle you looked at it. The technology behind it, optically variable or “color-shifting” ink, was based on the same protective film that coats the windows of the Space Shuttle.
There were also many small, less noticeable changes as well. The back of the note—which had long been easy prey for counterfeiters because of its uniform color—also featured fine line, moiré-producing printing in the oval around Independence Hall. There was an extra serial number, a new Federal Reserve indicator, a universal seal, and numbers indicating which plate had been used for production, but these were mostly for internal tracking purposes. Out of all the changes, the one that turned out to be the most effective was one of the oldest printing techniques in the book.
Hold any U.S. bill above a dollar in front of a light source, and as in the moon letters of fantasy novels you will suddenly see a smoky image paralleling the portrait. This is the watermark, a printing technique invented by Italian papermakers in the thirteenth century. Although it was otherwise invisible, unlike the security strip it smacked of mystery, a secret image that was not only incredibly difficult to replicate, but also harkened back to something runic and old-world. There was a little bit of magic in the watermark that caught people’s interest—and that, by far, would be its greatest power.
The New Note was released to the world on Monday, March 25, 1996—less than two months after Art Williams disappeared into the rabbit hole of Texas’s penal system. On that day, hundreds of armored trucks set out from the nation’s thirty-seven Federal Reserve offices. In a wondrous system that has gone on almost every weekday since 1913, their holds were filled with bills meant to satisfy America’s $125-billion-a-day appetite for paper currency. There’s no other word for it but circulation. Like blood cells from the heart, the bills had been pumped out from the BEP’s presses in Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, then distributed to the Fed offices, which in turn trucked them to roughly 7,600 commercial banks. From there, they were destined for the pockets of 280 million Americans, the vast majority of whom—for lack of a more exchangeable medium—considered the greenback both the means and the embodiment of attaining their very dreams on earth.
Despite an intensive publicity campaign under the Treasury Department’s “Know Your Money” program, Americans greeted the new bills with almost universal skepticism. The off-center portrait of Benjamin Franklin, whose head had ballooned overnight, bore the brunt of the derision. “Big Head Ben,” people quickly nicknamed him, and that was about as flattering a description the bill received. Newspapers relished printing articles about just how ugly the New Note was. A stockbroker in Fort Lauderdale told the Florida Sun-Sentinel that the new bill looked like “Monopoly money,” while Primo Angeli, a San Francisco graphic designer, called it “tacky” and declared to a Washington Post reporter that the note was “the cheapest hundred-dollar bill I’ve ever seen.” One Post columnist advised people to hang on to their old currency and cited the
New Note as the beginning of “an era of Ugly Money.” Some cashiers refused to accept the bills altogether. A resident of Kenosha, Wisconsin—the same town where the pot dealer who took Art’s first counterfeits lived—was forced to return to the bank for change after clerks at both a grocery store and a gas station deemed the bill “too suspicious-looking” to honor.
What the media failed to recognize was that, for the first time in sixty-six years, Americans were assimilating the components of their cash. In bars and banks and restaurants, they held the weird new bills up to the light and discussed the changes with their friends. Even as they ridiculed the new design, they learned more about the security features of their currency than any previous generation.
For counterfeiters, it all meant very bad news.
ART HAD READ AN ARTICLE about the new currency while in prison. At the time he’d been intrigued, but the ennui of life inside had all but drained any recollection that he would be seeing a new bill upon his release. And when he finally did see it there at the checkout line in the Barnes & Noble, like everyone else, he had to take a closer look.
“You got any more of those hunds?” he asked Natalie the moment they cleared the counter. They sat down in the bookstore’s café and she dug another bill from her purse. He held it between his thumbs, studying it as if it were an alien artifact. Everything about the New Note impressed him: the portrait, the color-shifting ink, and particularly the watermark, which he immediately recognized as the most ingenious addition. Light beamed through the bookstore windows, and he held the bill up to a pane, marveling at how Franklin’s ghostly image vanished with the slightest angular shift. He twisted the front, watching the nacreous play of color across the denomination mark. Even the feel of the bill, the hundreds of extra ridges on the portrait, was different. “They put a lot of work into this,” he thought.
Art was silent on the way home from the bookstore. Seeing the new bill had roused not only his imagination, but also old feelings of possibility and challenge. The bill felt like a dare to him, a taunting and intricate lock whose challenge was as enticing as the reward behind it. But it was Natalie who first spoke the idea.
“How hard do you think it would be to counterfeit it?” she asked him. She insists that she spoke the question more out of curiosity than a desire to try. Although Art hadn’t counterfeited in nearly five years, he’d mentioned the crime a few times since they’d met and she’d always wondered how he’d done it.
Art told her he didn’t know. But right then it wasn’t the new modifications he was thinking about. It was the pen. “It seems to me if people are putting so much faith in that damn pen, then they might not even be looking at the rest of the bill,” he said. “Beat the pen and you’ve got a way in, you’re halfway there.”
“I bet you could do it,” Natalie said gamely. Seeing her interest, Art started to wonder himself.
Once again a conversation had begun. When they got home, for the first time since his release, Art became animated and hopeful. Over beers, he told Natalie stories about da Vinci and the Dungeon days; about how he had learned from the best and, for a brief while, lived the good life. He told her about how he’d been treated like a king by Chicago’s biggest criminal organizations, and the incredible feeling of seeing sheets of freshly minted counterfeit slide off a press. The hundred-dollar bill came out of Natalie’s purse again and Art began theorizing about inks and chemical reactions, paper density and polymers.
By the end of the night, Natalie had agreed to front him three thousand dollars and let him set up a temporary print shop in her apartment. But this time it would function more as a laboratory. Its main purpose would be for experimentation, because their goal was not to merely print counterfeit, but to pursue what would become a Holy Grail quest: creating a perfect replica of the 1996 New Note.
CHOOSING WHICH DENOMINATION to counterfeit was a no-brainer for Williams. Even though the new fifty- and twenty-dollar notes were also circulating by 1999, the hundred-dollar bill offered the greatest potential profit, and it was the security prototype for every other denomination. If he could crack it, then the entire currency line would be vulnerable. He knew that there could be little room for error. The new hundreds were more scrutinized than any bill ever created before—a quality that made the potential reward all the more enticing.
Knowing that breaking the New Note could take months, Art planned to initially print and sell pre-Series 1996 twenties and tens, bills that were rarely subjected to the Dri Mark pen. The proceeds from these lower denominations, he figured, would allow him to upgrade his equipment and keep afloat while he experimented. He was so confident that no one would inspect the small denominations that he didn’t even bother going to a printer for high-quality newsprint; instead, he bought several stacks of high-quality printer paper and ran off fifty thousand dollars in old twenties, then approached a friend he’d made at Lopez in the hopes of turning a fast deal. His friend was a stocky, amicable Irish kid named Toby McClellan, but Art called him “Garfield” because of his pudgy face and red hair. Like Art, McClellan was fairly fresh out of prison and low on cash, so Art fronted him twenty thousand dollars in counterfeit on the condition that he’d get paid as soon as McClellan moved it. True to his word, McClellan unloaded the money within a week, paid Art, then presented him with another proposition.
“I know a heroin dealer who’s interested in counterfeit,” McClellan explained, “but he’s cash poor right now and doesn’t want to pay for it upfront. He wants you to front him so he can mix it into a heroin buy, then pay you after he’s turned it around. Or he can just give you some of the dope.”
Art was dubious. He had never fronted a stranger counterfeit before, much less a heroin dealer. But he was desperate for funds, so he agreed to meet McClellan’s friend. The junk dealer, a guy named Ritchie, seemed serious enough when Art met him. He explained that he already had the heroin buy lined up with some Mexicans in Dallas—reliable sellers who he’d done business with before. Despite his misgivings, Art agreed to front Ritchie twenty thousand dollars with one provision:
“I’m going with you on the buy,” Art told him. “I don’t know you, and I’ve done this kind of thing before.” Ritchie agreed, but what neither he nor McClellan told Art was that the counterfeit he had fronted McClellan a few weeks earlier had gone to the same Mexicans they were about to meet. In his haste to raise funds for his work on the New Note, Art had never asked McClellan that all-important question: Where are the bills headed? And when they showed up to the buy, Art immediately got a bad feeling.
“We pulled into this apartment complex, and these Mexicans were on their shit,” he remembers. “They had walkie-talkies, ear-pieces, and all that stuff. We walk into the apartment, and there’s two Mexicans in the apartment. One’s sitting in the living room and one’s in the kitchen. I follow Ritchie in, and the guy in the kitchen immediately gives me the eye. He looked crazy to me, a serious gangbanger.”
“Who’s this vato?” the dealer asked Ritchie, pointing to Art. After Ritchie explained that Art was on the level, the dealer nodded and they sat down at the kitchen table and got down to business. Ritchie told the dealer that he wanted an eighth of a key, about seven thousand dollars’ worth, then dumped the money from a bag onto the table. Half of it was counterfeit.
At first the dealer seemed unfazed. He got on the walkie-talkie and ordered his associates, who were at another location, to bring in the drugs. At least that’s what Art assumed, since the conversation was in Spanish. As they waited for the delivery, the dealer counted the money, his fingers moving ever more slowly through the stacks.
“You know, the last time you came here you gave me some bad money,” the dealer said. “I go to the store, and they mark it with the pen, and it don’t come back. What was that all about?”
Art’s heart began to pound. He could tell by the dealer’s eyes that he was fully aware that Ritchie was attempting to salt the money again.
“You’re kidding me,” Ri
tchie said, playing dumb.
“No, I’m not, vato,” the dealer said calmly. “I bought a pen myself and found a whole bunch of them.”
There was little doubt in Art’s mind where this was heading. “This dealer was crazy, and he had his shit together,” he says. “I knew that whoever was on the other end of that walkie-talkie wasn’t bringing in no drugs. They were gonna come in and trap us in there. They were about to put bullets in us.”
Art was sitting with his back to the door. He leaned his chair away from the table, listening for footsteps. The Mexican in the living room, he noticed, had his eye on the door as well, and once the bagman arrived their only exit would be blocked.
As soon as the door opened and the new arrival entered, Art leapt out of his chair, slammed the bagman to the side, then bolted out of the apartment. Remembering his Chicago street rules, he had parked Natalie’s car on the main road just outside the apartment complex, far enough away so he wouldn’t be trapped on the lot. He sped off and left Ritchie to his fate, later learning that the dealer survived the wrath of the Mexicans by blaming the counterfeit solely on Art.
The incident’s lesson was loud and clear: “Right at that point I knew I had to step it up a notch,” says Art. “I couldn’t go with the old money that didn’t mark properly. It had to change.”
The Art of Making Money Page 13