Whatever the Supernote’s origins, On Leong had gained access to it during Art’s hiatus from counterfeiting, and upon seeing Art’s bill the Horse acknowledged as much, throwing him a backhanded compliment. “This bill is really good, Art,” he said, “but we’ve still got you beat with the Supernote.”
He then placed an order for a hundred thousand dollars, at thirty cents on the dollar.
Art found himself in the awkward position of telling all of his clients that they had to wait. Although he’d guessed that his new bill would be a hit, he had no idea that demand would come so quickly and with such high numbers—way beyond both his production capacity and his nerve. “They all wanted so much, and right then,” he says. “And of course they had no idea how hard it was to make. Hell, at that point, I was still figuring out how to produce it on a large scale.”
Mikey was at his lifeguard post at the Sheridan Park pool when Art showed up with the note. As his most trusted adviser, crime partner, and friend, he had bitter feelings when Art had left Chicago. “We had made good money together, and Arty had thrown away a profitable business only to wind up in prison because of a stupid move,” he says. But once he saw the new bill, his feelings of abandonment dissipated like midwinter spindrift off Lake Michigan. “He’d done it. That’s all there was to it. He’d beaten the new bill. I wasn’t surprised in the sense that it was him, because I always knew the boy had brains, but this was something special. That bill was perfect. You really couldn’t tell the difference. Oh, I knew right away that we were going to make a lot of money.”
Mikey wasted no time setting up Art’s first firm deal with the new money. The client was a bookmaker he knew, Jimmy Amodio, who also ran a social club near Taylor Street. All he had to do was present Jimmy with the new money and a proposition: With the NFL play-offs approaching, what better way to cover his losses than by using this new fugazi for payouts? The bookmaker jumped on the idea and ordered up fifty thousand dollars. As always, there was a catch.
“He wants it tomorrow,” Mikey explained to Art. “How can we make this happen?” Art told him that it was impossible. Although he and Natalie had printed and cut about a hundred thousand dollars in fronts and backs before leaving Texas, he had no place to assemble, dry, and wrap it, and it was a task he could never complete on time by himself. Mikey’s solution would reveal one of the greatest strengths of Art’s design.
“If I understand it correctly, your bill is kinda like a kit, right?” he asked Art.
“More or less.”
“And you have all of the components made?”
“Yeah.”
“So you just need a safe spot where you can assemble the bills, and some help. Does there need to be anything special about the place?”
“As long as it’s indoors, not too small, and nobody will find it, theoretically I could assemble anywhere,” Art explained.
That’s how the filtration room beneath Sheridan Park’s pool became the first printing hole for Art’s new note. Since Mikey was a lifeguard there, they waited until after hours on a weekend, then snuck in with equipment and set up shop between the pipes and pumps. Bolstered by half an eight ball of cocaine, they had more than five hundred bills drying on clotheslines between the pipes in just under four hours, with time to kill. “It was probably one in the morning when we got finished,” Mikey remembers, “so after we were done we called up some hookers and told them to bring beer. They had a great time and so did we. They were swimming in the pool naked and we were literally throwing money at them all night. They had no idea all of it was fake.”
The following morning, Mikey delivered the product to Jimmy, who put it into circulation with magnificent results. None of Jimmy’s clients had any idea, but that year they were walking around with fistfuls of Art’s money. Jimmy was so pleased with the NFL operation that he invited Art and Mikey to sit in on a weekly Texas Hold’em game that he ran in the back room. Provided that he kept twenty percent of their winnings, Jimmy allowed them to throw as much counterfeit on the table as they wanted.
No one appreciated the homemade nature of Art’s bills as much as Wensdae, who allowed Art and Natalie to stay at her place while they looked for an apartment. A few days after Art and Natalie arrived, she came home from work to find a half-assed spider’s web of clotheslines across her living room and kitchen. Hanging from them like spring leaves were dozens of freshly made, air-drying bills that Art and Natalie had been gluing and stamping all day. Up until that moment, she didn’t even know that her brother was a counterfeiter. “I was pissed at him for about five minutes. I mean, what kind of fucking asshole would do that to his own sister? But you gotta understand that when you look at those things, you can’t tell the difference. I don’t care who you are. If you had seen those bills, and fucking Art with all his assurances, you wouldn’t be any different. You just want to spend them.”
Art refused to give her any, which infuriated her even more. But in what would become an irresistible tradition for his friends and family, Wendz snuck a handful when he wasn’t looking. “I went to Navy Pier, and I was dropping them like water,” she remembers. “I’m a shopaholic, and I was in candyland.”
DESPITE ART’S FLEXIBLE ASSEMBLY METHOD, he now had a supply deficit. In legal business, it’s generally a good problem that can be overcome by partnerships and loans. In the criminal world, it’s one of the most dangerous positions a crook can be in. Nothing increases a criminal’s profile like expansion, and Art had not forgotten da Vinci’s advice about occupying too much space. At the same time, he had to strike while the bills were hot, so to speak. And yet he lacked that most American of business essentials, the capacity for mass production.
The very thing that made his bills great—the fact that they were handmade—was also a limitation. Unlike da Vinci had done, it wasn’t just a question of plates, paper, ink, and a press. Breaking the new note had required all those elements plus many more. Polyester paper, color-shifting paint, ultraviolet reactive inks, watermarks on tracing paper, spray glues and glosses, high-end scanners and printers and computers, plus a dozen other small steps like carrier sheets and spacers that could only be applied manually—they were all infuriatingly labor intensive. In his efforts to become perfect, he had become boutique.
To meet even a small portion of the demand, Art needed better equipment, a printing hole, and a labor force. Once again, Chicago turned out to be a propitious location. Every year, printers from around the globe converge on the McCormick Place convention center for Graph Expo—the world’s largest graphic-arts convention. For three days the center’s nearly three million square feet of display space exhibit the latest hi-tech presses, inks, papers, scanners, and computer programs—every innovation the industry has to offer. For a counterfeiter, standing above the South exhibition hall and looking across the floor of Graph Expo is perhaps the closest thing to a view of heaven on earth.
Counterfeiters aren’t invited to Graph Expo, of course. Conventioneers pay thousands of dollars for the right to display and attend, and access to the floor is strictly regulated. But it is a little-known fact outside of Chicago that McCormick Place itself is heavily manned by Bridgeporters. From the suited managers to the back-braced laborers who set up the displays, most are either from the South Side or know somebody from the South Side who got them their union jobs, which at forty-five dollars an hour to start are among the best blue-collar gigs in Chicago. And so it was that in October of ’99, Giorgi gave Art the keys to heaven.
Giorgi was working as a floor manager at McCormick Place that year, a job that gave him unfettered access to the entire exhibition floor. After seeing one of Art’s New Notes and hearing about his need for good equipment, Giorgi personally saw to it that Art was given a necklace pass, complete with a photo ID, to the convention. He walked onto the floor that year with as much access as the president of Xerox.
His name was James Salino, and he was a small printer from the South Side. He spent three days roaming the floor, ch
atting up representatives from Adobe and Lexmark and Hewlett-Packard, attending demonstrations, and asking questions. At the same time, he was also shopping, because Giorgi made it clear to him that if he saw something he liked, then arrangements could made to obtain it.
On the first day he attended the Expo he fell in love. As he roamed the South Hall, his eyes fell upon a compact, two-color offset press made by Ryobi that was unlike anything he had ever seen before. Instead of using metal plates, it used plasticized paper plates, which distributed ink with far more uniformity and detail than aluminum sheets. Being mostly paper, the plates also burned quickly, which made getting rid of evidence a cinch. On top of all that it was downright sexy, “silver and yellow, like a race car.” Plain and simple, it was “a bad motherfucker.”
The Ryobi retailed for twelve thousand dollars. On the last night of Graph Expo, after the convention closed, a small army of South Siders assaulted the exhibition floor with forklifts and dollies to crate up the millions of dollars of equipment. McCormick Place is one of the best-run convention centers on the planet, and prospective visitors to those great exhibition halls would disservice themselves to be dissuaded by this anecdote. But that night, not everything made it safely to the loading dock.
ART SET THE RYOBI UP at an empty warehouse that Giorgi found for him on the South Side. Within a day he was experimenting, using it to color bill backgrounds and seals. Compared with his earlier offsets, it was a Rolls-Royce, with a touch so light and reliable that he wondered how he’d ever done without it. “That press even sounded good,” he remembers. “It had a nice electric hum to it. I loved the feeling of turning it on, because when that fucker was rolling it was moneymaking time. It was going down.”
His first hundred-thousand-dollar batch of the New Note was destined for the Horse, his oldest and most reliable client. With Natalie helping, they went from raw material to fully assembled bills in about ten days, twice as long as Art would have liked. There were paper jams, glue problems, cutting problems. Perfecting his methodology into a fluid system would take him many more months, but when they were finished and staring at ten shrink-wrapped piles of ten thousand, he knew that he was back in the game in a big way. “I felt like the caveman who had discovered fire,” he says. “The bills looked so good I almost didn’t want to sell them. I wanted to spend them.”
During Art’s hiatus from counterfeiting, the FBI had raided the On Leong Building several times, and the once legendary gambling den in the basement had passed into history. This time around, he met the Horse in his car at Ping Tom Park, and afterward they went out to a downtown nightclub.
“You’ll have to be careful with these new bills,” the Horse warned him at one point. “Everybody will want.” Art was already seeing it. While superficially good for his ego, his social calendar exploded as clients, crooks, and even family members jockeyed for position next to the goose who was laying the golden eggs. “Everyone wanted money faster than I could make it,” he says. “They all had big plans, they all wanted me to become exclusive with them. I could see that it wasn’t really about me or my interests, but the money. It bothered me.”
Dmitri was still pushing Art hard to travel with him abroad, specifically to St. Petersburg. Sensing Art’s earlier reluctance, the Russian now talked about a short trip—three months—in which they would basically hang out and explore the architecture, but Art knew that once he was there he’d be seduced by Dmitri’s friends and relatives into printing, or at least selling some of his secrets. At the time, the city was one of the largest producers of U.S. counterfeit in Europe, and all Dmitri needed to return as a conqueror was an unlimited supply of Art’s bills.
One of the worst changes Art saw was in Tim Frandelo, an old friend he’d grown up with at the Bridgeport Homes. It had been Tim’s little brother, Darren, who was gunned down outside the Dunkin’ Donuts next to the projects. Back in the Dungeon days, Tim had helped Art out with a few deals, but once Frandelo saw the new bill, he pressed hard to become Art’s full-time partner. Since Art desperately needed someone besides Natalie to help him with the backlog of orders, he brought Frandelo in on a trial basis. But from the very first print run Tim was frustrated.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing fifty- and hundred-thousand-dollar deals when we can be printing millions,” he complained. “I know people who would buy a million.”
Art didn’t doubt it. Tim had solid Outfit connections, and that worried him. He explained da Vinci’s rule about occupying too much “space” and the certainty that the Secret Service would catch them if they printed too much, but Frandelo derided him as being too cautious. “When you have an ability like you got, you need to use it to its full extent,” Frandelo pressed. “These little batches will never make us rich, but with this product we could be.”
A few weeks after they started working together, Tim informed Art that he had been offered another job; an Outfit associate named Ron Jarrett was smuggling cocaine into the city from an Indian reservation upstate, and he needed foot soldiers to help him move it. Since it was much better money than the five thousand dollars per batch that Art was paying him, Tim was seriously considering taking it.
“If you can promise me we’ll print larger amounts, I’ll stick with you,” Frandelo told him. Art not only wouldn’t budge, but he was incensed.
“You go with Jarrett and we’re done,” Art replied. “I won’t be able to talk you. And if you tell him anything about me I’ll find you.”
Everybody in Bridgeport knew Ron Jarrett. A key member of the Twenty-sixth Street Crew, Jarrett had recently been released from prison for a 1980 jewelry heist, and since returning to the streets he’d been throwing his weight around the neighborhood, extorting money from locals and aggressively trying to tax any crook who smelled faintly of money. He was known for being a brute and a bulldog, and it was widely believed he was positioning himself to take over the Crew. That Frandelo was now associating with Jarrett spelled bad news to Art. “I figured it could be only a matter of time before I got on Jarrett’s radar,” he says. “If that happened I’d get taxed. The guy had a high profile. It was the kind of circle I didn’t want to be anywhere near. Those guys are always watched by the feds.”
As Art feared, Frandelo took the cocaine job, and he broke off all contact with his old friend. Worried that Jarrett or law enforcement would catch wind of his operation, Art grew intensely paranoid. He began spending thousands of dollars at the SpyShop USA, a “discreet electronics” store in downtown Chicago that specialized in high-tech countersurveillance equipment. Art bought a police scanner, bug and wire detectors, even night-vision goggles so he could look for stakeout cars in the dark. At the same time, he rarely answered his phone or allowed people to know where he was. When he and Natalie finally found their own apartment near Comiskey Park, he rented it under a false name and invited no one over but family. “I was like a ghost,” he says. “Nobody could ever find me. People hated it, but it kept me safe.”
“He was nuts,” says Tony Puntillo. “I remember one day Art shows up at my apartment. He was worried that he was being followed. He comes in and he has this little box with an antenna sticking out of it—a bug detector. He starts poking the antenna around the whole place, the walls, the furniture. I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ The jagoff’s walking around my house acting like he thinks he’s James fucking Bond.’ Then he goes to the window and shuts the blinds and keeps peeking through them. He’s convinced that one of the parked cars is following him.”
Even though nobody knew where he and Natalie lived, Art decided that Chicago wasn’t anonymous enough for him. The couple began searching downstate for a safe house, a country home where they could lay low and print if necessary. Eventually they found a farmhouse in Marshall, an agricultural community of about four thousand not far from the Indiana border. Located at the end of a dirt road, it literally sat in the middle of a cornfield. “No one was going to find this place,” Art says. “I paid cash for si
x months’ rent up front, used a false name. We didn’t go there all the time, but when we did we usually printed. We did all the digital stuff there. My plan was to operate out of there and do what Pete had always said: Keep my batches small, avoid too much attention, and live a comfortable life. Things didn’t work out that way, of course.”
9
THE ART OF PASSING
“Papa! What’s money?”
The abrupt question had such immediate reference to the subject of Mr. Dombey’s thoughts, that Mr. Dombey was quite disconcerted.
“What is money, Paul?” he answered. “Money?”
“Yes,” said the child, laying his hands upon the elbows of his little chair, and turning the old face up toward Mr. Dombey’s; “what is money?”
Mr. Dombey was in a difficulty. He would have liked to give him some explanation involving the terms circulating-medium, currency, depreciation of currency, paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of precious metals in the market, and so forth; but looking down at the little chair, and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered: “Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You know what they are?”
The Art of Making Money Page 15