Art and Dmitri caught up at the bar, then headed up to the room to conduct the deal and snort a little cocaine while Amy chatted and danced with two other Russians. Once business was taken care of, Dmitri invited everyone to a party over at his place, which Art thought was a good plan.
“Can’t we go to another club first? I want to see more of the city,” Amy pleaded after the Russians left.
Obliging her, Art took her to a nearby club where he knew the staff. Neither of them realized it was gay night until they entered and beheld an eclectic mass of writhing, shirtless men on the dance floor. Art wanted to leave, but Amy insisted on a few dances, so they started boogeying down with the guys. By now they were both trashed, and Art’s powers of libidinous resistance—a Maginot Line even when he was sober—began to crumble. He became convinced that Amy wanted to take things further than flirting. The possibility ripened when, during one of the dances, Amy accidentally ripped her pants and ran off to the bathroom, returning shortly afterward with the embarrassing news.
“How bad is it? Do you want to leave?” Art asked her as they sat down at a cocktail table.
“See for yourself,” she said. To show him the rip, she grabbed his hand and placed it in her lap.
Art pulled his hand away, but it was too much for him to resist. “She put on one of those sad puppy-dog faces. And so I put my hand back down there. And I’m like, ‘What am I doing? If we’re gonna do this, let’s get back to the House of Blues.’ ” Back at the hotel room, Amy hopped in the shower while Art rolled a joint. She insists that she was preparing to go to sleep and that Art was having delusions of sexual grandeur, but whatever might have happened between them was moot, because he had passed out by the time she got out of the shower. Just as Amy stepped out of the bathroom wearing a robe, there was a knock on the door. Art jolted awake, and before he could tell her that it was a very bad idea to respond, Amy opened it a crack.
That’s when four Chicago police officers pushed their way into the room.
Earlier that evening, a hotel security guard had called CPD after overhearing Art and Dmitri at the bar talking about scoring an eight ball of cocaine. Since hearsay didn’t constitute just cause to enter Art’s room, CPD told the guard that they could enter the room only if a disturbance was reported. Conveniently, the guard had reported a loud noise complaint shortly after Art and Amy returned.
One of the cops pinned Amy to the wall while the others moved toward the back. And once they were in, the sight of Art’s marijuana on the coffee table was the only invitation they needed to stay and have a look around.
“This smells like really good shit, I wish I could smoke some,” one of the cops joked as he sniffed Art’s weed. “What else have you got in here?” They roused Art from the bed, sat them both down at a table, and began searching the room. Rifling though Art’s suitcase, Amy’s clothes bag, and a chest of drawers, they were frustrated to find nothing. Art had no outstanding warrants, and the possibility of nothing more than a marijuana violation seemed tantalizingly close. But just as the cops looked like they were about to wind up their search, a young, redheaded officer named Marty O’Flaherty opened the closet.
“I didn’t see anything in there at first,” remembers O’Flaherty. “I was about to close the door again, but something made me run my hand over the top shelf. That’s when I found this fat pile of cash, sixty grand.” O’Flaherty assumed the money was real. But he took a closer look, holding the bill right up to his face. It was then that he noticed that the paper contained no red and blue silk fibers.
Art had easily simulated the fibers many times in the past, usually by taking hair from his own body, then burning a plate just for them, but he found that nobody really looked for them anymore after the ’96 note was released. He had spent so much time perfecting the new security features that, on that particular batch, he had neglected to include the oldest one in the book.
O’Flaherty turned to Art and smiled.
AS AMY REMEMBERS IT, Art stayed “real calm” when O’Flaherty discovered the counterfeit. “He immediately told the officers that I had nothing do with it. He said that everything was his fault and that they should let me go.” But the CPD was just getting started. After allowing Amy to dress, they cuffed and escorted both of them down to the hotel’s garage, where the cops searched the rental car. Finding nothing of interest, the officers then hauled them to the Eighteenth District precinct house. It was there, at about eight that morning, that Art finally came face-to-face with the Secret Service.
There were two agents, a man and a woman, both in their mid-thirties and well dressed. The Service had been studying Art’s bills for months, unaware as to who was creating them or where they’d been made. By the time agents showed up at malls or banks to inspect the bills, Art was always long gone, leaving no trace of his identity. To the agents, his only identity was his bills, and as soon as they inspected the notes that O’Flaherty had recovered, they became convinced that Art was the one they’d been after.
The male agent was pissed. Because the Secret Service had reason to believe that Art had been spreading bills across state lines, he’d been called in from D.C. on a red-eye. He was bleary-eyed and irritable, as tired as his suspects.
“I just left President Bush,” he groaned to Art at one point, “so please, don’t fuck with me.”
Anytime the Service gets its hands on a counterfeiter, the first priority is almost always obtaining more evidence. They go after equipment, because seizing it is the best and often the only way to prove that a suspect is the creator of the notes as opposed to just a passer. When there are two or more suspects, standard interrogation procedure is to separate them and question the weakest one first.
That meant Amy. Young, frightened, and vulnerable, she was most likely to crack and provide them with information they could leverage against Art. While Art waited in a holding cell, they had at her. After confirming her identity—which also established a baseline for her truthful responses—the pair immediately demanded to know where the money had been made and who else had made it with her.
Amy was, of course, completely innocent. She knew nothing and told the agents as much. That’s when the threats began. Interestingly, it was the female agent who played bad cop. “It was only the woman who was mean to me,” she says, “the guy from D.C. was nice. But I hated her. She told me that I’d never see my mother or sister again. She said they’d arrest my mother, although that was ridiculous because my mother had nothing to with anything.”
The agents brought up names and places: St. Louis, New Orleans, Minneapolis. They knew she had been involved. They even brandished a folder. Most of it was probably filled with blank paper, but it looked intimidating as they declared they knew everything, so there was no use holding back. Crying now, Amy reiterated that she knew nothing. This went on for eight hours, as the agents moved back and forth between her and Art. Other than a bag of M&M’s, neither of them would be given any food or sleep.
“They absolutely tortured that girl,” says Art, “and she gave them nothing.”
Amy did know a few things. She knew that Art and Natalie were the ones who had made the bills, and that they had been doing it for some time. She’d heard stories about hitting malls. But she also knew that Art and Natalie were family, and that there was no way she was going to turn against them.
ART WAS FAR MORE COOPERATIVE. He told the agents outright that he alone had created the bills and that they should let Amy go. “He confessed,” remembers O’Flaherty, who was in the interrogation room at the time. “And he was very arrogant. He told them that they had no idea who they had. He even told them how he had beaten each part of the bill.”
“I figured that was it, I had been caught with the money and it was over,” says Art. “I knew the conviction rate for counterfeiters. You don’t beat the feds. They don’t allow it.”
Unlike their treatment of Amy, the agents let Art talk and talk. He had been dodging them for so many years that the in
terrogation took on the relieving air of a meeting that both parties had long desired. Who else but the Secret Service could truly appreciate what he had done? Art’s weakness—his desire to be admired—flowered in that windowless room. The agents and O’Flaherty listened raptly while he affably schooled them on just how shortsighted the Treasury Department had been when it designed the New Note. “I thought he was real nice guy, he could charm his way out of anything,” says O’Flaherty. “I told him, ‘With all the right marks you had on your bill, you could have done anything. You could have had your own company.’ ”
Despite his long-windedness, Art’s confession was far from total. He did not tell them what equipment he used, where it was, or the names of any of the other people involved in the manufacturing, distribution, and passing of his bills. He filled the airspace with time-consuming vagaries, and whenever the agents tried to get him to be specific, he smiled and shrugged, indicating—compassionately, almost—that he couldn’t and wasn’t going to help them.
At the same time, he was steadily bargaining. He needed to call Natalie, he told them, so that she’d know what had happened to her sister. By law he was entitled to one phone call, but the agents could postpone it for hours if they wanted. More than anything, the agents wanted an address where they could look for equipment. And late that afternoon they decided to gamble and let him call Natalie most likely in the hopes that they could trace the line and get a location.
“He got ahold of his girlfriend, and said he was in trouble, but couldn’t talk much,” remembers O’Flaherty. “And the Secret Service dropped the ball in letting him make that call.”
Art was on the phone for a minute at most, long enough for the Service to trace the call to a fairly localized area in Marshall, but they still had to determine the address and get a warrant. The call was far more advantageous to Art. He was able to let Natalie know, without saying it, that she needed to destroy every piece of incriminating equipment in the house.
WHY THE SERVICE DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY DISPATCH AGENTS to Marshall is known only to them. An hour later, they decided to release Amy, and were even able to obtain directions to the house; Art wrote them down for her so she could drive the rental car back.
Poor Amy’s ordeal was far from over when she left the station. Even though Art had more than three hundred dollars in genuine currency on him at the time of her arrest, the Service gave her only seventeen—barely enough for gas. Driving through an unfamiliar state with no food or sleep, she missed her exit and wound up in Indiana. After running out of money for tolls, she broke down crying at a gas station, where a sympathetic clerk drew her a map, gave her fourteen dollars and a toll card, then escorted her back to the highway. She got lost again on the back roads of Marshall, where she finally woke up an elderly couple living in a trailer at the end of a dirt road. Seeing her distress, they told her to leave the car till morning and mercifully gave her a ride all the way to the house.
Natalie was devastated when Amy told to her the story about the arrest. She was furious at Art, not because she thought anything would’ve happened with her sister, but because he hadn’t been more careful about security. They were now on the Secret Service’s radar, which meant that she herself would be under investigation. She had no doubt that the Service would obtain a search warrant for the house in Marshall, which still contained a computer they had used to work on scans. To top it off, she’d learned a few months earlier that she was pregnant, and she was now five and half months and showing. “Yeah, I was worried for Art,” she says, “but I also had a baby to worry about. I was afraid he’d wind up in jail and I’d have to raise the baby alone. I was a wreck.”
Luckily, Art’s phone call had given her a head start. Within minutes of hanging up, she was stuffing a computer tower into plastic garbage bags, which she then hauled to a dumpster in downtown Marshall. Despite her rush, the Service didn’t show up until the following afternoon. The women were away in Indianapolis dropping off the rental car at the time, but when they came home they saw the warrant taped to the front door. Despite the fact that Natalie had locked all the windows and dead-bolted the doors, they had entered without a scratch and searched the entire premises. The only thing they took was a camera containing undeveloped family photos. They never gave it back.
ART WAS ARRAIGNED A DAY AFTER HIS ARREST and charged with one count of counterfeiting United States currency, a crime that carried a maximum sentence of twenty years. But even as he stood haggard before the judge and heard the charge, agents and lab technicians were poring through bill databases and pulling up potential matches for other bills that might be linked to him. They turned up more almost immediately.
Six weeks earlier, Art, Natalie, and a couple of friends had taken a spending trip into Oklahoma, knowing that the post-Christmas bargain crowds would make a great slamming environment. Along Interstate 44, they had absolutely papered the Central Mall, near the town of Lawton. When the Secret Service later sent a couple agents from the Oklahoma City field office to investigate, they found that a whopping 80 percent of the merchants—or about sixty stores—had received counterfeit bills. In the report, they noted that the bills “differed in serial number, but possessed many of the same characteristics [as the Chicago notes] to include: mismatch Federal Reserve Bank number and letter, unique two-part note defeating the CFT detection pen, watermark and security fiber representations, unusual paper.”
Proving that Art had made the Lawton bills would be difficult without his equipment, but if they could establish that just one of those bills was his, then there was a good chance he could also face at least one count of “uttering” counterfeit—an Old World term for passing. Uttering carried a fifteen-year maximum, but that wasn’t the end of the bad news for Art. If they could trace any of the bills to another criminal he’d sold them to, then he’d also be facing a “dealing” charge, which also carried a twenty-year max.
The federal government enjoys a ninety-five percent conviction rate when it comes to criminal cases. Its law-enforcement officers enjoy the best training, equipment, and funding in the world, and their investigations produce evidence for not just a single prosecutor, but typically a team of a highly talented attorneys who often find themselves facing a lone defense lawyer or, in the case of multiple defendants, a loose and conflicted confederacy. The Department of Justice is also infamously selective; it likes to choose opponents it knows it can beat. In cases involving the Secret Service, the conviction rate is 98.8 percent, the highest rate of any law enforcement agency in the land.
Needless to say, Art needed a very good lawyer, which came down to money. Yet despite the millions in fake cash he had made and sold over the years, he had very little real money to spare. His lifestyle, and the confidence that he could always print more, had left him pathetically unprepared for financial emergencies. He had never established a way to launder his counterfeit earnings into savings; he had convinced himself that he could create a note that would fool anticoun terfeiting devices used in offshore banks, deposit millions of dollars, then withdraw real cash. Such a plan, if feasible, would take years of research, and he had run out of time. Other than about fifty thousand dollars in assets, he had nothing, which meant that he was looking at a court-appointed lawyer who would invariably press for a guilty plea.
Natalie’s mother, Sharon, decided that she wasn’t going to let that happen. The morning after the arrest, she was hitting the phone, hunting for criminal-defense attorneys in Chicago. Conveniently, the town was practically built on them, and after several calls she was referred to a federal criminal-defense attorney named John Beal. The next day, she drove up to Chicago, visited his office downtown, and enlisted his services.
A few days later, Beal visited Art at the Metropolitan Correction Center, Chicago’s federal jail, an ominous, eleven-story-high triangle. Art liked Beal immediately for his no-bullshit style. Beal asked Art to give him a step-by-step account of the arrest. When Art reached the part where the officers came into th
e room and found the marijuana, the lawyer became visibly excited. In the police report, CPD stated that their cause for entering room had been because they had seen—apparently through the crack in the door that Amy was holding open—marijuana on a coffee table.
“That’s impossible,” Art told him. “There was a hallway, and the coffee table was around the corner. It would have been physically impossible to see the weed, you’d have to have X-ray vision.”
The next day, Beal visited the House of Blues. A police officer and the hotel manager escorted him to the room, which was blocked off with police tape. After the manager signed an affidavit stating the room had not been disturbed, Beal entered and took photographs. Just as Art had said, the coffee table was entirely out of view from the door. The manager also confirmed that the coffee table was in the appropriate position according to hotel policy, further indicating that it had never been moved. Beal developed the film and made a visit to the prosecutor, affidavit in hand.
“You’ve got a straight-up illegal search and seizure here,” he told his adversary, and showed him the photos. “Not only that, but I have CPD lying about it on paper.”
Three weeks later, the preliminary hearing had barely got under way when the prosecutor approached the bench and told the judge that the state wished to dismiss all charges.
Moments later, the gavel fell. After less than a month, Art was free.
11
THE LETTER
The world meets nobody halfway. When you want something, you gotta take it.
—LINCOLN HAWK, IN THE FILM Over the Top, 1987
Art’s elation upon beating the House of Blues rap was un abashedly visible. He bear-hugged Beal in the courtroom, then literally jumped for joy once he hit the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. Thanks to a technicality, he had escaped spending the rest of his youth in federal prison.
The Art of Making Money Page 18