His rapture lasted about five minutes. His life as an underground counterfeiter was over. The Secret Service knew his identity, his capabilities, and the names of at least some of his associates. In the courtroom, he had seen two suited, short-haired men in the gallery. They glared at him as he exited, leaving him little doubt as to their affiliation and message. “They were so pissed,” Art remembers. “By law, they had to burn all the evidence, sixty grand. I knew it wasn’t over. There was no way they were going to let me get away.”
Chicago was now way too hot for him. He believes the Service began tailing him the moment he left the courthouse. He stayed in the city just two days, then drove back roads all the way to Texas, where Natalie was waiting for him at her mother’s house in Lewis ville. Within a day of his arrival, black SUVs began appearing in his rearview mirror, or parked up the street at odd hours, the frozen silhouettes of their drivers in the front seats, waiting.
He stopped venturing outside, turned down the shades, and spent what was left of March beached on the sofa reading and watching TV. His plan was to bore the Service into moving on, but he became caught in his own trap. With too much time to think, he lapsed into a severe depression. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he says. “I figured that was it, game over. We lost the house in Marshall, and it was only a matter of time before the Service caught me for something else. I thought about the past, all the shittiness, my dad leaving, my mom going crazy, my fucking sister almost dying.”
One day he found himself engrossed in a TV showing of Over the Top, a Stallone film from 1987 about an estranged father and son traveling across the county in a semi truck. Stallone’s character, Lincoln Hawk, is an arm-wrestling trucker who hasn’t seen his ten-year-old kid since he was a baby. His son resents him for leaving at first, but the pair gradually bond on the road. True to its title, Over the Top is one of the most shamelessly sentimental, manipulative, and ridiculously optimistic father-and-son movies ever made. By the end of the movie, Art was bawling.
Natalie found him breaking down on the front porch, trying to hide his tears. “I hadn’t seen my dad in so many years. I didn’t even know what happened to him, why he left. Then that fucking movie came on and got me thinking about everything. And I said to myself, ‘Screw it. I’m gonna find him.’ ”
Natalie went back into the house, got on the computer, and enrolled in an Internet people-finder service for twenty dollars. Fifteen minutes later, she rejoined Art on the front porch.
“Your dad’s living in Alaska,” she told him. “I have his address.”
ART HAD SPENT ENTIRE DAYS on the Internet researching paper companies and bill components; using it to answer his oldest question had never occurred to him. He had to run to the computer to see the address for himself to believe it.
Williams, Arthur J.
P.O. Box 1258
Chickaloon, AK 99674-1258
Art felt certain it was his father because, in a margin, the site listed the subject’s age as fifty-two, precisely the age his dad should be. They entered the city into a map site. There it was, Chickaloon, a mote in the wilderness about sixty miles northeast of Anchorage. Art stared at the map point, transfixed. Farther away than he had ever imagined, but not so far that he couldn’t picture it. His dad was right there, right now, probably holed up by the fire as the dark days ruled over the biggest, wildest state. No phone number was given with the address, but they called information just to be sure. The number was unlisted. Art decided that was better anyway; a phone call out of the blue after all these years would be too sudden.
That same night, Art sat down and wrote a letter. He wanted to pen an account of everything that had happened since his father had left, along with the only question that really mattered: Why? Realizing such an epistle would take a butt roll of paper and probably freak his father out, he kept it simple. He told his dad that he was living in Texas and doing well. He was married and had a kid, with another on the way. He wanted them to know their grandfather, and he had never stopped thinking about him. He understood if his dad was hesitant after so many years, but he still loved him. He left the phone number for Sharon’s office line, telling his dad to leave his own number with her if he was interested in catching up. Art would call him back.
The next morning, Sharon took the letter to her office and deposited it in the outgoing mail.
ART KEPT A TIGHT REIGN on his hope that his father would respond, but the very act of reaching out made him feel like the future was opening up. Three weeks had gone by since he’d left Chicago, and sure enough, the Secret Service tails soon thinned out. That didn’t mean that he was no longer under investigation; it only meant that they’d been occupied elsewhere. He knew that as soon as they had time they’d start checking back, like fishermen revisiting the magic spot where they’d nearly hooked a big one.
He started thinking about establishing a new printing hole, someplace even farther off the map than Marshall, where they’d never find him. Although Natalie had been forced to destroy the computers and printers, the Ryobi press and process camera were still safe in Chicago, and he had plenty of paper stock in Dallas. If he could find a spot, then pull off a large, swift sale, he’d be able to disappear—this time for good. “I still wanted to find a place and finally do it like da Vinci had taught me. Keep it small and contained, not occupy too much space, and just live well. I had wanted to do that in Marshall. Now I felt like I had learned my lesson and this was it. I wanted to get out, get a place where I could breathe some.” It was classic criminal logic: He wanted to do a big sale so he could get back to doing small ones.
Finding a new house in rural Illinois was out of the question; not only was it too hot as far as law enforcement was concerned, but the House of Blues bust had given Natalie her fill of the state. “I told Art that I was never going back there,” she says. “If he wanted to be with me, then we’d have to live somewhere closer to Texas.” Using the Internet and want ads, they started shopping for real estate within a few hours of Dallas. Since the humidity was worse to the south, they concentrated their search north so as to avoid the sticky problem of having bills peel apart. Eventually they found a listing for about a hundred acres of land in northwest Arkansas east of Fay etteville. Early one morning when the street looked clear of surveillance, they slipped out of town to take a look.
Both of them immediately fell in love with the plot. It included a small, one-story house, along with a twelve-acre lake, several streams, and it was thick with forest. The seller was an elderly woman who’d grown up on the land, and she was asking for $500 per acre. When Art asked her if she was willing to drop her price to $350 per acre in exchange for fifty percent cash up front, no questions asked, her generational preference for hard currency perked right up. “That would be wonderful,” she told him.
To get real cash to pay for the land, all Art needed was a client willing to buy his biggest batch of counterfeit ever, and he already had a buyer in mind. As one of his oldest clients and friends, Sandy Sandoval not only trusted him completely, but for the last year he’d been begging Art for larger batches of money, five hundred thousand dollars and up. Art had always declined on the grounds that it was too dangerous. For this one-time deal, however, he was willing to make an exception if Sandy told him precisely how the money would be used.
Sandy jumped on the opportunity. “Okay, the money isn’t for me,” he told Art over a pay phone, “I’m just a middleman. The guy who wants it is my supplier, Beto.” Beto, Sandy went on to explain, was even deeper into the cocaine business than he—one of five Mexican Mafia-affiliated suppliers in the Chicago area. Every month, each of the suppliers deposited anywhere from seven hundred thousand to a million dollars into the walls of an RV, which was basically a traveling bank. From Chicago, the RV went on to California, then Tijuana, Mexico, where the money was laundered and exchanged for more cocaine. “Beto wants to pad his shipment,” he explained to Art, meaning that the supplier would mix the counterfeit into h
is deposit and pocket the savings.
Art liked the idea. Not only would the money be leaving the country, but he soon confirmed that Beto had been the one that Sandy had been selling to all along. In other words, the counterfeit-for-coke scam had a proven track record. After a few negotiating sessions over a pay phone, Art arranged to print the most exorbitant sum he had ever attempted: $750,000 at thirty cents on the dollar. Not all of it would be for Sandy; $250,000 would be for himself—rainy-day money that he intended to shrink-wrap and bury in the woods at his new place in Arkansas. “This was going to be it,” he says. “One sweet move. Just print a shitload of money, then build my own place like I’d always dreamed about. Land, horses, the whole thing. I was going to design it and build the house with my own hands. I even had some kick-ass tools that I’d gotten from Home Depot stores. That was one of the places I’d hit hard over the years.”
SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND meant at least 15,000 bill faces. It meant 7,500 security strips and watermarks, and more print cartridges than many businesses use in a year. Since every bill had to be hand-assembled, Art and Natalie were looking at a minimum of two weeks of nonstop production, not to mention buying new computer equipment, arranging for a temporary hole where they could work, and transporting paper and supplies. Fortunately, the one problem they didn’t have was getting the money to pay for it: Sandy agreed to front them five thousand dollars to pay for the production costs.
The operation would have to be done in Chicago—a sacrifice that Natalie conceded to, given the one-time scenario of the deal. Her only condition, which Art was happy to comply with, was that as soon as the deal went down they would hit the road for a long trip before setting up in Arkansas. Both of them were hungry to rekindle the romance from their earlier trips, and they wanted to do it before the baby arrived.
Setting all these plans in motion helped Art to forget about the letter. But as he and Natalie drove back to Texas, the possibility that his father had responded—or worse, hadn’t—snowballed into an anxiety that grew with each mile. He suppressed it by mentally preparing himself for disappointment. It was certainly possible that the man in Alaska was a different Art Williams; if it was his father, why would he be willing to reconnect with him now after having remained silent for so long? And the way his father had always moved around, the address could be old, a cold lead. When they finally pulled into Sharon’s driveway, he had primed himself for the inevitable letdown.
“Guess who called my office.” Sharon said to him the moment he walked in the door. “He left a number; he wants to talk to you.”
ART DIDN’T EVEN BOTHER UNPACKING. He drove straight to a 7-Eleven, got five dollars’ worth of quarters, and dialed the number on a pay phone outside. A female answered. Despite the barricade of time, Art thought he recognized the voice. But given how impossible it seemed that his dad could be with the same woman, and the advantage of anonymity, he simply requested to speak to Arthur Williams.
“Just a moment, I’ll get him.”
Footsteps went away, then new ones approached.
“Hello?”
That voice he was sure of.
“Dad.”
“Hello, son!” said Senior. He sounded more cheerful than Art had ever imagined.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s you.”
“It’s me. I’m so glad you wrote me,” Senior said. “I’ve been waiting for your call. When I got your letter, it made me so happy.”
“That’s good,” Art said, and then they began the awkward process of reconnecting. With sixteen years and a continent between them, it was easiest for both of them to pretend like they’d last seen each other a few weeks ago. They stretched to speak in the possessive tones of family while touching on subjects that exposed just how much of strangers they’d become to each other. “It was simple things first,” remembers Art. “I told him that he was a grandfather, that I had a wife who was pregnant. It was . . . there was too much to talk about over a pay phone. Baby steps. Of course, I had a shitload of questions I wanted to ask him, but I wasn’t gonna do it over the phone.”
Art was able to get some basics. After he’d left, Senior had driven back West and then moved Anice and her children to Alaska. He’d worked as a mechanic, had a house there in the mountains, and was “semiretired.” Every subject led to more questions, but it was easier to stay general and keep to small talk. As Art suspected, the woman who had answered the phone was Anice. Senior had stayed with her the whole time. This both surprised and bothered him. Part of him had hoped that abandonment was congenital with his dad, a trait that hadn’t centered on just the family he had left in Chicago.
“How are your brother and sister?” Senior asked at one point.
“They’re good,” Art lied. “They miss you.”
“I miss you too,” Senior said. Then he told Art exactly what he wanted to hear. “Why don’t you come on up here? Why don’t you just come as soon as possible?”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
Art didn’t even stop to think before responding.
“You know what? I am,” he said. “I’m coming as soon as I can.” He explained that there were a few things he had to take care of first, but that a visit within the next few months was a given. They made plans to talk to each other again in a few days. Art hung up and raced back to Natalie to tell her the news that they would soon be heading north.
“He didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go to Alaska,” she says. “He just told me that that was what we were doing. He was excited; he needed to see his dad. I thought it was a good thing for him.”
ART HAD NEGLECTED TO MENTION to Senior that he happened to be on the run from the United States Secret Service for perfecting a counterfeit of the 1996 New Note. Not the kind of detail you give your long-lost father if you want to rekindle a relationship, or even just get an opportunity to confront him face to face. Art wanted to do both, so when he touched base with his dad over the next few days he kept the calls short, light, and slim on specifics. Had Senior known his own son better, he might have interpreted that forced brevity as a sign that Junior was making serious criminal moves.
The day after Art contacted his dad, he and Natalie drove back to Chicago and started ramping up for the big print run. Sandy gave Art the five thousand dollars, and he bought a scanner, an Apple laptop, and a printer. He already had many of the smaller items—the glues, carrier sheets, hardening sprays, and hand tools—stashed away with the Ryobi at the warehouse. The run, Art decided, would take place in two locations; rather than breaking down the Ryobi and moving it from Giorgi’s warehouse, Art would use it in situ to color his paper and print security strips and seals. He’d also take care of the faces and the color shifts. He would then take everything to Natalie, who’d have her own little shop set up in Sandy’s back bedroom. She’d ink-jet the serial numbers and the “100” over the treasury seal, then they’d assemble the bills with the help of Big Bill, who Art hired on as a much-needed extra hand.
As the deal grew closer, in typical fashion, Art latched on to an even more grandiose scheme—one that could potentially turn the five hundred thousand he was making for Beto into millions. When Sandy had told him that his bills were destined to be stuffed into the walls of an RV full of cocaine money, the old drug pirate in Art began salivating. “Oh, God, I wanted to hit that thing,” he laughs. “Can you imagine? You’re talking five dealers depositing six or seven hundred thousand each. That’s at least three million dollars inside that thing. Pose as a cop, pull it over on the road at night . . . that would set me up for life!”
Art had no way of locating the RV without tipping Sandy off to his plan, a risk that would not only ruin their relationship but probably also get him killed, so he visited his friend Mark Palazo, an electronics expert up in Des Plaines. He wanted to know if there was a GPS device small enough to fit inside a bill. “He told me there was no way he could do it,” says Art, “and said that I was the craziest person he’
d ever met.”
Early retirement plans dashed, Art raced back to Chicago to begin work on the largest batch of counterfeit currency he’d ever attempted. By now, he had a commanding knowledge of a once tortur ous process, and production ran smoothly. Every morning, he and Big Bill ferried cardboard boxes of prepped faces and strips to Natalie, then returned to the warehouse to make more. Beholding the completed bills still gave Art a powerful rush, but laced into that feeling was now a persistent fear. The arrest, the prospect of seeing his father again, and Natalie’s pregnancy reminded him that he was risking more than he ever had before. He wanted no evidence remaining. Two days into the print run, he visited Natalie with a somber air.
“Baby, I’m breaking down the Ryobi and destroying it after this is over,” he told her. “I’m done. So make these bills good.”
Natalie had heard similar resolutions before. It meant that in six months or a year, when they were out of money, they’d have to wrangle all the equipment again and start from scratch—easy enough to do with digital equipment. But the Ryobi was a special machine. When it came to shading the paper and the delicate printing on the strips, it was like a grand piano; it hit notes that no synthesizer ever could.
“Don’t do it,” she told him. “We might need it.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
She didn’t really believe he’d throw away the best press he’d ever owned, and he didn’t mention it again until a few nights later when he dropped off the last box of finished sheets and strips. Although it was midnight, he told her he was heading back to the warehouse. It was time to dispose of the press. Tired of arguing, she told Art to do what he needed to do.
The Art of Making Money Page 19