The Art of Making Money

by Jason Kersten

  That was as far she’d go. She saw how much Art wanted it, and there was no way she was going to insist that he couldn’t live near his dad after being deprived of him for most his life. She didn’t want to be that woman, the one who makes her husband choose between her and his family. She was also almost nine months pregnant and tired.

  “If we’re staying here, I’m not gonna have my baby out in the sticks,” she said. “You either find me a place in Anchorage where I’m five minutes from the hospital, or my ass is going back to Texas. I’ll have the baby and get a job, you can stay here yourself and have a nice life.”

  She meant it, but Art knew he’d won. He swore to Natalie that he’d start searching for a place in Anchorage the next morning. He hugged her with joy, poured out the sugar, then walked back to the main house to deliver the good news. Senior had the look of a man eager for an answer when Art walked in the door. For the briefest moment, Art thought about employing Natalie’s test: What would Senior do if he told him no? But he wanted to see the look in his old man’s eyes when he heard yes.

  TRUE TO HIS WORD, Art got them into a place in Anchorage the very next day. It was too easy: At Senior’s suggestion, Chrissy put them up at her place until after the baby was born and they had time to arrange something more permanent. The baby, a girl, arrived on May 30. In keeping with the tradition of having all his kids’ names begin with the letter A, she was Andrea.

  Once they were back from the hospital Art, having successfully copied his own genes, began searching in earnest for equipment to copy the money he’d need to pay for her.

  In the Windy City, a counterfeiter can spend months visiting industrial printing houses and small graphic arts-shops and still not see all of them. In Anchorage, it took Art less than a week to visit every printer in the area. He could not find a single plate-burner, process camera, or offset for sale that met his requirements. He also struck out when it came to finding a local distributor of the all-important Abitibi paper.

  While he could order some of the items he needed from Seattle, he knew that there was simply no way he could set up a proper shop without returning to the lower forty-eight, preferably Chicago, where he knew the lay of the land and still had a few items in storage. But he had never envisioned leaving the state when he agreed to his father’s plan, much less returning to the city where he was hottest.

  “It’s going to be risky and it’s going to be expensive, because these items are heavy and shipping them will cost a small fortune,” he told his father. He was half hoping his dad would call it off.

  “Then let’s go, just you and me.” Senior shrugged. “Why don’t we hit the road? We’ll fly down to Seattle, rent a car, and drive to Chicago and get whatever you need. We can have some fun spending money along the way.”

  A spending trip with his old man. The thought had never occurred to Art, but it had the ring of destiny. Suddenly the journey went from being a fretted chore to an adventure. Just the two of them on the road, freebooting across the country and slamming hard along the way. “I remember thinking, ‘Me and Pops are gonna do it. Not Anice, not Natalie, not anybody—just us.’ ” He could already picture them laughing over the memories years later.

  “Are you serious?” Art asked him.

  “Sure I am. Don’t you think it’d be fun?”

  “I do,” said Art. “You crack me up. You’re starting to sound like me.”

  Natalie, having given birth only two weeks earlier, was less thrilled with the idea. The prospect of Art taking off on a spending trip made her worry that he’d get arrested and never return. Since she’d agreed to resume counterfeiting, however, she had little choice but to admit that the only way it could happen was if they obtained new equipment. Before they left, Art made sure to give her a project: While he was away with Senior, she’d be working on the computer, polishing up scans of the new fifty-dollar note. Although it was unusual for him to print fifties, he and his father would be dropping so many hundreds over the next few weeks that he didn’t want to risk printing any more upon their return to Alaska. He wanted a new bill ready to go, something different, something that would allow him to embark on a new life with his dad without rousing the authorities.

  13

  FAMILY BONDING

  It is simply impossible to convict counterfeiters, as a rule, without the aid of their confederates. The lesser criminals in this secretly conducted business can alone obtain the confidence of the greater villains.

  —GEORGE PICKERING BURNHAM

  They flew to Seattle, where they rented a white Crown Victoria, a model that satisfied Art’s requirement of looking as much like a cop as possible while committing crimes. As they pulled out of Sea-Tac Airport, Senior turned and gave him a devilish grin.

  “You ready to do this?” he said.

  “Hell, yeah.”

  Within an hour they were hammering gas stations along Interstate 90 East. Art had always avoided spending counterfeit at gas stations because they bristle with security cameras, but three decades of nine-dollar change-raising scams had given Senior a tactician’s knowledge of how to avoid being taped. They’d cruise down the highway, wait until they spotted a forest of signage ahead, then swoop in from the off-ramps. They’d circle a station once to get a feel for its layout, then park away from the pumps, where the cameras are usually aimed. Art junior would then enter and buy a pack of cigarettes and a soda. They’d usually be gone in less than a minute. “It was cigarettes and pop all day long,” Art remembers, “and every time we’d get back ninety-two dollars in change. Sometimes there’d be four gas stations on one intersection, and we’d knock them all—bing, bing, bing, bing. At the end of that first day we counted out about $4,200 in a hotel room just across the state line in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. We just started laughing because we’d never seen so many gas stations.”

  Based on their change returns, they calculated they’d hit roughly forty-five stations in just over three hundred miles—about one station for every seven miles of road. The closest call they encountered turned out to be right there at the hotel in Coeur D’Alene. Later that evening, Art ventured down to the lobby bar for a celebratory beer; he’d heard a healthy commotion from the bar when they’d checked in, but it wasn’t until he walked in and sat down that he saw the source: The entire place was filled with cops.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked the bartender.

  “Northwest State Police Conference. Washington, Idaho, Montana . . . they have a huge meet here every year.”

  Art got his beer to go.

  He ran right back to the room, where he found his father smoking weed from a pipe next to an open window—a move so stupid and arrogant that, had it been anyone else, Art would have dumped him off at a Greyhound station and ended the trip right then.

  “Put that out! We have to get the fuck out of here,” he told his dad, and explained the situation. Senior casually finished inhaling from the pipe.

  “They don’t know what we’ve done,” he finally said. “You look good, I look good, and we’re driving a car that looks just like what they drive. Do you really think they’ll think we’re anything else but cops? We’re safer here than anywhere.”

  Against all instinct, Art surrendered to his old man’s assurances and calmed down. Senior’s control impressed him. Art took a hit from the pipe himself, drank his beer, and they went to bed watching TV. “The truth was, I was having the best time in my life,” Art says. “My old man was cool. I can’t explain it. Yeah, he was a piece of shit, but he was cool. Maybe that’s easy to say because that’s really all I had, but I’d never give that trip up.”

  They slipped out of Coeur D’Alene the next morning while the hungover cops slept. Continuing down I-90, they hit the gas stations in and around Missoula and Billings hard, changing up almost as much money as the day before. They were having so much fun, in fact, that on the third night they almost died. Hoping to make up for all the time lost at gas stations, they drove late into the night as they e
ntered North Dakota—and straight into a supercell storm system that was causing massive damage along the I-94 corridor. As lightning and rain raked the highway, the pair smoked a joint and cranked up the Led Zeppelin, oblivious to the fact that tornadoes were touching down all around them. “I thought it was a little weird because for a long time we were the only car on the road,” remembers Art. “We didn’t realize what had happened until we checked into a motel early the next morning. It took a long time for the desk clerk to show up, and when he did he said, ‘What the hell are you people doing? Haven’t you been listening to the news?’ He’d been hiding in a shelter behind the motel.”

  After that little laugh at God’s expense, they kept moving across the North Dakota plains. For hundreds of miles the land was empty and bright and mostly free of civilization. At that point they couldn’t be criminals anymore; just father and son, stuck inside a speeding shell that could have doubled as a time capsule. Art couldn’t help remembering that the last time he had been on the road with his dad, the trip had ended with his father dumping him off on a Chicago curbside, then abandoning him for good.

  BY THE END OF THE FOURTH DAY they had made it into Minnesota. Senior wanted to hit Minneapolis, so they spent the next day milking the gas stations there before bearing south for Chicago. Two hours from the city, Art called his sister from a gas station pay phone.

  “I’ll be arriving tonight, and I have a surprise for you,” he told her.

  In keeping with his practice of never allowing anyone to know his plans or his location, Art hadn’t told Wensdae that he and his father were coming to the city. As far she’d known, they were still in Alaska. Her boyfriend at the time, a man who was, ironically enough, a successful Chicago printer, had a fifty-foot yacht that they lived on during the summers, and she was relaxing on deck when Art came aboard alone.

  “Ready for your surprise?” he asked her, then shouted, “Okay!”

  Senior, who had been waiting on the dock, ambled onto the deck and toward his daughter. “I was freaked out and happy,” Wensdae remembers, “also relieved. Suddenly I had a parent that wasn’t fucked up in the sense that I could talk to him and have a normal conversation. My mom’s sickness made talking to her pretty much impossible. Now I had this whole other parent who wasn’t crazy. I had decided long ago to forgive him for what happened at Uncle Rich’s. Life was too short to hold that against him, and I needed a father in my life.”

  While Wensdae and Senior visited all the next day, Art began a mad dash for supplies. Flush with cash, he rented a truck, then bought a used AB Dick offset from a shop on the Southwest Highway for three thousand dollars. He took it back to the storage space, where he still had his process camera and plate burner. Over the next two days he bought inks, blank plates, and various small items. He crated it all up, took it to a shipper, gave a false name and the address of one of Senior’s friends in Alaska, and slapped down a wad of cash. It was the fastest he’d ever equipped a shop.

  With the supplies taken care of, Senior decided that it would be fun for all three of them to hit the road together, so they jumped in the car and headed south. It went without saying that it would be a spending trip, but their first stop wasn’t a mall. It was the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois. Only a year and half after his release from the boys’ home, Jason had sold some cocaine to an undercover police officer. He was carrying a 9mm at the time, and the state threw him right back into maximum security, this time for five years. “They only got an hour together, but Jason was excited,” remembers Wensdae. “We let them catch up alone. My dad was shaken up to see him in there. Every one of his kids had problems, but Jason had no real memory of our dad before he left us.”

  Seeing their son and brother in prison didn’t deter them from the spree that ensued. The first mall they hit was in Kentucky. Tired from all the gas stations, Art and Senior took a rest, sticking to surveillance while Wensdae hit the stores. Prior to that, Art had given Wensdae a few hundreds to spend, and she had sneaked a few when he wasn’t looking, but this was the first time Art had ever allowed her to accompany him on a full-blown slamming trip. And once he saw her in action, he regretted he hadn’t brought her along earlier. Wensdae turned out to be a spending machine.

  “I’m a girl, I love to shop, and I used to be a model,” she says. “And when I say I love to shop you have to understand that there is nothing, nothing in the world I like to do more. I’m a born shopper. Art gave me all kinds of instructions about how to spend, but they just went in one ear and out the other. I know how to spend money. His money was so good that I just treated it like real money, and so did everyone else.” Even on crutches, Wensdae could drop five thousand dollars a day. The crutches helped—no one was inclined to suspect a handicapped woman of handing over a fake hundred-dollar bill. Also, Wendz loved to chat up the cashiers and bond with them. She’d ask the ladies behind the counter if they liked the color of a bra, or which scented soap a man might find most appealing. She had the rare gift of being able to forget that she was committing a crime, at least during the act itself.

  Wensdae tore it up through Kentucky, where Art insisted that they drive by Fort Knox and make a symbolic gesture of spending counterfeit as close to the depository as possible. It wasn’t until they swung back up into Indiana that it occurred to Wensdae that her reunion with her father was massively dysfunctional. Fittingly, the revelation came on Father’s Day, when the three of them went out for a celebratory breakfast at a diner in Kokomo. At the table, she handed him a three-dollar card that she’d purchased with a fake hundred-dollar bill. Both she and Art had signed it. After reading it, Senior reached out to give her a hug.

  “Don’t touch me,” she suddenly snapped. “You disgust me. This is all wrong.” She began crying.

  Senior and Art were taken aback. They asked her what was wrong.

  “Here it is, after all these years and we’re out here on the road spending,” Wensdae sobbed. “Is this what we are to you? Accessories? You’re supposed to be our father. Fuck you.”

  It was her dog-food moment. She railed on Senior much the same way Art had, reciting the litany of Bridgeport sufferings. But this time Senior didn’t take it. Hurt, he stepped outside of the diner. Art ran after him.

  “We’re done,” Senior told him. “I’m going back. You can drop her off, stay here if you want. I don’t care. This is too much.”

  “She’s just overwhelmed, what do you expect?” Art said. He talked his father down, then went back into the diner to try to soothe his sister. He made no attempt to downplay Senior’s shortcomings as a role model. Wensdae was right; their father was a shit, but neither of them was going to change that. They might as well make the most of the time they had with him, and no one was going to feel good if the trip ended prematurely. Wendz settled down, then crutched back to the car and made up with her dad.

  They continued on, all the way up to the tip of the Michigan Peninsula, where they hopped a ferry to Mackinac Island, and rented a beach house on Lake Huron. They were all exhausted, and Wensdae’s leg was hurting her, but on their first night there Art wanted to go out and hit some more stores on the island. Before he left the house, Senior took him aside.

  “We’ve done enough,” he told his son. “Let’s just cool it while we’re here. No more passing.”

  Art was relieved to see his father put some brakes on the spree; he attributed his hesitancy to the fight with Wendz. But once they left Mackinac Island, the respite ended and they were soon slamming malls again, this time as they headed West. Wensdae wanted to see Senior’s place in Alaska, and the plan was for all of them to drive back to Seattle and take a plane back to Anchorage. But the closer they got to Seattle, the more Art began having doubts of his own, both about the money, and about where he was headed with his father.

  THREE MONTHS EARLIER on Sharon’s porch in Texas, Art had envisioned a far different reunion with his father. He’d pictured his pops living a more or less straight life, one that perhap
s even inspired him to go clean too. Wishful thinking or not, it was a vision he had latched on to. But like always, he’d allowed the counterfeit into the fabric of their relationship. It was now dominating everything they did, becoming inseparable from not only the future, but also the past. Even now they were traveling the same sad highways that Art would forever associate with his dad’s abandonment, except now Art was the one doing the driving. Twenty years earlier, his father had been the one in control, but as the creator of the counterfeit, Art was the one in charge. It was this realization that made him stop short of getting on the plane once they reached Seattle.

  “I’m not going back with you,” he told them at the airport. “I have some things I need to pack up in Texas, and you two should spend some time together alone.” It was half true at best. Art indeed had a stash of Abitibi paper in Texas that he wanted to ship north, but he also felt the need to get away from his father. He needed space to think.

  Senior was annoyed by his son’s change in plans. He tried to talk Art into staying, but once he saw that Junior wouldn’t be swayed he wished him luck and told his son that he’d see him in a week or so. Before they parted, Art gave Senior nine thousand dollars in counterfeit. He told his dad that he and Wensdae could have fun with it in Seattle, but warned him that if there was any left over he should not spend it in Alaska. They hugged each other good-bye, and Pops and Wensdae walked off to rent a car so they could spend a few days knocking around Seattle before heading home. “I got the feeling that that was the last time I was ever going to see him,” says Art. “I was wrong, but it felt that way.”