Now completely alone, Art embarked on the most forlorn spending trip of his life. He still had about fifteen thousand dollars in counterfeit, but the bills felt like a burden. Like an addict who’s tired of doing drugs but still has an abundant supply, he wanted to blow it all and be rid of it. As he beelined for Texas, he hit every mall he saw, sleeping in his car along the way. He didn’t even attempt to hide the remaining bundle of bills, but tied it with string and placed it on the passenger seat, almost as if he wanted to get caught. By the time he was nearing Oklahoma, there was still seven thousand in the pile, and finally he just pulled over, left the car, and walked down to the edge of the Cimarron River. He tossed the remaining bills into the water, feeling an immense relief as they drifted off to the east.
A few hundred miles later, he was back in Sharon’s driveway, the very spot where the whole trip to Alaska had begun. He walked through her front door like a ghost.
“Where’s Natalie?” was the first thing Sharon asked him. He found himself stammering to explain that she was still in Anchorage with their newborn baby. “Why aren’t you with them? What are you doing here?” Sharon asked.
Breaking into tears, he confessed to her everything that had gone on with his father—the counterfeit plan, the road trip, his feeling that everyone was headed for disaster. The only thing Sharon could do was to throw out her hand to his and hope that he could hold on.
“We need to get Natalie back from there,” Sharon told him. “Get her back here, then you two can break away. You can leave the counterfeiting behind. You have three wonderful children.” She handed Art the telephone and told him to call Natalie and tell her to get on the next plane back to Texas. He dialed Chrissy’s, but he had been largely incommunicado for the last two weeks. When he got Natalie on the line and told her she needed to fly back, she was pissed.
“I’m not coming back unless you come get me,” she told him. “I’ve got two kids here and there’s equipment to destroy. You think you can just leave me to clean up the whole fucking mess you started up here? You’re wrong.”
Art and Sharon pleaded with her to come back on her own, but Natalie didn’t budge. She had compromised her needs for Art’s all summer, and unless he came and helped, she was planted. Reluctantly, he agreed to return to Anchorage the following day.
ART’S SENSE THAT HE WAS LOSING CONTROL OF EVENTS was not misplaced. Anice was not enthused that her husband had spent three weeks visiting with his first family, spending time among both the offspring and the turf of her old rival, Malinda. When Senior and Wensdae arrived at the airport in Anchorage, the reception she gave her stepdaughter was almost inhumanly cold. “Anice didn’t even say hello to me at the airport,” Wensdae recalls. “She ignored me, like she was looking through me. I haven’t seen this woman in twenty years and she’s still pretending I’m not there. It was disgusting. She was mad at my dad, probably for bringing me up there. Then they dumped me off at Chrissy’s. I knew it wasn’t my dad, but her.”
Senior knew of only one surefire way to disarm the situation with Anice, who after twenty years of having him to herself was now far less interesting to him than his children. He showed her some of Art’s bills, telling her excitedly about how they’d crossed the country, twice, dropping notes the entire way without receiving so much as an eye bat from a single cashier. He also told her that they had obtained equipment, and that he would soon learn Art’s secret of making the money himself. Thanks to Junior, they were about to become rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Art’s bills, combined with Senior’s story about the road trip, had an immediate and positive effect on Anice’s disposition. To bolster it even more, Senior gave his wife eleven hundred dollars as a taste, along with some basic instruction on how to pass. A few days later, she passed her first fake C-note at a local store, using it to buy two cartons of cigarettes. Senior and Anice had now broken one of da Vinci’s most important rules—they had spent money in their hometown.
It only took them a few more days to break another one. Having experienced the thrill of passing, Anice was thoroughly hooked. She grilled Senior for everything he knew about how Art made and passed the fakes. Since traveling with his son, Senior had become an armchair expert, and he regaled his wife with stories about Art using groups of passers to quickly convert large amounts of counterfeit. “That’s what we should do,” she told her husband. “Why expose ourselves when we can get other people to pass it for us?” she told Senior. She even had a couple of people in mind.
A few days later, Senior and Anice visited Vicki and Jim Shanigan, their friends from Wasilla, the latter of whom was also Senior’s partner in the pot and OxyContin operation. They were slightly younger than Senior and Anice, and in addition to their “business” partnership the two couples often spent a lot of time socializing together. Anice thought of Vicki almost like a daughter, while Jim had looks remarkably similar to Senior himself, with a thin mustache and square-framed glasses. Since Wasilla was as comparatively populated as Chickaloon, and closer to Anchorage, Jim covered the distribution end of their drug business, dealing much of their product to local Native American tribes. With these connections, the Shanigans were the natural choices to include in a passing scheme. To boot, Jim Shanigan was a licensed bush pilot who owned a float plane, meaning that he could fly them to far-flung destinations in Alaska, Canada, and, theoretically, even eastern Russia, where they could pass or sell counterfeit at a safe distance from their home.
Like always, all it took to rope in Jim and Vicki was a gander at Art’s product. They saw the possibilities right away and, interestingly, even before holding Art’s bills they were already deep into greed’s blinding grip. At the time, Vicki and Jim were themselves victims of a “419” scam, which derives its name from the criminal code of Nigeria, where the scam first originated. It usually begins with a “confidential” e-mail from a distinguished exile of an African government who needs help accessing tens of millions of dollars in frozen funds, often attributed to a defunct oil company, ousted political regime, or an inheritance. Through a series of highly convincing cross-references, the scam builds the confidence of the recipients, then engages them in a series of bureaucratic hurdles in which they must first deposit money in foreign bank accounts in order to realize the golden hoard of millions at the end. In Vicki and Jim’s case, the money was in South Africa, where they would presumably meet with the banker or lawyer who would hand them the keys to happiness. For weeks they had been talking of little else except raising the money to go to South Africa.
“This can help you get to South Africa,” Anice told them. She and Senior were apparently as caught up in the scheme as the Shanigans, because in return for helping them raise the travel money, they wanted a piece of the final cut. Since there would be plenty of money to go around, the Shanigans were more than happy with the arrangement, and as their meeting progressed it elevated into talk of buying yachts and mansions and luxury cars. The only real thing they had in front of them were Art’s bills; fakes themselves, but real enough to make the wild fantasies seem as equally close. They stared at Art’s bills, held them in their hands, and saw in them their own dreams.
“How much do you have?” Jim asked Senior, who had been hoping for just such an inroad. Senior explained that he still had five thousand dollars left over from the road trip. If the couple was interested, he and Anice were willing to give them all of it to try out. All they had to do was go shopping, buy items under twenty dollars, and bring back the receipts and change.
“There’s a lot more where this came from,” he told his friend. “Spend this, and I can get you twice as much when you’re done.” When Vicki and Jim asked how the bills were made, Senior and Anice revealed their source without hesitation.
“My boy made them,” Senior said. “He’s got a gift, and he’s told me how to do it.”
The Shanigans were in. Soon afterward, Anice took Vicki spending just to show her how easy it all was. They visited the Northway Mall in A
nchorage, where they bought candles and incense and a host of other cheap items. When they were finished, Anice gave Vicki the rest of the five thousand in counterfeit, making her promise to keep the receipts from every bill she and Jim spent.
ART WAS COMPLETELY UNAWARE that his father and Anice had given money to the Shanigans. He made arrangements to get back to Alaska, this time enlisting Natalie’s brother in the same ticket-switch scheme that had allowed him to anonymously book flights twice already that summer. He caught a flight north from Dallas-Fort Worth, and in keeping with his policy of revealing his movements to as few people as possible, he did not tell his father he was returning. Instead, he waited until he was back at Chrissy’s house in Anchorage before calling him. When they finally talked, Senior made no mention of counterfeiting and Art was relieved.
Natalie was still on the warpath when he arrived. She’d lost thirty pounds in water since giving birth to Andrea, and was infuriated that Art hadn’t returned earlier with Wensdae and Senior. Wensdae had already gone back to Chicago, but the sisters-in-law had gotten into some petty squabbles—one more stress that Natalie blamed squarely on Art. But once she calmed down, she took Art into the back bedroom. She had a surprise for him.
While Art had been road-tripping, Natalie had been hunched over a laptop, polishing up scans for the new fifty-dollar note. She’d gone ahead and assembled a few dozen prototypes, and Art was speechless when he saw them. “They were just perfect,” he says. “The best bill we’d ever made. After she put on the finishing touches, it just sparkled. The lines, the color . . . I could have a spent a million of those.”
He almost regretted that he wouldn’t be staying in Alaska to make more of them with his father. The next day, he drove up to Chickaloon to inform Senior of his decision. But his dad was in a good mood when he arrived, and Art didn’t have the heart to bring it up right away. Thinking a scenic drive might help relax them both, he suggested his dad hop in the Trans Am. As they drove along the Matanuska, Senior updated Art about their plans. All the equipment had arrived. Most of it was in storage, but now that Art was there they could set it up in the coach house. Senior had also reached out to Terry Cartwall, and the Angels were ready to receive money as soon as possible.
“They want a million dollars. How long do you think it will take to print that much?” he asked his son.
Art was dumbstruck. In his own head for much of the last week, he’d forgotten—or, more accurately, denied—that from Senior’s perspective everything was going according to plan. And the optimism in his father’s voice was infectious. Art could see the new fifties rolling out en masse—the foundation for his own homestead, a reason to stay. But given his production process, the amount of money his dad was talking about was almost unfathomable.
“A million dollars would take months,” he replied.
“Well, we can break it up into several runs,” Senior went on, unfazed. “And you’re gonna love this, my friend Jim Shanigan has a float plane, and we can use it to pass or make money wherever we want. He knows the backcountry like you wouldn’t believe. He says he can set us up on an island in a lake he knows where nobody would find us, real remote shit where nobody goes.”
And that’s how Art learned that his father had broken his promise.
“Shanigan knows about the counterfeit?”
“This guy can help us,” Senior said, and continued to extol how valuable and trustworthy Jim was, how he and Anice had given Vicki and Jim money to pass, and how the couple was poised to receive a vast fortune from South Africa.
Art exploded. Once he learned that strangers were passing his money in Alaska, every fear that he’d been harboring about partnering with his dad came true. He pulled over to the side of the road and demanded that his father get out. He told Senior that he had made a mistake by not kicking his ass on the day of the dog-food run. Now he was going to rectify it.
Senior refused to leave the car. By now, he knew his son well enough to know that Art wouldn’t strike him. He sat stoically in the passenger seat while Art screamed at him, throwing back admonish ments for him to shut up and listen. Art finally let his father have his say, but since Senior had already broken his vow to not tell anyone, his new promises about Shanigan’s reliability were meaningless. Art got back in the car, turned it around, and finally told him what he’d come to say.
“We’re done,” he told Senior. “You were a shit when you left us and you’re a shit now. I’ll probably always love you, but I can’t do this with you. We’re leaving.”
Senior begged him to stay. When he failed to convince Art that he was overreacting, Senior told him that they didn’t have to counterfeit at all. He still meant what he’d said about Art and Natalie building a house on his property. The Trans Am was still his, whether he stayed in Alaska or not.
“I don’t want your car,” Art told Senior. He said he’d leave the vehicle at Chrissy’s house, then sped away without saying good-bye.
MINUTES AFTER ART ARRIVED BACK IN ANCHORAGE, he and Natalie began executing their plan to return to Texas. Since most of their equipment was at Senior’s, the only evidence they needed to destroy was Natalie’s laptop computer, along with about five thousand dollars in counterfeit. Both of these presented problems. The laptop contained Natalie’s beautiful images of the Series 2001 fifty, as well as a new computer program they wanted to try out—a random-number generator that they could use to print variegated serial numbers. While the files could be transferred to CDs, a disk was just as incriminating as a computer, and by now—especially after the loss of the Ryobi—they were weary of constantly having to reequip themselves. They decided to risk keeping it.
The five thousand in counterfeit was also too juicy a nugget to just throw away. As usual, Art had burned through the fifty thousand dollars they’d built up over the summer. All the new equipment, traveling, plane tickets, and partying had left them preciously little to start on once they got back to Texas. Knowing that they’d need to lay low once they returned to the lower forty-eight, they decided to spend a day hitting the malls around Anchorage hard in a furious attempt to unload as much counterfeit as possible before skipping town.
At the same time Art and Natalie began spending, they had no idea that Jim and Vicki Shanigan were busy passing the five thousand that Senior had given them. Amateurs when it came to passing, Senior had provided them with no special instructions when it came to surveilling malls or selecting stores and cashiers. They were out on their own, dropping counterfeit with no method or understanding of how to pass.
On Wednesday, July 11, the Shanigans visited the Fifth Avenue Mall in downtown Anchorage, a high-end, four-story structure that constitutes the city’s largest shopping center. The couple had already passed bills at the mall at least once before, and businesses were on the lookout for counterfeit. That day cashiers from at least two different stores noticed that the bills the Shanigans gave them were slightly hazy and flat to the touch. The couple was still ambling through the mall obliviously when officers from Anchorage PD approached them.
At first the Shanigans tried to the use the oldest excuse in the book: They played dumb, pretending that they didn’t know they’d been in possession of bogus bills. While that denial often works in isolated cases, they’d already peppered the mall, and the officers knew full well that the couple was passing. Anchorage PD detained them on the spot, leading them to the headquarters of mall security.
Two U.S. Secret Service agents arrived within an hour: Resident Agent Michael Sweazey and Special Agent Robert Clark. The agents read the couple their Miranda rights, then sat down and examined some of the bills recovered from the mall. Both of them were immediately impressed. The counterfeits, Clark later noted in an affidavit, “were of good quality, and appeared to be most likely produced by a sophisticated computer, scanner, and printer operation. The bills had false security strips and were made of acid-free paper.”
With their curiosity piqued, the agents separated the Shanigans and began i
nterrogating them. At first both Vicki and Jim continued to deny knowing the bills were counterfeit, but Clark pressed Vicki hard. Exactly what he told her is unknown, but his tactics probably weren’t much different from those employed on Natalie’s little sister after the House of Blues bust. Her freedom, her family, and her future were now all but gone unless she cooperated quickly.
Vicki caved fast and thoroughly. She revealed that Senior and Anice had provided the bills, and that Art junior had made them. She even gave them Senior’s address.
“Jim knows about all of this as well?” Clark asked her, forcing her to choose between telling the truth and protecting her husband.
“Yes,” she told Clark, but the confession would have little impact. Minutes later, Jim himself broke. He corroborated Vicki’s story and told the agents of Williams’s plan to use the coach house as a printing hole. They also admitted to passing at least thirty bills in Anchorage and Wasilla. After their interrogations were over, they led Clark and Sweazey to their car, which the agents searched. Inside, they found several bags of merchandise from the mall, and a fanny pack containing bundles of genuine currency, with store receipts paper-clipped to each one. The agents photocopied everything.
Once they were finished, Clark and Sweazey, like true Alaskan fishermen, allowed Jim and Vicki to return home, releasing them back into the stream of their lives. The agents had caught their bait, now they were after bigger fish.
THE NEXT MORNING, the phone rang at Senior’s place in Chickaloon. The number on the caller ID was unfamiliar to Anice, but when she picked up she immediately recognized the voice of her friend Vicki.
“I’m calling from my fax because my stupid phone battery—I need two batteries for my phone,” Vicki explained, but Anice wasn’t interested in such mundanities. She had news to report. A day earlier, she had attempted to pass money at a Kmart in Anchorage, and noticed copies of Art’s bills taped above every cash register. She desperately wanted to warn Vicki not to pass counterfeit there, but she didn’t want to be specific over the phone.
The Art of Making Money Page 23