The Art of Making Money

by Jason Kersten

  Largely thanks to Art, Anice had won herself a beautiful deal: five years’ probation plus the by now standard $7,350 restitution. She would not spend a day behind bars, and with special permission she’d also be able to visit her husband.

  Like clockwork, when the clerk called up Anice’s case, Bottini presented his evidence, then her lawyer, Eugene Cyrus, informed Judge Singleton of her intent to plead guilty. As required by law, the judge then asked her if she understood that she was pleading guilty to the charges, thus surrendering her right to a trial.

  “I’m doing this because my lawyer advised me, but I’m innocent,” she said.

  “You’re innocent?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It was my understanding that you were going to plead guilty. Do you wish to change your plea to not guilty?”

  “I didn’t do anything, Your Honor. I’m innocent. This all happened because of my stepson, Art. You see—”

  “Mrs. Williams, this proceeding requires that you plead either guilty or not guilty. Your stepson is irrelevant here. Do you wish to change your intended plea?”

  “I’m an innocent woman, Your Honor. Nothing should be done to me.”

  “You must reply either guilty or not guilty, Mrs. Williams.”

  “I’m not guilty.”

  Eugene Cyrus, Anice’s lawyer, was standing right next to her at the time. Like everyone else he had assumed her guilty plea was a done deal; he now found himself in the unfortunate position of having won for his client a very good arrangement—only to watch her double down on a terrible hand. And Bottini wasn’t just unhappy, but incensed. By any legal assessment he had been merciful toward Anice. He had her on tape arranging counterfeit deals, a ledger listing the proceeds, and the Shanigans to testify to it. In spite of that, he’d offered her no time.

  “Do you understand what you are saying?” Judge Singleton pressed Anice. “That you wish to enter a plea of not guilty and proceed to trial?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well,” said Judge Singleton, but he was far from convinced of her competency to stand trial. He ordered that Anice undergo a psychiatric evaluation prior to proceeding. The assigned psychiatrist, Dr. Irvin Rothrock, found that Anice was not only aware of her actions, but that she was “feigning an impaired memory hoping to avoid the legal consequences of her actions.” Judge Singleton ordered her case to proceed.

  Both her lawyer and her daughter attempted to change her mind. “Arthur had tried to take the fall for everything,” Chrissy remembers. “He had tried to keep my mom and dad out of it, and she had gotten a good deal. I begged her to sign it. ‘Mom, you could lose,’ I told her. ‘I’ve seen the police reports.’ She blamed everything on Art junior. But she didn’t want to admit that she had anything to do with it. To say she was stubborn would be putting it lightly. Her freedom wasn’t enough for her; she wanted to clear her name.”

  But Anice refused to turn back, and so on August 12, 2002, the case went to trial.

  Bottini had expended his mercy. His prosecution of Anice, as her own lawyer described it, “was flawless.” Utilizing what was then the latest technology, he projected transcripts of the phone- and wiretaps, the ledger and the bill receipts, and her own signed confession onto a screen from a laptop computer. It was the federal flip-side of some of the same imaging technology Art had used to counterfeit. He put both Jim and Vicki Shanigan on the stand, as well as the Secret Service agents, and they confirmed every allegation against her. He also played back the audio of Anice’s own voice, arranging the meet with Vicki Shanigan.

  Once Bottini closed his case, Anice’s attorney had little choice but to put her on the stand. Other than her word, he had nothing to contradict the evidence. But on the morning she was scheduled to testify, the box stood empty as the court waited in vain for her to show up. That morning, she suddenly started complaining about a sharp pain in her side. Paramedics rushed her to the emergency room, where doctors gave her a battery of tests and discharged her. They were unable to find anything wrong with her.

  Back in court in following morning, she finally took the stand and answered the government’s charges.

  “I knew absolutely nothing about any counterfeiting,” she told the court. On cross-examination, when Bottini asked her to explain where the money and the receipts the Secret Service had confiscated from her bedroom came from, she said that “it was from Jim Shanigan’s drug dealing. Vicki gave it to me because Jim was a drug addict and she was afraid he would squander it.” When it came to explaining her signed confession, Anice was flabbergasted. Despite her acute memory of holding the money for Vicki because her husband was an addict, she had “no memory of making any statements to the Secret Service agents.” At the same time, she quite clearly remembered signing the confession, claiming that she “had been told by the agents she had to sign it or go to jail.” It was the sort of contradictory testimony that prosecutors dream of and rarely see. On at least two occasions, several jurors were so incredulous at the boldness of Anice’s lies that they actually laughed out loud at her.

  The jury returned with a verdict in two hours. Anice was sentenced to forty-one months in prison, followed by thirty-six months of probation plus the restitution. Next to her husband’s sentence, it was the longest of the six defendants’.

  THE FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION IN WASECA, MINNESOTA, is a low-security facility about seventy-five miles south of Minneapolis. Housing about a thousand inmates, it has no bars or cells, and inmates sleep in dormitory-style bunks, held in by little more than a chain link fence and razor wire. Compared with the prisons Art had seen in Texas and even the Anchorage Jail, it was a cakewalk, filled with mostly nonviolent offenders, many of them white-collar criminals.

  His first cell mate, Kenneth Getty, was the former mayor of the Illinois town of Lyons. He’d been convicted of bid-rigging town contracts. His second cellie, a big-time credit-card scammer from L.A. who faced $1.8 million in restitution, had been neighbors with Marvin Gaye. Prison had always been a likelihood in the world where Art grew up and in the life that he had chosen. Most of the boys from the Bridgeport Homes had done hard time in much worse places. A cynical reality of Art’s life is that, compared with many he grew up with, Waseca could almost be interpreted as a sign of success.

  Word travels fast in prison. A few weeks after his arrival, Art was jogging around the outdoor track when a fellow Chicagoan named Louis Bombacino approached him. Bombacino was an Outfit man, convicted for loan-sharking fifteen years earlier.

  “You’re from Chicago, right?” he said. “Taylor Street and Bridgeport?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We don’t get a lot of young guys from the neighborhood here. There are a few of us, but we don’t get much news. We’d like to talk to you.”

  “Okay,” Art said, waiting for a question.

  “The only thing is, we can’t really talk to you until we look into your past and who you are and what you did, you know? So don’t take offense, but until then we probably won’t even speak.”

  “That’s cool, whatever,” Art said, and started running again, perplexed and at the same time painfully cognizant that, after all those years of successfully hiding his operations from the Outfit, they’d finally discovered him in federal prison.

  Art was heading out to the rec yard when Bombacino approached him again two weeks later.

  “Hey, Arty. We just wanted to let you know that you’re a good kid,” he said. “You never said anything about anybody. We’d like you to come to breakfast tomorrow, if you don’t mind. We’d just like to catch up on the neighborhood.”

  Now Art was truly mystified. Who was the “we”? And for a bunch of guys who didn’t get much news from the neighborhood, they had tapped into the lowdown on him pretty fast. Art wondered whom they’d contacted. Giorgi? The Chinese? He’d never know.

  The next morning at breakfast he brought his tray up to a table occupied by three old men. There was an empty seat just for him. Before he sat d
own, Louie introduced him to the two other men: Bobby Ferrare and Jerry Scalise. Art was awed. He had heard both of their names before. Ferrare was a well-known boss from Kansas City who was doing time for a vending-machine scam, while Scalise was nothing less than a legend. A longtime thief for the Outfit, in 1980 he and a cohort named Arthur “The Genius” Rachel had robbed a London jewelry store of more than $1.5 million in gems, including the famed Marlborough Diamond—a forty-five-carat stone once owned by Winston Churchill’s cousin. Although Scalise was later convicted of the heist, authorities never recovered the diamond, and rumors were that he had buried it on his property in DuPage County. Scalise also had a famous nickname—Wither-hand—due to the fact that he was missing four fingers on his left hand. Having already done his time in the UK for the jewelry heist, he was now serving a nine-year sentence for participating in a drug-running ring.

  “I sat down, and we just started talking about the neighborhood,” remembers Art. “They’re asking me things like ‘What changed here?’ et cetera. And then the awe kind of fell off me, and I just started listening to them tell stories about the old days, about how when they’d steal shit everyone in the whole neighborhood would be wearing Armani suits or something. I’d get a real kick out of it.” Art became a regular at their table, and along with reading, that’s how he clocked his time at Waseca—hanging out with four old crooks and listening to stories of the glory days. Every once in a while Scalise would grill him for the details of his counterfeiting formula, and Art would just smile and give his patented answer: “I’ll tell you how I counterfeited the Note if you tell me where you hid the Marlborough Diamond.”

  And so the months dripped by, bracketed by books, breakfasts, and a little piece of Bridgeport in the pen.

  SENIOR WOUND UP at the FCI in Sheridan, Oregon, a combination medium- and minimum-security camp about ninety miles south of Portland. Counting Leavenworth, this was his second stint in federal prison. Almost as soon as he arrived, he and Art began writing each other on a regular basis. Sadly, none of their letters survive, but Art remembers many of the words he and his dad exchanged, at least the parts that mattered most to him.

  “We did pretty much forgive each other,” he says. “Both of us recognized that the way we made contact again was destructive. He blamed himself for not being a good father, I blamed myself for exposing him to my lifestyle. We both made huge mistakes. But the important thing about those letters was that they were full of love. Yeah, it had come at a huge price, really too much, but we did start to have a relationship again. We talked about picking up where we left off once we were both out. He wanted to see me. He told me that he didn’t want anything to come between us again.”

  Chrissy, who visited Senior once at Sheridan and spoke to him on the phone frequently, echoes that sentiment. “He held absolutely nothing against Art for what had happened. He loved Art. His only regrets were for the choices he made. He accepted responsibility for his own actions.”

  Wensdae saved every letter Senior wrote her from prison. They are among the most valuable pieces of paper and ink she owns, and in many of them he evinces a desire to become the father he never was:

  5-27-03

  . . . God, honey, I can’t express how happy I am knowing you’re back in my life. I’ve missed you so very much. You’re right about never being apart again. These days are over. . . .

  I realize today that what pulled your mother and I apart were the world’s persecutions, and because we were so young we let others in the world divide us and go our separate roads. When you talk to her again, please give her my best wishes.

  Honey, I wanted to ask you again how Jason is doing? Have you heard from him? Is he still in prison in Illinois, or is he out now? I’d really like to be back in his life. I know it would be really hard for him to accept me, but I feel in time God can heal all things. Jason and I need to open that door and take it from there.

  I’d love for you to send me some pictures of all of you kids. I got your picture hanging right next to my bunk, so when I get up in the morning I see my beautiful daughter. I even say good morning to you every day. . . .

  Wensdae mailed him pictures, and Senior indeed sent a letter to Jason. According to Wensdae, the pair’s correspondence was minimal. By the time he and his father connected, Jason had spent most of his twenty-four years in institutions and become more a child of the state than a son of Senior’s.

  COMPARED WITH HIS EARLIER PRISON STINT IN TEXAS, Art’s time at Waseca flew by. He had already been credited with about six months of time served before he arrived, and with good behavior he was eligible to spend the last six months of his sentence at a halfway house in Chicago. And so less than a year and a half after he entered Waseca, he was walking toward the main gate, on his way back into the world.

  Jerry Scalise and the rest of Art’s breakfast crew, along with a few other friends, lined up near the exit to see him off. As each man hugged him good-bye, one of the men (he won’t say who) handed him a letter for someone on the outside. “He told me not to read it and asked that I hand-deliver it,” laughs Art. “I remember being scared, thinking ‘What the fuck am I doing? I’ve gotta be out of my mind to take a letter from the mob and give it to someone. On the day I’m leaving, I’m already fucking up!’ ”

  Natalie’s probation requirements prevented her from leaving Texas, so she couldn’t be there for Art’s release. But he didn’t reenter the world alone. Waiting out front to give him a ride to the halfway house was his first love, Karen Magers, and Little Art, who was now thirteen years old. Art jumped for joy and hugged both of them wildly, reveling in his first minutes of freedom. It was a strange scene. Two years earlier, after years of putting off her dream while she raised her son, Karen had completed her academy training and become a full-fledged CPD patrolwoman. Because she was about to go on shift, she’d shown up in full uniform and driving a police cruiser.

  “If you two want to sit together, you’ll have to sit in back,” she told Art with a smile.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said, picking up the bait. “I’m not out of prison five minutes and I’m already in the back of a cop car. That figures.”

  The halfway house Art was assigned to was in downtown Chicago. He had his own room, and was free to leave during the day, provided that it was for work and that he was back by the seven P.M. curfew. The provisions of his release required him to meet with his parole officer and undergo drug testing once a week. Any violation of the rules could be grounds for returning to prison, or an extension of his probation. He was also forbidden to be employed at any job that placed him in the proximity of “credit, credit cards, or negotiable instruments”—a condition that he would soon learn could be interpreted by his parole officer however she saw fit.

  Art landed his first job within two days, working at a real estate brokerage run by his old friend, Mikey Pepitone. Mikey had gone legit while Art had been in prison, and when he heard that Art needed work he convinced his boss to hire him, swearing by his smarts. It was clerical work, filing and letters mostly, but knowing how quickly Art picked things up Mikey thought there was also the possibility that he could be selling houses himself within a year.

  “Are there bank-account numbers on these papers you file?” Art’s PO asked him on their first meeting, three days after he started.

  “I guess so, probably,” Art told her.

  She insisted that he quit immediately. Shocked, Art explained that if he was going to commit a crime, it wouldn’t be at the place where his best friend had vouched for him and it wouldn’t be something so moronically traceable. He also reminded her that he had printed millions in counterfeit over the years, and that it wouldn’t be logical for him to steal somebody else’s money when he could just as easily print his own. But she wouldn’t budge. The next job he took, waiting tables at a restaurant, needless to say had far less of a future than real estate. Even though he knew it required him to work a cash register and take credit cards, he took it anyway, th
inking that such a dead-end job had to fall beneath the radar of even the most obtuse PO. When he reported for his usual Thursday check-in, she not only forced him to quit that job, too, but threatened to send him back to Waseca. The week after that, he made sure to show up with an airtight position: A friend of his had offered him a gig installing cigarette display cases in gas stations. It paid well, and the closest he’d get to a “negotiable instrument” would be to the pennies in the change dish. She refused to let him take it on the grounds that it would occasionally require him to leave the state.

  From that moment on Art was convinced that his PO didn’t understand him, had no interest in helping him, and was possibly even taking pleasure in dashing his hopes. The one job she finally allowed him to take was working at a boatyard run by an old friend of his aunt Donna. It was boring, menial labor for minimum wage, and until he had fulfilled his probation requirements, he was stuck.

  Despite the setbacks, Art tried to look forward to the day when he could leave the halfway house and start fresh. The closer that day drew near, the more he thought about using his expanded freedom to rectify some of the mistakes he had made with his father. Three days before he was released, he received a letter from Senior, who had been counting the days before his son was finally free. He was excited for Art, and wanted to know if it would be possible for him to come visit him at the FCI in Sheridan in the near future. Art quickly wrote his dad, explaining that he wanted nothing more than to do exactly that. It would require some paperwork and wrangling with his parole officer, but Art was determined to see his father as soon as possible. “We’d wasted too much time,” says Art. “Along with seeing my kids, seeing my dad was one of my main plans when I got out. He was back in my life and I wanted to keep him there.”